Obituary
Shelton Lea 1946-2005
Kevin
Pearson
Overland, No.
180, Spring 2005
‘When
I was wide-eyed and
entering the poetry scene back in the late 1970s it was Shelton... who
gave me time and encouragement. He was luminous and passionate and a
very fine poet.’ That email from the poet and novelist
Anthony
Lawrence was one of many received by Black Pepper after Shelton died
eight days after his heroic appearance at his last book launch. It is
how many remember him as a poet and as a barracker for poets.
Shelton Lea was born in 1946 in Fitzroy and adopted out into Toorak. He
fled from the toffy suburb and Carey Grammar aged 12 and into a
troubled youth on the streets and survival by theft. He was in
Pentridge C Division by 16. Writing for fellow prisoners became one of
the schooling grounds for his art.
He travelled the country and forged his first Aboriginal bonds, leading
to his informed championing of their causes, and those of the
dispossessed generally, in his work. Psychologically, his adoption made
him feel at one with them. His street education gave him his characters
and their stories, though it should not be forgotton that he was also
well read, hence the range of classical references in his work.
After a stint in Kings Cross in the early sixties, he returned to
Melbourne where he was associated with the Heide group of artists and
poets. Barrett Reid encouraged his poetry and through Reid Shelton
developed an ongoing link with
Overland.
He published nine collections, the first in 1962, the last in May this
year. They are
The
Asmodeus Poems (1962),
Corners In Cans
(1969),
Chrysalis
(1972),
The Paradise
Poems (1973),
Chockablock
With Dawn (1975),
Palatine
Madonna (1979),
Poems
From A Peach Melba Hat (1985),
The Love Poems
(1993) and
Nebuchadnezzar.
Most of these were published during his influential Melbourne years.
During that time he was an instigator and organiser of important poetry
readings and an ardent reader himself. He received two Australia
Council grants and Arts Victoria funding to read his works throughout
rural Victoria and read in pubs, at festivals, schools, prisons,
universities and under trees throughout the land. (I first met him on
one such excursion to Adelaide in the early eighties where, at a
reading I had organised, he and Eric Beach read on a boat on the
Torrens.) His compelling voice, his swagger, that silver-topped cane;
in short, his identity as a poet, were at the centre of his charm.
He led a restless life without ever losing his innate commitment to his
poetry. Fourteen and a quarter years ago he met Dr Leith Woodgate who
became his partner. During those years he established Eaglemont Books
which published seven poetry titles, the last being Raffaella
Torresan’s photographic essays
Melbourne Poets Live 2003.
He also ran a bookshop by that name until he moved and it became
DeHavillands on Wellington, specialising in Australian poetry and
collectors’ editions.
Shelton and Black Pepper had for more than eighteen months planned to
bring out what was to become his last book. He would never deliver me
the manuscript. Two and a half months ago we met by chance in Brunswick
Street. Drinking in The Bar With No Name, he told me of his diagnosis
with cancer. Gesticulating with his characteristic long joint he was
upbeat about the book. The manuscript was about to appear. Leith kept
him up to the mark on delivery. That book is dedicated to her. It is
his most comprehensive collection, in that it covers most aspects of
his life and concerns.
He is survived by Leith, two sons and two daughters from previous
relationships. Many friends mourn him.
There are strong and fine poems throughout his collections. He deserves
a broad Selected, a task made awkward by the Literature Board
underwriting only living authors. As another poet and novelist, Peter
Murk remarked: ‘58! - it’s teenage these
days’.
Back to top
Memoir
Vale, Shelton Lea
Michael
Sharkey (poet
)
Overland, No.
180, Spring 2005
Shelton
encouraged others, who were often first-timers, from the sidelines,
calling out ‘Tell it to them’ and
‘Beautiful’.
Young and old poets thrived in that atmosphere.
I lament the death of Shelton Lea. He deserves a poetic eulogy, and I
wonder who’ll write one up to his deserving. I heard about
Shelton’s death three days after the event, and the news
rocked
me. We became compadres, as he might have said, from the time we
encountered each other in 1965 in the Royal George Hotel in Sussex
Street, Sydney, two blocks away from where I worked in a
publisher’s office in Clarence Street. He introduced me to a
world that I inhabited only in mind: a bohemia where everything that
was anathema to the privately educated, square world we emerged from
had its home.
