The C.J. Dennis Collection

C. J. Dennis

Edited by Garrie Hutchinson, 1987

Cover painting by Clarice Beckett

Dust-jacket Synopsis

With the Songs of the Sentimental Bloke in 1915 C. J. Dennis (1876 -1938) became Australia's most popular and best loved writer of "pomes" at a time when verse writing was almost a national sport. Dennis hoped that in the "Bloke" and in "The Moods of Ginger Mick", World War 1 Diggers favourite book, he was writing Australia's songs. It was a task he continued after the war on an almost daily basis, in thousands of pieces of topical and occaisional verse, many of them published in the Melbourne Herald.

Compared with the Bloke, Ginger Mick and Doreen, Dennis's newspaper characters have languished in the shadows , in old newspaper and magazine files. But the likes of Ben Bowyang, Polly Dibbs the washer woman,'Erb, Fred, and Gus, and the "aspiring young arther" Bobby J. were readers favourites, to be chuckled over and discussed on the cable tram. Dennis's annual Anzac Day poem was eagerly awaited. This selection from more than 4,000 pieces Dennis wrote gives an unexpected charming and whimisical insite into the Australia between the wars.