Made it his mission to make Australian poetry visible
By Brook Emery
RON PRETTY October 16, 1940-June 30, 2023
Ron Pretty AM was a much-loved, much-admired, poet, publisher and teacher, and a tireless advocate for the importance of poetry within the Australian culture. He died of pneumonia at his home in Farmborough Heights, south of Wollongong, in June after a long struggle with cancer.
Ron was born in 1940, the third of six children born to Arthur Herbert Pretty and Greta Pearl Pretty. The family lived at Engadine until Ron was three, when Arthur moved the family to Little Jillaby, near Wyong, to take up share farming. When this venture failed the family moved back to Sutherland, for a time living in a tin shed at the rear of their grandmother’s home. The Pretty family eventually settled at Helensburgh.
Ron described himself as a late starter but encouraged by his teacher Mr O’Neill completed the leaving certificate at Sydney Technical High School and was awarded a teachers’ scholarship.
He obtained a teaching certificate from Balmain Teachers College in 1959 and later an arts degree with honours in history and a master’s degree in Australian literature from the University of Sydney. Later still, he became an associate of the Institute of Education at the University of London. He taught at various primary and secondary schools in both the country and city before he was appointed as a lecturer at Wollongong Teachers College in 1970. He moved to the University of Wollongong where he served as head of writing for 15 years until he retired in 2000 as an associate professor in the Faculty of Creative Arts. Subsequently, he taught writing at the University of Melbourne from 2003-2007.
Ron once said in an interview he was “frustrated by the fact that there is so much poetry happening at present, but most of it is hidden from the majority of Australians. I don’t think poetry is so much an unpopular art as an unknown one.” Through his involvement in a staggering number of projects Ron made it his mission to make Australian poetry visible and available to all.
He edited the student magazine Scarp: New Arts and Writings for 15 years. He founded and ran the annual residential Wollongong Poetry Workshop from which six poets were chosen to have their first books published in the New Poets program. Ron then hired a bus and toured the poets around Australia to familiarise readers with their works. Many established present-day poets received their start this way.
Ron Pretty: founded publishing co-operative Five Island Press.
In 1986, Ron was part of a group which founded a publishing co-operative called Five Islands Press after the five small islands off the coast of Port Kembla. By 1995, this had become a solo operation with Ron as director, commissioning editor, layout artist, producer, fetcher and carrier. By the time Ron left the press it had published 230 books of Australian poetry, a mammoth and important effort at a time when the large commercial publishers were abandoning poetry.
Ron was instrumental in founding Illawarra Writers which evolved into the South Coast Writers Centre, a place where writers could congregate, read and workshop their work, hold events and advocate for Australian literature. In 2001, he established the magazine Blue Dog: Australian Poetry which was unique in its time as all submissions were considered anonymously – there was no preference for established names. He reached out to schoolchildren by establishing, with Bradley Trevor Grieve, the Taronga Foundation Poetry Prize and tried to lift the standard of poetry appreciation by creating the Blue Dog Reviewing Prize. He was active in the Poets Union based in Sydney, eventually becoming its patron. When he moved to Melbourne, he established the Australian Poetry Centre that subsequently merged with the Poets Union to become Australian Poetry based at the Wheeler Centre.
Such commitment did come at a cost, financial and creative, and to some extent overshadowed Ron’s considerable achievements as a poet in his own “write”. Nevertheless, Ron was remarkably prolific publishing 10 books of poetry beginning with The Habit of Balance in 1988, flourishing after retirement with the publication of What the Afternoon Knows (2013) and The Left Hand Mirror (2017), and ending with 101 Poems in the year before his death.
Ron began thinking of himself as a poet during the year he spent teaching in England and Greece. His influences, among many, were WB Yeats, above all others (Sailing to Byzantium his favourite poem), George Seferis, Constantine Cavafy, Walt Whitman and E K Braithwaite. In an interview with Anne Elvey, Ron said that what attracted him to a poem was “the verve and excitement of its opening, the freshness and appropriateness of its language and imagery; I value those things, but beyond them I value the world that the poem opens up to me, making connections that I may not have previously seen. I don’t particularly value cleverness for its own sake: I want the poem to lead me somewhere.”
As noted by reviewers, Ron honoured these sentiments in his own poetry which, often concerned with family, relationships, music, myth, history and politics, was always emotionally engaged, humane and generous. Writing of Ron’s last collection in Australian Book Review, Sam Ryan noted, “a coherent and affecting expression of experience that, in its simplicity, is satisfying in good poetry. It shows the confidence of a skilled poet. What is striking here and in many other places in the collection is Pretty’s plain language. Rarely does he lean on obscure references or complex language to create or convey meaning.”
Mention should also be made of his extensive critical writing, especially two handbooks Practical Poetics and Creating Poetry, the second of which is in its third edition and is an invaluable guide to poets just embarking on the craft.
As was the poetry, so was the man. Many have spoken of his kindness, his generosity of spirit, his understanding, the unfailingly polite and helpful encouragement and advice he gave to so many poets. Ron was passionate about fairness and equity and wasn’t averse to firing off a missive to the newspapers when he perceived a political injustice was being done.
Late in life Ron was awarded residencies in the Whiting Studio in Rome, the Tasmanian Writers Centre, the Katherine Susannah Pritchard Centre in WA, and at the Hill End Artists Studio. Ron’s achievements were recognised when he received a special award for services to poetry at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2001 and when, in 2002, he was made a member of the Order of Australia. He was elected a fellow of the University of Wollongong in 2023.
Ron is survived by his wife Jane, his daughters Alana and Saroja, their partners Luke and Jakub, and grandchildren Alexander, Olivia, Nathaniel, Lachlan, Eliza and Oliver who all supported him strongly in his endeavours. He was 82.
Brook Emery was a friend of Ron Pretty, who published his first three poetry books.