I occupied a series of fly-by-night tenements in alleys and main
streets of the Cross and lived, like Shelton, a step away from the
vagrancy laws then in operation in New South Wales. We drank and talked
in the George of poetry and jazz, and talked in the streets of the
Cross, where he and his brother Bretton kept a stately distance from
the straights and squares who came to visit at weekends - the suburban
night-trippers who sought drugs, sex from the ladies of the night, and
quasi-sex from the strippers who saw them coming. Shelton and I joked
that we were ‘gentlemen of the road, just like the women who
were
ladies of the night’. Shelton knew the gambling haunts of the
bent coppers, the fly-by-night cafe-owners like the bigamously married
Black Cat proprietor, the coppers’ narks, the spivs, the
hoons,
the gunmen, the speed freaks and the backyard manufacturers of lysergic
acid, who became our friends or desperates-in-common.
I owe a lot to Shelton, who was even then called Shelly - partly
derived from his name and partly from his self-declared profession as
poet, when he wasn’t pulling off spectacular raids as a
cat-burglar of select high-rise apartments and elegant dwellings of the
Eastern suburbs bourgeoisie. Shelton brought his girlfriends to my flat
in Bayswater Road: he befriended refugees from suburban uncoolness at
the Cross - including a lovely woman called Jaimey. When Jaimey was
told by her landlord that she could not keep a cat in her apartment,
she put the weight on Shelton, who took the unfortunate feline to a vet
along Bayswater Road to be put down - one of the most traumatic
episodes of his time in the Cross. He wrote a poem for Jaimey, and
brought flowers to her every day, to soothe the passing of her pet,
aware that nothing ever compensates for such loss. I like to think he
just went down the road and released the cat in some back block: it
would be Shelly all over. Shelton didn’t have to try to be
the
friend of grief-stricken people. He achieved this with such sympathy
and grace as I have rarely seen. There was no thought in his mind that
he might profit or score from such concern for others’ grief.
Shelton was gold standard when it came to friendship. If he won hearts,
it was through his love for people, a love that had no end through the
forty-odd years that I have known him. Someone has to say these things.
Here, I interpolate some vignettes: Shelton, dancing in sunlight
through Hyde Park with a girlfriend called Dawn, both of them in
exultant spirits; Shelton jumping onto the wall of the Archibald
Fountain and into the water, and declaiming poetry; Shelton in
uproarious conversation with Sandor Berger outside the Bar Coluzzi in
Darlinghurst Road, and egging on Sandor’s recital of poems
against psychiatry (Sandor was an eccentric Sydney identity, standing
in Martin Place with placards fastened front and back to his jacket
proclaiming in hand-written block letters, ‘Psychiatry is an
evil
and must be stamped out’); Shelton chanting poems in the El
Rocco
with a jazz band; Shelton engaging drinkers in conversation in the
Royal George while his girlfriend fastened onto the old Push clientele,
and newcomers like me, to cadge the copper pennies and thrippences that
came across the counter as change; I got pissed off with some of her
less engaging pals, who’d sidle up and say ‘You
won’t
miss this’, but I couldn’t be angry with
Shelton’s
girl - she and Shelton were so good-natured, and we simply had to share
whatever we had; Shelton, asking if he could borrow my floor for the
night to entertain another lonely terrific girl whom he’d
claimed
had no place to stay, and my agreement to move down the road a few
doors to stay at Doug Pilgrim’s place while Shelton consoled
his
new friend. Shelton had the least sense of imposition, the surest sense
that people would see a charitable act required doing and would do it.
I think he had the least malicious intentions of anyone I’ve
met.
His self-deprecation was boundless, his awareness that he was putting
on an act so surely judged (‘How was I, brudder?’;
‘Could you believe that?’) that it was impossible
to
begrudge him anything.
