AustLit

Keith James Hetherington has written commercial fiction in most categories, radio plays, and scripts for television. Today [2007], he writes for Black Horse Western. He started writing after a work accident: 'One day I filled my boot with boiling water. When I took off the sock, the skin came, too. I had a week off and bought a book of locally published western stories.' Keith thought, "Hell, I can write as good as that! and penned The Texan. Ten pages in an exercise book. I submitted to Jack Atkins of Cleveland Publishing Co...They eventually asked for regular contributions, one a month, then they began publishing 15,000 and later 48,000 word novelettes and I got into that. When I wanted something, like a motorbike or a trip to England, I'd write like hell and save the same way, until I had enough, then ease off. I soon realized I could make more writing at my fast rate than I could working for a boss. I took the plunge just before I got married in 1957 and began churning them out: westerns, a couple of Larry Kent crime thillers, and the Carl Dekker series, which was about a world-weary adventurer, each yarn set in a different city or country.' Markets multiplied.

Hetherington also wrote short stories that separated pin-ups in Man magazine and the digest-sized Pocket Man, and for a similar New Zealand magazine called Stag. During the 1960s a boys' adventure book, Scuba Buccaneers by James Keith, was published by Angus and Robertson in Australia, and during the 1970s, two Keith Conway thrillers were published as hardcovers by Hale in Britain: Naked Nemesis and Hammerhead Reef. 'One of the thrillers went to paperback but I didn't find out for something like 14 years when I picked up a copy at a book exchange,' Hetherington has said. 'I'd forgotten to notify Hale's of change of address so they wouldn't pay me interest on the fees due!' Earlier, Hetherington had taken a job as a journalist in the Queensland Health Department.

'This involved writing short radio plays as well as articles. I became editor, and a Yank who worked for me went to work for the television series maker Crawford Productions in Melbourne. He kept pestering me to write for TV. There was big money there at the time, so I gave it a go. When I got tired of flying back and forth between Melbourne and Brisbane at weekends for editing of scripts, I moved to Melbourne in 1971 and got to work for Crawfords full-time, though I worked as a freelance from home.'

For the rest of his biography refer to http://www.blackhorsewesterns.com/ back issues/ issue 2 September 2005.

Keith Garvey was born in Frog Hollow, Moree, New South Wales.

He worked in several outback occupations and has published many books of bush stories and verse based on these experiences. His poetry and short stories vividly portray life in the shearing sheds and cattle camps of an earlier era. A fellow shearer has commented that 'Keith's inclusion in a shearing team always assured plenty of entertainment as he recited a repertoire of poems from a retentive memory that is the widest of any man I know'. (Colin Newsome, Foreword to Song of a Shearer, 1984).

His publications include My Uncle Harry (1978), Uncle Harry Rides Again (1981), a collection of 'tall tales', and Cattle Camp Collection (1987). His 1981 publication Slowly Sweats the Gun and Other Tales of an Earlier Outback Australia is a selection of poetry and short stories. In 1980 he published Keith Garvey's Dinkum Little Aussies, poetry for children illustrated by Beryl Morley. He has also contributed to Old Australian Food Recipes (2002) - a collection of recipes, sayings and bush wisdom - with his poem 'Dampers'.

A popular writer and reader, Garvey has read his stories on ABC radio.

Poet, editor, Emeritus Professor and critic Keith Harrison was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in English and French from the University of Melbourne in 1954, and a Master of Arts from the University of Iowa in 1967. He has worked as a freelance poet, journalist and broadcaster, and has held several international academic posts, including Professor of English at Carleton College, Minnesota. His reviews and critical work have been published in Australian and international literary journals and he has published a translation of the middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Harrison also edited the Uncollected Poems and Prose (2001) of A.K. Ramanujan and Islands West : Stories From the Coast (2001).

Harrison's poetry has appeared in a number of anthologies, literary magazines and newspapers, including The New Statesman, The New York Times, The Observer (London), Poetry (Australia), Quadrant, The Spectator and Westerly. Harrison has participated in many public poetry readings, including television, radio, and a performance at the Edinburgh Festival. He is also the also author of plays and radio plays, including The Water Man, broadcast on BBC and ABC.

Harrison has regularly spent time in Australia and at his farm-house in southern Minnesota.

Keith Taylor's interest in science fiction began when he was a child listening to radio serials such as Speed King, Kings of Space and Captain Miracle. As a teenager he was attracted to heroic fantasy in books by the American writers Leigh Brackett and Robert E. Howard. Taylor started writing his own stories at the age of nine.

Taylor joined the army in 1965 and, as a member of the Medical Corps, he was stationed at the Australian Base Hospital in Vung Tau, Vietnam, in 1967. After he left the army in 1970 he began writing more seriously, selling his first 'Bard' stories to Fantastic, an American magazine, under the pseudonym Dennis More. According to the entry for Taylor in The MUP Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction (1998), some of Taylor's shorter work has been published in another American publication, Weird Tales; its Fall 1988 edition was a special Keith Taylor edition containing three of his stories: 'The Haunting of Mara', 'Men from the Plain of Lir', and 'The Ordeal Stone'.

