John Forbes

Just over a month ago, on February 2nd, Gleebooks in Sydney held a reading in memory of John Forbes, who died aged forty-seven at the beginning of 1998 (details of this event, along with other material on John Forbes, are available on the APRIL website). The image above, taken sometime in 1972 or 73 by an unidentified photographer shows John and the fiction writer Ranald Allen standing on either side of a self-portrait by George Washington Lambert in the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Lambert's is another story - father of Constant, the composer; grandfather of Kit, manager of The Who). John's poetry was central to that being written in Australia from the seventies through into the nineties. The Collected Poems is still available, as is a festschrift entitled Homage to John Forbes and edited by Ken Bolton. Both of these books are published by Brandl & Schlesinger, Sydney.