Lex Banning

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Arthur Alexander (Lex) Banning (1921 - 1965) was an Australian lyric poet. Disabled from birth by cerebral palsy, he was unable to speak clearly or to write with a pen. "Yet he overcame his handicap to produce poems which were often hauntingly beautiful and frequently ironic, and gave to other, younger poets a strong sense of the importance and value of their calling". [1] Such younger poets included Clive James, Les Murray and Geoffrey Lehmann.

Banning worked at the Sydney Observatory and learned to type before being admitted to the Faculty of Arts at Sydney University as an unmatriculated student in 1944. He graduated in 1948 with honours in English and history. He wrote for and edited university publications. Later, he worked as a librarian at the Spastic Centre while also writing for print, radio, film and television. He was a regular associate of Sydney Push and media personalities including close friend and biographer Richard Appleton[1], Robert Hughes, Piers Burke, John Croyston, Mike and Marjorie Hourihan and Brian Jenkins. Accomplished jazz musician Ray Price and his distinguished wife Nadine Amadio were also close friends.

In 1962[2], he travelled to London and married Australian paediatrician Anne Ferry. Through senior medical contacts who admired his poetry, Banning was invited to visit the Aegean Islands aboard a luxury yacht and develop his interest in paleontology and his love of the work of Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy. However, the marriage foundered and Banning returned to Sydney in 1964, to live alone in a small flat at Darlinghurst. He became depressed and unwell before his sudden death less than a year later[1].


[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c Page 337, Baldwin S (ed) Unsung Heroes and Heroines of Australia Greenhouse, Vic 1988 (for the Australian Bicentennial Authority)
  2. ^ Australian Dictionary of Biography Online Edition [1]

[edit] Bibliography

  • Everyman his own Hamlet (1951)
  • The Instant's Clarity (1952)
  • Apocalypse in Springtime (1956)
  • There was a Crooked Man : the Poems of Lex Banning (1984)
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