Above all, Shelly had the best sense of his own role-playing, the most
inclusive sense of humour of all the people I’d met who
called
themselves artists. There were plenty of contenders: Lindsey Bourke, so
fixated on insisting that everyone must be creative; Harvey Brookes,
the guitarist who sat playing with his long arse-length hair
interrogating each new arrival at the Cross to the extent that everyone
believed he was a coppers’ nark; Brubeck, the world-weary
jazz
aficionado and beret-wearing cool dude from Greenknowe Avenue whom
everyone stood in awe of for his poise and cool detachment; the
ex-German Army Swiss deserters who inhabited the Kings Cross RSL and
bragged about having survived hard labour in Swiss prisons after the
war; the old sailor who had the best dope in Darlinghurst, but who
graciously warned people who wanted to shoot up heavier drugs that
they’d better not make a mess in his kitchen; Black Alan, who
shared Christmas dinner with me and his girlfriend in a cold-water
apartment in Wooloomooloo. None of these had the personality and grace
(a word later debased into the buzz-word
‘charisma’) that
Shelton possessed right to the end. Some of them were interested in
people as fellow travellers pausing in a demimonde balanced between
great days in the past and some ill-defined future glory; some were
talented and interesting and had the knack of living frugally alone or
off others down to a fine art, and some were out and out mongrels.
Shelton was finer than that: when he struck a pose, it was as a lover
of women, poetry and friends - and he was playing himself, because at
heart, those affections were genuine. When he put on his
‘villain’ act, he couldn’t keep a
straight face.
Shelton walked the streets of the Cross with his girl Wendy, pushing a
pram containing their infant daughter Chaos (later changed to
‘Kay’) lying on a mattress that covered a fantasy
stash of
drugs. I ran into him doing the rounds, as I ran into his brother
Bretton, magnificent with an avant-garde (for those times) Mohawk
haircut, set off by elegant clothes; he was also interested in
practical applications of chemistry. Shelton paid his dues to society
in many ways, and proved himself, to me at least, a real pal to his
outlaw brother. This occurred before the Vietnam cockup, when the
streets of the Cross were a sprawl of American and other soldiers on R
and R. Shelly and I knew the streets were mean even before they became
the anterooms to further sleaze: some of the gambling dives were
chockablock with thuggish cops, like Bumper Farrell, whose reputation
for turncoat behaviour was legendary. Farrell hunted vagrants (and
anyone he didn’t like the look of, myself included) to boost
the
score of arrests at Paddington Police Station, while turning a blind
eye to grander villainy. A companion at the publisher’s
warehouse
I then worked in recalled Farrell as a footballer who had in his
younger days been famous for biting the ear off a rival football
player; he had also reneged on his Labor background to become a
stalwart of the evil empire of Liberal Premier Norm Askin (of later
‘Drive over the bastards’ fame during anti-Vietnam
demonstrations). Shelton was on his way to Melbourne by then, where he
published in the Melbourne Surrealist poetry publication
Outlaw with Joel
Ellenberg and Walter Billeter, and where he met Barrett Reid and the
Overland writers.
The last time I saw Shelly in Sydney, he was on the eve of leaving,
when he told me he would be gone for a while. It was a hell of a long
while, and before I moved to Melbourne nearly twenty years later, we
had the most desultory contact: word of mouth, occasional encounters, a
parcel of publications. I followed his career, collected the flimsy
broadsheets and the surrealist magazines, heard and read about the
extraordinary sectarian turf wars that made up Melbourne poetry. When
we met in Melbourne in the 1980s, Shelly loudly advertised our
acquaintance and introduced me to a brilliant lot of people; he was a
visitor in every poetry tribe except for those he regarded as frauds,
and some pompous ones in the academies. I worked part-time in one of
the academies - Footscray Institute of Technology, but that was light
years from Melbourne and Monash, and I lived at North Melbourne next to
the mills and railway and opposite the brothels and warehouses. Shelton
visited my partner Winifred Belmont and me, and stayed over at our
Dryburgh Street cottage at times. On one occasion, he woke on a public
holiday morning with a terrible thirst, and we set off in search of an
oasis. We walked for miles around a ghost city; the trams were running
on Sabbath timetables, and every pub was shut as a miser’s
purse
in Bob-a-Job week. After a couple of hours, we found an early opener
that was open, down on the Bay, crammed full of extras from an
Antipodean version of a Fellini movie - refugees from a Bachelor and
Spinster’s Ball, dressed in ruined evening clothes; smashed
derros and ‘parkie darkies’ who had the price of a
couple
of heart-starters; railway workers and cleaners breaking on morning
shifts; punters stuck in town who’d missed the last train the
night before; gay girls and sailors, and wide-boys and schoolboys,
businessmen and city gents refusing to break with a lifetime of early
limbering-up drinks. It was a glorious sight and Shelly was in heaven.
