Writers

Next morning, through a screen of wine-coloured Japanese plum trees, I stepped on the edge of the Range. Eight hundred feet below me the mists were just breaking up from the purple valley floor; shreds of finely ascending gold and tenderest pink, quivering stirring banks of silver, parting to reveal deep blue and purple of fathomless shadow; ruby touching the peaked wall of the northern mountains; and to the east the hill waves running on and on to meet the sun. ‘The Singing Gold,’ Dorothy Cottrell

Toowoomba and the Darling Downs have been associated with a significant number of writers active in different ways and in different spaces within our literary culture.

Some writers were born here and moved away, others came from elsewhere to stay for varying lengths of time, others still were just visitors. Some wrote extensively about their local place, others ignored it completely, most dealt with it in some shape or form.


The Oxford Literary Guide to Australia list of writers who have a connection with Toowoomba or the Darling Downs includes: A.G. Stephens, W.H.Trail, Steele Rudd, John David Hennessey, Heber Hedley Booth, Francis Adams, Ronald McKie, David Rowbotham, Maureen Freer, Bruce Dawe, Mary Hannay Foot, John Henry Nicholson, JE MCDonnell, Eric Partridge, Arthur Upfield, Peter Edwards, Margaret Curran, Margaret Trist, Dorothy Green, V Cunnington and Gavin Souter. [i] J.L. Blyth and P.T. McNally name hundreds more in their extremely valuable Darling Downs Writers: A Bibliography. [ii]


This section provides biographies and portraits of some of the area's more distinguished writers but it hopes to add to this list writers important to the local area who have yet to have their work collected. More information on the place of these figures within the cultural history of Toowoomba or the Darling Downs can be found in the History section.


Further Reading

[i] Peter Pierce, ed. The Oxford Literary Guide to Australia, revised edition, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993.

[ii] J.L.Blyth and P. T. McNally, Darling Downs Writers: A Bibliography, Toowoomba: Darling Downs Institute Press, 1989.


Please use the link list on the left to access various featured writers Biographies and Portraits.



Submissions and suggestions for writers not yet included can be sent to leec@usq.edu.au