After attending Burnside Primary School and Hutchesons' Grammar School, Keith Stevenson then went to Glasgow University where he was awarded an MA (Hons) in Drama and Philosophy. His early working life was in community arts, firstly as a drama worker in Newarthill, then as supervisor of the Maryhill Arts Centre and finally as coordinator of the Easterhouse Arts Project which received major funding from the Glasgow City Council as part of the 1990 European City of Culture celebrations.

Stevenson first came to Australia in 1988, backpacking around the country and finally settling in Melbourne. He returned to Glasgow to work in Easterhouse for a period before becoming a permanent Australian resident. He was interested in science fiction at an early age, reading as much as he could find, especially Asimov, Niven and Dick. He remembers what first appealed to him about science fiction: 'I must have been about 8 or 9 and I read in a junior encyclopedia that the sun would one day go nova and planet Earth would be destroyed. The book pointed out that this wouldn't happen for billions of years, but that didn't mean much to a child. I was inconsolable for days. And then I found a science fiction book and I realised that humanity could survive the death of the sun if we escaped to other planets. SF gave me a message of hope and it's that message which still fires my imagination today - that humanity will survive, however altered.'

In Melbourne Stevenson worked in the public service, but he quickly got involved in the local speculative fiction scene, meeting Dirk Strasser (q.v.) at a TAFE course on science fiction and fantasy writing. Strasser told him about Aurealis, a magazine for which Stevenson assumed publication responsibility from 2001 to the end of 2004. He was also organising convenor of the Aurealis Awards for a number of years before they came under the auspices of Fantastic Queensland. During that time he also wrote a science fiction novel, Horizon, and had two short stories published. He has been working on a multi-book space opera called The Way of The Kresh. Stevenson is a member of SuperNOVA, the Melbourne-based speculative fiction writers' group. In 2006, he and fellow SuperNOVA writer Andrew Macrae (q.v.) launched 'coeur de lion', a speculative fiction publishing imprint, and with it their first anthology, c0ck, a collection of original stories interrogating masculinity within a speculative fiction framework. In October 2007 coeur de lion published Rynemonn, the conclusion to the Tom Rynosseros stories from Terry Dowling (q.v.). A further speculative fiction anthology is scheduled for a 2008 publication date. Stevenson recently became science fiction and horror reviewer for Aurealis and now lives in Sydney [2008].

It was Keith McKenry's recounting of bush verse around bushwalking campfires that led to his writing verse for recitation. His search for more material in old poetry books sparked his special interest in Australian folklore. McKenry has chaired UNESCO's Special Committee of Technical and Legal Experts on the Safeguarding of Folklore, was a member of the Commonwealth Committee of Inquiry into Folklore in Australia, and was President of the National Folk Festival 1997-2005. He headed the Commonwealth Government's Arts Branch from 1985 to 1988.

McKenry's work has appeared in a number of newsletters and periodicals. The Australian National Library Oral History collection holds many interviews he has recorded with people such as ecologists, folklorists, folk musicians and related music industry identities. He has recited his verses at receptions in the United Nations in New York and the Australian High Court, performed at concerts, festivals and folk clubs around Australia, and also been recorded by community radio stations.

Together with Alan Scott, McKenry has worked on a National Library of Australia project to produce high quality studio recordings of important but little-known Australian bush songs and poems. Battler's Ballad ([Canberra] : National Library of Australia [and] Fanged Wombat Productions, c1991) and Travelling Through the Storm (Ainslie, ACT : Fanged Wombat, c1996) have been produced to date (2006). He has also written academic articles on recreational use and conservation of wilderness areas.

Keith Dunstan OAM was an Australian journalist and author born in Melbourne, Australia, the son of William Dunstan VC and Marjorie Dunstan. He attended Geelong Grammar School and was a Flight Lieutenant in 1943–46 with the Royal Australian Air Force, stationed at Labuan in the Pacific. He is among the most prolific of all Australian writers and the author of more than 25 books.

Keith Willey grew up in Queensland and 'must have read every book Ion Idriess ever wrote. ... [A]dventure was the Torres Strait, the wide, slow rivers of the Gulf of Carpentaria, the mountains and grass plains of Kimberley' (xi). He worked as a journalist on daily newspapers from Cairns to Launceston and from Sydney to Darwin and Adelaide and in Papua New Guinea. Willey attended and covered the historic hanging of convicted murderer Ronald Ryan, the last person to hang in Australia, and the disappearance of Prime Minister Harold Holt. A dramatised documentary about Ryan, The Last Man Hanged (1993) telling the story from the point of view of Willey was written and directed by Willey's nephew Lewis Fitzgerald.

As a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Sun, Willey reported on the wars in Vietnam and the Middle East. He also filed stories from the South Pacific, Papua New Guinea, Cambodia and Malaysia. Willey spent eight years in the Northern Territory and Kimberley region of Western Australia from 1956; part of the time as a professional crocodile hunter. He was editor of The Centralian Advocate (1956-1957) and The Northern Territory News (1958-1964?). Later in life he gained a degree in history from the Australian National University.

