William Anderson Forbes was the son of a Presbyterian minister, Lewis William Forbes, and his wife, Elizabeth Mary, née Young. He was educated in a parish school and commenced tertiary studies at King's College, Aberdeen, in 1854. He proved a troublesome student and on 6 April, 1855 the Senatus Academicus suggested he be expelled for 'repeated contempt of the authority and discipline of the college'. Although removed from King's College he attended Marischal College from 1854 to 1858 but did not complete a degree.
Forbes is reputed to have run away to sea and travelled widely before arriving in Australia. His whereabouts after 1858 are unclear, but a subscription to his poem 'Fragments' declares it was 'Composed on leaving Scotland, June 1862'. This appears to have been written as he set out for Australia as his brother wrote in 1884 that Forbes had 'stranded somehow on the shores of Queensland' some twenty-two years before. In 1883, four years after Forbes's death, his elder brother, Archibald, visited Queensland to seek more information about William's life there. Most of what he learned was passed on from acquaintances and may have been partly hearsay. According to these accounts Forbes lived and worked in many parts of Queensland including employment on a northern cattle station, farming in Mackay, mining on the Morinish goldfields northwest of Rockhampton, road work in Roma, shepherding on the Burnett, and washing sheep in the Toowoomba area.
Much of his time seems to have been spent in Central Queensland. His volume of poetry, Voices from the Bush (1869) provides some insight into his character and life. He was an acute and sardonic observer of the world in which he found himself. Hadgraft describes him as 'the best all-round poet of these early years in Queensland' and suggests his view was more realistic and perhaps more truthful than other poets of his fime. Forbes was a forerunner of the bush poetry that was to rise to prominence in Australia from the mid-1880s and form the Bulletin tradition. Forbes never married. He died from a bowel obstruction two days after being admitted to hospital at Warwick in Southern Queensland.
Adapted from: Hadgraft, Cecil, 'Forbes, William Anderson (1839-1879), Australian Dictionary of Biography Online, Online Edition, 2006. See also: Hadgraft, Cecil, Queensland and Its Writers, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1959, pp. 3 - 4; Cryle, Denis, '(Re) Writing Tradition: The Bush Ethos in Central Queensland Writing', in By the Book: A Literary History of Queensland, Patrick Buckridge and Belinda McKay (eds), University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2007, pp. 144, 181.
