30 Facts About Ronald McCuaig

Ronald McCuaig was an Australian poet, journalist, literary critic, humorist and children's author.

Ronald McCuaig was described by Geoffrey Dutton as "Australia's first modern poet" and Kenneth Slessor included him in "the front rank of Australian poets".

Ronald McCuaig's work was the subject of one of Douglas Stewart's 1977 Boyer Lectures for the ABC.

In 1915, when Ronald McCuaig was seven BHP established an iron and steel works at the nearby suburb of Port Waratah.

Ronald McCuaig recalled in an interview with Peter Kirkpatrick he had taken elocution lessons in Newcastle from a woman called Beatrice Welch.

Ronald McCuaig was a quiet man with a love of Banjo Paterson, and passed his interests on to his son.

When he was eleven Ronald McCuaig spent ten days on a relative's farm remembered in ten poems which make up Holiday Farm, a sequence he wrote in 1953 and first published in book form eight years later in The Ballad of Bloodthirsty Bessie and Other Poems.

On Fridays after school Ronald McCuaig visited his father in his office.

Ronald McCuaig got a job at Sargood Brothers Department Store working as a "glorified office boy".

Ronald McCuaig began writing for radio in 1927, hired by 2BL as a writer, his principal task being to write a piece of light verse for the evening program.

Ronald McCuaig worked for Wireless Weekly throughout the following decade.

Publishers considered the poems unacceptably explicit and even when Ronald McCuaig decided to pay for the printing himself seven printing firms refused to print the book because of the subject matter.

Ronald McCuaig decided in 1938 to publish Vaudeville himself, printing the book on a hand-press in his flat at Pott's Point.

Mr Ronald McCuaig is unconventional and indecorous, and a long way from being respectable; but I have high esteem of the value of ribaldry in literature.

Ronald McCuaig had come to like printing his own books.

In 1949, Ronald McCuaig joined the editorial staff of The Bulletin, becoming short story editor from 1950 to 1960.

In 1992 Ronald McCuaig was awarded a New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Special Award for his contribution to Australian Literature.

Ronald McCuaig explained what he meant by modernism and McCuiag's part in it in a 1999 interview with Susan Hill in the Animist, January 1999 where he said Kenneth Slessor was usually considered to be the first Australian modernist poet but that McCauig was slightly ahead of him.

Slessor and Ronald McCuaig were both followers of French modernism but more so with Ronald McCuaig who was not under the "powerful influence of Norman Lindsay".

Yet Ronald McCuaig was barely known as a modern poet in his lifetime.

Ronald McCuaig was never "taken up by anyone" Dutton said.

Ronald McCuaig himself acknowledged his influences, having read Leavis's New Bearings in English Poetry, Eliot, Henry James, and Ezra Pound which he bought as first editions.

Ronald McCuaig produced a number of commentaries on Australian literature in the form of articles, essays, and booklets, notably Literature a survey of Australian writing from 1810 to 1965.

In 1954 McCuaig was the editor of an anthology Australian Poetry published by Angus and Robertson greeted upon its arrival by William T Fleming in Meanjin as "frankly depressing".

Ronald McCuaig finds the ballads entirely without poetic merit and blames The Bulletin for their inclusion.

In contrast to his rather savage treatment by some in the academic poetry establishment Ronald McCuaig was a rather even-handed and positive critic, not easily displeased and only occasionally disappointed.

Ronald McCuaig singled out McCuaig in particular in saying his "tone and attitudes are fairly consistently man-to-man-over-the-beer-keg".

Rundle's assessment was that Ronald McCuaig could hit a "cool and stylish note in his verse, although much of it dips too far into the twee and whimsical for contemporary tastes".

Ronald McCuaig argued to call Vaudeville "modernist" distorts "either the literary term or the poems".

Ronald McCuaig prefers the term "modern", a term he notes Dutton used.