Later, when I had got to know Barrett Reid, he asked Winifred and me to
help with the proofreading of
Overland,
and we joined him and Shelton at Barrie’s place at Heide,
taking
turns to read aloud and check the stories, articles, reviews and poems.
There was engaging and often hilarious or entertainingly clever
commentary on the contributors, especially when we paused for elegant
lunches and Barrett and Shelton fired up each other with anecdotes
about people who were legends to us. Shelton and Winifred chiacked each
other, both aware that they were artists in different ways. When
Winifred and I moved to North Carlton in 1988,1 interviewed Shelton for
Southerly
magazine, and
Winifred found a choice gift for Shelton to give to his daughter for
her twenty-first birthday. (The interview appeared in the fourth issue
for 1989.)
The charm of Shelton is what I hold close. We resumed conversation
after absences of days, weeks, or years as if we’d never
stopped
talking. He knew the core in the Melbourne poetry scene - at the Hawke
Hotel, the Provincial, the Dan O’Connell pub, where he was
one of
the star performers. Shelton was often the presiding genius, always
starting a new performance venue when publicans decided that poets
weren’t spending enough money. I owned a few books and
fugitive
publications by Shelton that had become collectors’
treasures,
and Shelton was an avid collector of rarities on his own account having
become a friend and confidant of Barrett Reid. I was amazed to find
myself in Barrett’s house, where the front study was crammed
with
floor-to-ceiling shelves bearing a treasury of choice books: European
novelists and playwrights and poets, English, American and Australian
and South American and Asian and African ditto; it was a wonderful
library. Elsewhere, the house held long work benches, shelves, and
stacks of magazines and books piled up for review in
Overland.
Australian painters’ works hung from every vacant wall space
-
paintings that summed up the history of Heide’s occupants
during
their heyday. Outside, Barrett kept a splendid garden, including a
section set off for herbs and another dedicated to the oldest types of
rose bushes; Barrett thought the examples he had there were accurate
exemplars of the types Shakespeare would have had in mind in the
history plays.
Shelton helped with gardening, had a real affection for the house and
its occupant. When Barrett died, I had left Melbourne, and I flew to
Melbourne to condole with Shelton, who had seen Barrett through his
last days. I spent a couple of days at Heide with Shelton before the
funeral, and I didn’t envy him the task of organising
Barrett’s affairs. Now, I don’t envy the lot of
those who
have to organise Shelton’s.
When Shelton walked into a poetry reading, the audience often heard a
terrific new poem, or at the least as it now seems to me, were
privileged to hear him read some of his perennially outstanding poems.
Shelton encouraged others, who were often first-timers, from the
sidelines, calling out ‘Tell it to them’ and
‘Beautiful’. Young and old poets thrived in that
atmosphere. And Shelton was just as likely to turn up next day and tell
me that he’d spent the night with the ‘parkie
darkies’ in the Fitzroy Gardens. Who could disbelieve him? He
shared himself around. He had the gift of friendship for all new poets
and people he once called ‘travellers’, who, like
myself,
had warmed to him from the moment we met. He invited us to Mountain
View, where he lived with Chrissie Webb, the beautiful white witch and
simpler with whom he hosted Eric Beach’s wonderful fortieth
birthday party.
I imagine his final days with Leith like that: the company of a
beautiful companion, surrounded by friends who admired and loved him,
expressing by their presence their unbounded sense of gratitude for the
gift of their convergence with Shelton’s life. I missed his
last
reading. In September 2004, he came to hear me, Tony Bennett, Julian
Croft (three New England admirers of Shelton) and Lauren Williams
(home-grown Melbourne admirer of Shelton) read at Kris
Hemmensley’s shop in Melbourne, and he was as usual the
encouraging, warm friend I have always known. I hope my reading lived
up to his standard. (His own talent as a reader was outstanding:
eloquent, singing, commanding attention.) I missed his final book
launch, but I think it must have been one of the great readings of his
career. From all accounts it sounds like one of the most affecting.
