AustLit

Johnson was an eminent New Zealand poet whose writing themes included 'suburbia, domestic life, childhood love (with its attendant lust) and the folly of the contemporary world.' Johnson lived in Australia for over a decade, working firstly as a journalist in Melbourne and then as an academic in Bathurst. His poetry appeared occasionally in Australian publications; in the 1940s and 1950s his work was published in Angry Penguins, a Jindyworobak Anthology (1953), Arena, Southerly and Direction: New Literature in Australia, in the 1960s and 1970s several of his poems appeared in Poetry Australia and LiNQ. He was awarded an OBE in New Zealand in 1987.

(Primary source: The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature edited by Roger Robinson and NelsonWattie (1998).)