One of Australia’s finest poets, Kenneth Slessor would be outstanding in any company. His brilliance of technique gives an impression of unconscious mastery in poems that are always arresting in conception and illuminating in image. Slessor was born in 1901 in Orange, New South Wales. He was educated in Sydney and became a journalist in his late teens. Most of his life was spent in Sydney, which he grew to love, and the city’s harbour, streets and people appear in a number of his poems. He died in 1971.