Back in 1988, Shelton spoke in the interview about his desire to get
the Nebuchadnezzar poems finished. It’s astonishing to think
that
it took seventeen years for him to do that. In the meantime, Shelton
spread himself and his poems around like a spendthrift. When I think of
Shelton, and his poetry, I am devastated by what we have lost. Shelton
spoke of narrative as the core of poetry; I know his narratives, like
‘the peach melba hat’ so well that I think of
Drouin races
and Melbourne tram rides whenever it comes to mind. But there was
something else - the love of women and life gathered into lyric . lines
like the ones in the ‘palatine madonna’, that
showed
Shelton for the clever master of balladry and song that he was. Now, I
cannot help but think that Byron’s last words would do for a
memorial that Shelton might have, but was too modest to claim:
‘I
leave something of beauty in the world’.
Back to top
Editorial
The Years of Unleavened Bread, Again
Nathan
Hollier (editor,
Overland)
Overland, No.
180, Spring 2005
In this
issue we pay tribute to
the poet Shelton Lea, who died on 13 May. Shelton had been a close
friend and protégé of Barrett Reid, a member of
the Heide
circle of artists and intellectuals. Reid was associate and poetry
editor of
Overland
from 1967 and its editor between 1988 and 1993.
I didn’t know Shelton well but had seen and spoken to him at
various launches and readings over the past decade. He usually sat at
the
Overland
table at the
Premier’s Literary Awards and was a lone boisterous figure in
a
room full of mannered bookish types. I grudgingly admired his bravado
while wishing he wouldn’t draw attention to us. He invested
so
much store in his own identity as a poet - of the romantic mould - that
you expected his work to be terrible. But it wasn’t. I was
pleasantly surprised to find I enjoyed reading and listening to his
poetry. In an obituary for
The
Australian
(24 June 2005), Jen Jewel Brown described him as ‘arguably
Australia’s finest romantic poet’, and I do think
the
critical interest in his poetry will increase.
Shelton tended to remind me of the wizened ‘Doctor’
Robert
Levet in the famous poetic description by Samuel Johnson:
‘Well
tried through many a varying year... Officious, innocent,sincere, / Of
ev’ry friendless name the friend... Obscurely wise, and
coarsely
kind’. But I only knew Shelton as an older man. While staying
with Dorothy Hewett in the Blue Mountains, helping her collate and
organise her papers for what was intended to be the second volume of
her autobiography, I came across a letter from Dorothy, telling of her
meeting Shelton and describing him as a striking, wild young man. Jenni
Mitchell’s portrait shows that younger person (see
Overland, No. 154,
1999), evoked also here by Michael Sharkey.
Shelton certainly had an interesting life, one largely unconstrained by
bourgeois conventions. At least one biography of him is underway. He
has left a legacy of courage, colour and originality, demonstrating
through example how it is possible to remain an optimist and even an
aesthete in a world where opportunity and beauty are jealously guarded
by wealth and privilege.
The Australia of the past decade has of course been that of Howard, a
person who, culturally, brings to mind T.S. Eliot’s
‘hollow
men’ or Marianne Moore’s
‘steamroller’. Writing
in Meanjin in 1973, Manning Clark suggested that during the Menzies era
Australia had become ‘a member of a club of three or four
nations
committed to the defence of economic privilege for the few and the
supremacy of the white man’. A parallel between the
Australias of
Menzies and Howard comes to mind, particularly if our membership of
what Mary Kalantzis terms the ‘Axis of Anglos’ (
Overland,
No. 178) is taken into account, though it has to be said that
Clark’s ‘club’ nowadays includes more
than a few
members. ‘The great Australian dream of social equality and
mateship’, Clark writes, ‘was bleeding to death in
the
jungles and paddy-fields of Vietnam.’ Today we’re
in Iraq,
and the dream Clark refers to needs more than a blood transfusion:
perhaps cryogenic resuscitation.
Clark goes on however to draw a contrast between the politics and the
art of the Menzies age: ‘The men and women with the creative
gifts... expanded our minds and helped us to see ourselves as we really
were’. ‘Paradoxically,’ Clark says,
‘the more
exciting [the artists] made our lives, the greater the mess and the
mire and the moral disgrace to which the government of the day exposed
us.’ Again, a parallel with our own time comes to mind.
Louise
Swinn suggests in this is¬sue that there is a deal of exciting
and
stimulating new literary work both emerging now and on the horizon.
Perhaps the value and attraction of art becomes more obvious during
moments of profound political and social conservatism, as we experience
for ourselves what Clark, in reference to the Menzies era, called
‘the years of unleavened bread’.
