4 - ‘An entertaining young genius’: C.J. Dennis and Adelaide

Summary

In April 1918, a journalist from the Adelaide Advertiser might have been slightly starstruck when he described C.J. Dennis as ‘an alert, unaffected, and entertaining young genius’ (10 April 1918, 7). Dennis had left the city 10 years earlier without fanfare. Now, as the nation's most famous writer, he was returning to negotiate a film version of The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, which had been the literary phenomenon of the war years and which, even a decade into the twenty-first century, has sold more copies than any other book of Australian verse. Today his role as a poet and journalist is commemorated in a plaque on North Terrace, Adelaide's cultural boulevard, while another plaque on the Parade in Norwood celebrates his connection with that suburb.

Dennis's greatest literary successes—the Sentimental Bloke book and its sequel, The Moods of Ginger Mick—were written in Victoria, but it was in Adelaide that he received his first encouragement to write, that he cut his teeth as a poet and journalist, and that he established the approach and themes that would prove so fruitful in his writing career. This chapter explores Dennis's life and work during his periods in Adelaide.

Clarence James Dennis began his formal education at the public school in Gladstone, in the mid-north of South Australia, where his father held the licence of the local hotel, but his literary education had its real origins during visits to his grandmother's house in Adelaide a few years later.