22 February 1872   John Shaw Neilson

Poet and balladeer John Shaw Neilson was born in Penola on 22 February 1872. He attended the school there for about 18 months when he was eight years old. In 1881 the family moved to the Wimmera district of Victoria, but there was no school there until four years later at which time Neilson again attended school for a further 15 months. In between these times he had access to the Bible and a book of Robert Burns poems, his father being of Scottish ancestry. The family moved again, to Nhill, in 1889 where John began to write verses, some of which appeared in the local press and one in the Australasian in Melbourne. In January 1893 he won the junior prize for poetry at the Australian Natives Association competition, while his father won the senior prize.

Neilson was not blessed with good health and he wrote very little for a few years, but from 1901-06 the Bulletin accepted some of his verses. Then in 1906 his sight began to fail and he could not read much. Some of his best poetry was published in Heart of Spring in 1919 and another volume, Ballad and Lyrical Poems, followed in 1923. Later publications were New Poems in 1927, Collected Poems 1934, and a small volume entitled Beauty Imposes in 1938. Not a robust man the physical work he had to do for a living took its toll, but in 1928 a position was found for him in the office of the Victorian Country Roads Board and he remained there until his retirement in 1941. He died on 12 May 1942.

Geoffrey Serle (ed), Dictionary of Australian Biography, Volume 11,
pp. 184-185.