Philip Butterss wins National Biography Award for CJ Dennis work

When poet C.J. Dennis died in 1938, prime minister Joe Lyons ­described him as “the Robert Burns of Australia’’.

CJ Dennis

When poet C.J. Dennis died on June 22, 1938, aged 61, prime ­minister Joe Lyons led the tributes to the “Larrikin Laureate”, ­describing him as “the Robert Burns of Australia’’, a creator of “immortal” characters who “captured the true Australian spirit’’.

“Already his work is world ­famous,’’ Lyons said, “and future generations will treasure it.’’

The inaccuracy of that prediction motivated Adelaide academic Philip Butterss to write a life of Dennis, which yesterday won the $25,000 National Biography Award. “I noticed there were bio­graphies of Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, but there had never been one of Dennis, who in his day was vastly more popular than either,’’ he said at the awards announcement in Sydney.

The judges said Butterss’s An Unsentimental Bloke was a “forensic work of recovery’’ that resurrected the life and works of “far and away the most popular of all Australian poets’’.

The title refers to Dennis’s best known work, the verse novel The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, first published in 1915. Dennis’s poems of emerging urban Australia, full of desperate types and rhyming slang, were hugely popular, with the book selling 60,000 copies within 12 months.

His 1916 sequel, The Moods of Ginger Mick, which took one of the characters into the Gallipoli campaign, was another bestseller and Dennis was earning a fortune he would later lose. He battled illness, depression and the bottle.

Though he was no rogue himself, South Australian-born Dennis’s works were instrumental in establishing the iconography of the larrikin Aussie and laconic Anzac.

Butterss said Dennis’s popularity waned because his verse style and the type of mas­culinity he celebrated — “tough, rough men, though with a gentle side’’ — had become unfashionable.

The biography was 12 years in the making and by the end Butterss had come to know his subject well. “Like most of us, he had his good side and his bad side,’’ Butterss said. “But I think he deserves a biography.’’

Butterss’s book prevailed over an eclectic shortlist that showcases the diversity of Australian biographical writing: Gabrielle Carey’s Moving Among Strangers, an account of her family ties to writer Randolph Stow; Philip Dwyer’s Citizen Emperor: Napol­eon in Power 1799-1815; David Leser’s personal memoir To Begin to Know: Walking in the Shadows of My Father; Helen O’Neill’s A Singular Vision: Harry Seidler; and Liam Pieper’s account of his misspent youth, The Feel-Good Hit of the Year. Each received $1000.