[1] Alongside his contemporaries and occasional collaborators Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, Dennis helped popularise Australian slang in literature, earning him the title "the laureate of the larrikin".

When Dennis died, Australia's then Prime Minister Joseph Lyons said he was destined to be remembered as the "Australian Robert Burns".

His mother suffered ill health, so Clarrie (as he was known) was raised initially by his great-aunts, then went away to school, Christian Brothers College, Adelaide as a teenager.

It was while he was working in this job that, like banker's clerk Banjo Paterson before him, his first poem was published[1] under the pseudonym "The Best of the Six".

In 1908, he camped with the artist Hal Waugh at Toolangi, north-east of Melbourne, near Healesville.