As a poet, Shelton Lea dealt with language, imagery and symbols, in a
sense the primary materials of culture. Most contributors to this issue
are, as ever in Overland, broadly concerned with the historically
specific relationship between culture and society; and more
particularly with the political dimensions of that relationship...
Back to top
Overland: The Years of
Unleavened Bread, Again
Review
Michelle
Griffin
The Age, 22
October 2005
The tributes
to Shelton Lea
throughout this edition of the journal make for intriguing reading, as
the obituaries of our poets often do. Lea’s association with
the
magazine he edited between 1988 and 1993 stretched back to the 1960s,
on his watch
Overland
was most likely to let its freak flag fly.
‘He usually sat at the
Overland
table at the Premier’s Literary Awards and was a lone
boisterous
figure in a room full of mannered bookish types,’ writes
Overland’s
editor, Nathan Hollier. ‘I grudgingly admired his bravado
while
wishing he wouldn’t draw attention to us. He invested so much
store in his own identity as a poet - of the romantic mould - that you
expected his work to be terrible. But it wasn’t.’
Other remembrances fill in the picture with startling details:
‘Sherton walked the streets of the Cross with his girt
Wendy,’ remembers Michael Sharkey, ‘pushing a pram
containing their infant daughter Chaos (later changed to Kay) lying on
a mattress that covered a fantasy stash of drugs.’ Little
wonder
at least two biographies are in the works...
Back to top
tribute
The man who walked into a
pub, smiled
and served up a poem with the lot
Barry Dickins
The Melbourne Times,
25 May
2005
Popular Melbourne poet
Shelton Lea
died earlier this month from lung cancer at the age of 58. His friend
and fellow poet Barry Dickins penned this tribute.
I first argued with and loved Shelton Lea back at the Albion Hotel
opposite La Mama Theatre in 1967. He always drank there and
chain-smoked over the skulls of brain-dead, long-distance semi-trailer
drivers, or pompous poet critics, or Aboriginal drummers who dry-humped
geographically impaired roadies.
In those days you stepped boldly into the Albion and bought your father
or your lover a pot of white. Everyone drank a pot of white as soon as
they got in. On the Alzheimer juke box you vibrated yourself into a
whirling dervish as you danced to the Stones, then foolishly proposed
to anyone you thought might publish your poems.
Shelton was the most handsome young poet I ever saw. When he strolled
into the pub in Lygon Street, heads whirled. He was like Lord Byron
from Barkly Street. He read beautifully, no mean feat at a rackety bar
full of envious bewildered others.
He read at a cafe in Cockatoo. I was apprehensive, but Shelton had just
got out of jail, and feeling buoyant and liberated, he laughingly
sipped a hot cup of tea, winked at me, walked through the curtain and
enthralled them.
Once, he drunkenly steered a Valiant Safari station wagon down Johnston
Street, Collingwood, with me stupefied lying on the roof rack, grinning
at the stars. He hit a truck and I was cast into the chilly night
several times, braining myself upon the bonnet, the asphalt and then
into another vehicle. He checked my eyes to make sure I was alive. We
then dined late at Jimmy’s.
It is a great shock for me to understand that he is dead. He was always
there. In pubs mostly, raving at me, showing me his latest poem,
gobbling my stolen beer nuts, reciting hoarsely from the great unwashed
bards of the past. Apart from Kristen Henry, he is the only romantic
poet to work side by side with restraint, or delicacy, or subtlety.
It remains a work of art to read a poem well at a crazed pub. He was
not besotted with poetry or deluded by the chronic addictiveness of the
bastard muse. He was always hassling, always demanding attention,
always interested in giving encouragement to younger poets. He was kind
to them, attentive. He smoked their cigarettes. He turned them on.
I didn’t know any of his paramours or children. Our
relationship was
propped on a kiln-dried ugly park bench, talking all the day through,
chuckling, reciting. Him from Allen Ginsberg, possibly, the king of the
Beat Poets. Me from Charles Baudelaire, with Shelton correcting me.
Nobody loved poetry like him. Not even God.
I see him now, challenging the Fitzroy coppers, then being chucked into
the back of their van. He is at Heide now, reading shakily to wealthy
visitors who have never heard of him. He is sick and dying, old but
unafraid, smoking a big joint in front of them. He was always desperate
and always beautiful. How can’t he be there?
