Bruce Dawe's Homo Suburbiensis

Bruce Dawe was one of Australia’s most influential poet. He was born on 28th February 1930 to a family with agricultural background of Scottish and English descent. Bruce Dawe was the only one in his family to have gone to secondary school, however he stopped attending school when he was 16 years old. He obtained many odd jobs that ordinary Australians would have had before going to university. After less than a year he also stopped attending university. Bruce Dawe became a teacher after he returned from serving in the RAAF. He was inspired to write poetry by his mother who read Scottish poems to him from a young age. Bruce Dawe illustrates that ordinary things in life are a good subject to write about as he often wrote freeform poems about ordinary subjects that ordinary people were able to relate to. Poems such as “Doctor to Patient”, “The Cornflake” and “Homo Suburbiensis” are good examples of Bruce Dawe’s illustration of events or things ordinary people will experience in the form of poetry.

“Doctor to Patient” addresses a very ordinary event that every Australian must’ve faced at one point in their lives. Bruce Dawe wrote this poem about the unemployment of young Australians after they’ve

“Homo Suburbiensis” follows an ordinary Australian man in his garden, tending to it peacefully. Bruce Dawe included many things ordinary things in this poem such as aspects of living in a suburban life, gardening and how an ordinary man feels when he is in his garden. The lines, “Burning, hearing vaguely the clatter of a disk in a sink that could be his, hearing a dog, a kid, a far whisper of traffic, and offering up instead…” describes living in a suburban area. The line that continues after that, “Not much but as much as ay man can offer - time, pain, love, hate, age, ware, death, laughter, fever.” are things in which ordinary people have and feel and therefore can