Willey was a prolific author who wrote widely in the travel genre, captured a passing era in Australia's northern regions and commented perceptively on Australia's history and culture. He taught at the then Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education in 1983-84 before his death. The Keith Willey Award, instigated by the Willey family and administered by the Faculty of Arts, University of Southern Queensland, is presented to the journalism student with the highest academic achievement in the first two years of his or her program.

(Source: The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature ed. William H. Wilde et. al.(1994): 816-817; Keith Willey, 'Foreword', Ghosts of the Big Country (1975); xi-xvi)).

Smith was a well-known broadcaster and early Australian screen personality. His most popular on-screen program was The Pied Piper, in which he conducted candid interviews with children. He also devised and wrote (with veteran radio writer George Foster) the scripts for the entire 13 episodes of Mrs. Finnegan, a television series, which appeared on ATN 7 (Sydney) from 1970 to 1971. He published the parenting book How to Get Closer to Your Children (1985) and two volumes of Supernatural!: Australian Encounters (1991 and 1993), about ghost sightings in Australia. He also wrote the social history work Australian Battlers Remember: The Great Depression (2003).

Volumes One and Two of Australian Children's Books by Marcie Muir and Kerry White (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992-2004) list numerous activity books for children authored by Smith between 1960 and 1982.

Keith Arthur Murdoch was a journalist who became managing editor and chairman of the Herald and Weekly Times. He started his career with the Age, working as a correspondent for the Malvern district and in 1908 traveled to London to undertake speech therapy for his stammer and to also study part-time at the London School of Economics.

Murdoch returned to Australia in 1909 and continued working at the Age until 1912, when he secured the position of Melbourne correspondent for the Sydney Sun. In 1915 he was appointed managing editor of the London cable service run by the Sun and the Melbourne Herald. While travelling to England via the Middle east he managed to secure the permission of Sir Ian Hamilton, commander of the Dardanelles campaign in Turkey, to visit Australian troops in Gallipoli. He wrote his impressions for the newspapers and subsequently helped secure his reputation as one of Australia's finest war correspondents.

After arriving in England Murdoch expanded the cable service and made significant contributions to journalism there. He returned to Australia in 1921 after being offered the post of chief editor at the Melbourne Herald. When the Sydney Sun attempted to break into the Melbourne market with the Sun News-Pictorial, Murdoch fought a campaign against the paper and three years later acquired it. Thereafter he began buying out other newspapers, beginning with Adelaide's Advertiser, and soon after Brisbane's Daily Mail (which merged with the Brisbane Courier to become the Courier Mail). Through the Herald he also became involved in the acquisition of a network of radio stations and in 1935 oversaw the merging of rival cable services to form Australian Associated Press Ltd.

In 1942 Murdoch became chairman of the Herald group, and two years later established the Herald Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne. The following year he became chairman of the trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria.

Keith Lethbridge is a member of the Western Australian Bush Poets and Yarn Spinning Association and has travelled and worked throughout Australia in various occupations. He won the Perth's Poets Cup on Australia Day 1996 with his poem 'The Legend of Mother McQ.'

Lethbridge is the author of Call up a Storm : A Guide for Australian Square Dance Callers [1984] and has been the researcher, narrator and director of a documentary videorecording Nyawa Kulila Wangka = Look, Listen, Speak, that examined Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Community Scheme (BRACS), an indigenous media network using satellite re-transmission and local broadcasting equipment to record and promote Aboriginal culture.

Keith Shadwick was born in England and migrated to Australia with his family as a child. He attended Wollongong High School and the University of Sydney. While at university he co-edited Dodo, a Questionable Quarterly with Elizabeth Butel (whom he would later marry for a time) and Tom Thompson (qq.v.).

Shadwick was a member of various jazz and rock groups; he also worked as a music writer and critic. He published one volumne of poetry while resident in Australia and several more following his return to England.

Source: Martin Armiger and Jon Newey, 'Poet and Writer Revealed Music's Hidden Delights', Sydney Morning Herald, (8 October 2008): 14.

Script-writer.

'As a teacher of dance and movement, Keith has influenced the lives of countless dancers, actors and artists in Australia. With his great generosity, kindness and sense of humour, Keith has been both loved and respected in the dance and theatre communities of NSW and beyond. Originally a primary school teacher, Keith took his first modern dance class at the age of 27 at the Bodenwieser Dance Centre and in a short space of time he was a featured dancer in the company. After the death of Bodenwieser, Keith, with Margaret Chapple, took over the management of the studio and taught numerous styles of dance for many years.

'Always passionate about quality teaching and learning, Keith founded the Australasian Teachers Contemporary Dance Association and the Society of Dance Artists before establishing the movement studies course at NIDA. He also pioneered similar courses with other theatre companies in Sydney. For decades, Keith has been an important and influential person in the life of Ausdance, the Australian Dance Awards, the Australia Council and the NSW Ministry for the Arts.' (Source : http://www.australiandanceawards.net.au/award-winners/1999-australian-dance-awards/keith-bain-oam )

Keith Hounslow is a jazz trumpeter.