Vale Ron Pretty
On 30 June 2023, Ron Pretty OAM passed away at home with his family after a long illness.
Ron was a founding member of the South Coast Writers Centre as well as a poet, publisher, teacher and advocate for Illawarra and Australian poetry for more than fifty years. His contributions to Australian and local literature were immense and he will be sorely missed both by the SCWC and the local writing community. Highlights of his distinguished career include:
From 1987 to 2007, he was the founding director of Five Islands Press, a leading publisher of contemporary Australian poetry. During his tenure, the Press published 230 books (that’s about one a month) by Australian poets, many of which have subsequently been shortlisted for or won prizes.
Between 2000 and 2007, Ron ran the Poetry Australia Foundation – a foundation directed at promoting Australian poets and poetry. He is now a life member of its successor, the Australian Poetry Inc.
Ron’s services to literature, and Australian poetry in particular, were acknowledged by the NSW Premier’s Special Prize in 2001 and an Order of Australia (AM) in 2002.
In 2012, the Australia Council for the Arts also awarded Ron a residency at the Whiting Studio in Rome.
Ron was a founding member of the SCWC and participated in its Committee of Management from its inception until 2018. He also initiated and taught a number of poetry workshops, writing and courses and groups until late in 2021 when illness prevented him from continuing. His book Creating Poetry is an essential handbook, now in its 3rd edition is still widely used in creative writing courses across the country.
He is survived by his wife Jane, two daughters Alana and Saroja and six grandchildren.
In December 2020, as part of an end of year gala, the South Coast Writers Centre presented a tribute to the work of Ron Pretty, which included the following speech made by poet Brook Emery:
I’ve know Ron Pretty since about 1996-7. Only a short time really and, though we haven’t see each other as much as I would have liked in recent years because of distance and commitments, I have valued our association and friendship. Those of you who know Ron will be fully aware of the import of that word ‘commitment’. Ron is one of the most self-transcendingly committed people I have known.
Full disclosure: Ron published my first book of poetry, my first three books, and I probably wouldn’t be in the poetry business were it not for Ron. Although this is a public tribute it is also a personal one. Please forgive me if memory doesn’t always strictly mesh with history and if I waver from a strict chronology.
I’d like to start, oddly perhaps when you consider his packed CV, by mentioning one of Ron’s early projects, scarp, the literary magazine which Ron started with his students in 1984 when he was Head of Writing at the University of Wollongong and kept publishing until 1999. I wanted to start here because it illustrates Ron’s commitment to Wollongong and the escarpment, his innovative ideas, his practical teaching methods, his contribution to literature and, sadly, his ongoing battles with bureaucracy and authority for funds to keep worthwhile projects going. Under Ron’s overall editorship the magazine was produced by students who, in running it, learnt literary judgement and editorial processes, and it published poems from all over Australia in a newspaper format. It stood up well when compared to other, perhaps bigger, supposedly more prestigious, better funded, literary magazines of the time. I remember Ron’s frustration when the University of Wollongong discontinued to fund the magazine.
But there was no sulking in his tent for Ron. He invented something else. In 2002 he started Blue Dog because he was convinced there were not enough publishing outlets for Australian Poets, especially emerging poets who were yet to make a name for themselves. Ron asked me to be one of the editors and we made the decision, I think it was unique at the time, to judge all submissions anonymously so that a well-known name did not influence the assessment of quality. This decision did, I think, get us into a bit of trouble with certain people but I think it was worthwhile.
Ron’s commitment to supporting and publishing new poets is nowhere more evident than in the New Poets eight day residential program which he ran out of the University of Wollongong’s Campus East for I don’t know how many years. This was where I met Ron, first as a student, then as a tutor. It was fantastic. It was fun. It was, though I know he enjoyed it, incredibly hard, draining work for Ron. And once the workshops were finished, the books printed, Ron drove the successful New Poets all over Australia to introduce them to the public. On the driving note, I’ve driven with Ron to Brisbane and to Melbourne and I know the thousands, possibly millions, of miles he has driven in the service of poetry. If he needed a second job he could easily be a long-haul truck driver. I’m digressing, but on the trip to Melbourne when we’d pulled up for the night in Albury, had dinner and a couple of wines, and I was shattered and ready for bed, Ron pulled a bundle of files out of his briefcase and started reading manuscripts. Once again the University’s need to be a business and the stratospheric increase in prices for the use of Campus East forced the closure of this program.
A new project was needed. No problem. Ron became the moving force and artistic director of the Taronga Foundation Poetry Prize which encouraged school age poets. Then, after he had moved from The University of Wollongong to the University of Melbourne, Ron, as if he didn’t have enough to do, started the Poetry Australia Foundation as a not-for-profit, community based organisation to promote the writing, reading, reviewing and promotion of poetry. I know about this and the struggle for funds and government support because at the same time I was the Chairperson of the Poets Union in NSW. In 2007 the Australia Council strongly encouraged us, arms were politely twisted, to amalgamate and thus was formed the Australian Poetry Centre based in the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne. It would never have happened without Ron’s energy, expertise and patience through interminable meetings.
I’m rapidly running out of time but Ron has not run out of achievements by a long shot. Possibly Ron’s biggest, most enduring, project has been Five Islands Press which he founded and ran between 1986 and 2007. In that time Five Islands Press published a staggering 230 books by Australian poets making it the biggest publisher of Australian poetry. It filled a yawning gap left when the big commercial publishers abandoned the genre. Ron had some help but it was largely a one man operation for much of the time. Ron would be sitting in that little cottage adjacent to the University of Wollongong reading and selecting from a torrent of manuscripts, answering emails and phone calls from poets, laying out the successful manuscripts, supervising the printing, arranging the launches and, once again, driving here and there. Once, parked in Glebe with car stacked with cardboard boxes full of poetry books ready for a launch at Gleebooks, Ron’s car was broken into. The police advised him to leave the boxes open in future so prospective thieves would see the car contained only poetry books and realise there was nothing of value to steal. Of course there was something of value. One can appreciate the sometimes thankless task Ron was undertaking and the sometimes philistine society in which he was undertaking it. But Ron was never elitist or defeatist: he though everyone could, and had a right to, enjoy poetry.
This wasn’t the only cost Ron bore. As well as the financial imposition, Ron’s own poetry suffered in the sense that he had no time left over to write. How amazing it is then that he has somehow published eight books of poetry. His first was The Habit of Balance in 1988, his most recent The Left Hand Mirror in 2017. I’m going to finish this tribute by reading one short poem but before I do that I’d like to mention the book Creating Poetry. Whenever I have taught a workshop to beginning poets I have always recommended that they get their hands on this book as it is full of practical ideas and exercises. Ron must have been, well I know he was, a wonderful teacher.
Ron has done everything for the love of poetry, not for reward or recognition. But I was one of many who were terrifically pleased when his poetry was rewarded by the grant of a poetry residency in Rome, and his long, continuous contribution to the teaching, publication and promotion of poetry was recognised by the NSW Premier’s Special Prize for services to literature in 2001 and by an Australia Medal for services to Australian literature in 2002. And because it would be remiss not to mention it, and because Ron would acknowledge it, I’d like to recognise that all this was made possible by the wonderful support of his wife Jane who has shared the achievements and the struggles.
You can read Ron Pretty’s obituary written by Brook Emery and published in the Sydney Morning Herald here