I didn’t go to Shelton’s wake because I
didn’t want to see him so
reduced, but I should have turned up. His laughing, scrunched-up eyes
and the way he roared with mockery at life’s cruelties; these
brave
qualities of his will always delight me in the midnight reveries of
love.
He is in deep trouble. His spirit keeps pursuing elusive romantic
verse, but the old crook body is quick at giving up the Holy Ghost. He
is at La Mama in 1967, squinting his eyes from the sun drifting over
the friends who have come in to play. Guitars and babies and a tin cup
full of shrapnel.
Back to top
Bard
of the back streets
Jen Jewel
Brown
The Australian,
24 June 2005
Shelton Lea
Poet, publisher and fine-book dealer.
Born Melbourne, August 25, 1946.
Died Melbourne, May 13, aged 58.
Rapscallion, big-hearted mentor and arguably Australia’s
finest
romantic poet, Shelton Lea died peacefully at home in Clifton Hill,
Melbourne, on Friday, May 13. He was renowned as the beautiful,
charming, dope-smoking wag who was a close mate of Heide’s
Barrett Reid (poet and librarian) and Sweeney Reed (artist and gallery
owner). He lived at Heide for years after John and Sunday Reed died,
helping Reid put out
Overland
magazine. Last year Lea spoke eloquently on ABC television’s
Stateline
about his experiences as a 16-year-old in Pentridge, helping in the
campaign to keep children out of adult jails. Later that year, the
Victorian Children and Young
Persons (Age Jurisdiction) Act 2004 was passed,
effectively extending the definition of child from 17 to 18 in several
areas of the law.
Lea lived life on a grand scale. Mystery surrounds the identity of his
father, thought to have suffered a breakdown after serving in World War
II. His mother came to Melbourne from Perth in 1946 to give birth to
Shelton at the Haven, a home for unmarried mothers. The lively boy
spent the first 15 months of his life there. One carer remembered him
decades later as a delightful child, if a head-banger.
He was adopted into the Lea family of Toorak, famous for its
confectionery. At 12 he became ‘too close’ to a
chocolate
factory worker, who was accordingly fired. Distraught, Shelton told his
adoptive father ‘I fire you’ and ran away from
home, ending
up in various homes for wayward youngsters. He met Aborigines for the
first time and was made an honorary black. At 16, he ended up in
Pentridge’s notorious C Division, where he witnessed rape and
murder.
Time in Long Bay, Goulburn and Grafton jails followed. Lea became a
skilled pickpocket and cat burglar. He penned love poems and letters
for grateful inmates. For a time in the early 1960s he lived with
gypsies on the roads of rural Australia. After being thrown out of
Kings Cross for manufacturing LSD, he moved back to Melbourne where he
met the Heide set through sculptor Joel Elenberg.
In his 58 years Lea had children with three women. Nine books of his
poetry have been published. He is known for his articulate,
street-smart humour, his gentle love poetry and the mythic, visceral
masculinity of his visions. In a country where artists are generally
asked what their real job is, he took his poetic calling seriously. A
popular reader, he approached performance with an almost Shakespearean
bravura. He also published several other poets’ books through
his
imprint Eaglemont Press and ran fine bookshops including, recently, De
Havillands in Clifton Hill.
His February diagnosis of Jack Dancer (as he liked to call his lung
cancer) left him three months to live. He made the most of it, pushing
through the release of his ninth book
Nebuchadnezzar
(through Black Pepper), while poems from it were accepted by
The Age and
The Australian.
Nebuchadnezzar
was launched by Dorothy Porter at the Rochester Castle Hotel in
Fitzroy, eight days before the poet’s death. The pub
overflowed.
Although he had thought he wouldn’t have the breath, Lea
decided
on the night to make a final, moving reading of the title poem. In the
voice (with permission) of Aboriginal identity Sonny Booth and
dedicated to Booth and Lionel Rose, the work is inspired by the Arthur
Boyd painting,
Nebuchadnezzar
Burning.
Shelton Lea is survived by his partner Leith Woodgate, his children
Kaye, Destiny, Danay and Zero, godson Ben, half and adopted siblings,
and grandchildren, nieces and nephews.
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