James McAuley

He was educated at Fort Street High School and then attended Sydney University, where he majored in English, Latin and philosophy (which he studied under John Anderson.

In 1937 he edited Hermes, the annual literary journal of the University of Sydney Union, in which many of his early poems, beginning in 1935,[1] were published until 1941.

With fellow poet Harold Stewart, McAuley concocted sixteen nonsense poems in a pseudo-experimental modernist style.

[2] Peter Coleman considered that "no one else in Australian letters has so effectively exposed or ridiculed modernist verse, leftie politics and mindless liberalism".

[4] In 1952 he converted to Roman Catholicism, the faith his own father had abandoned, following an intense spiritual experience at a Catholic mission in New Guinea.