Cyril E. Goode

Cyril Harry Everard Goode (1907-1982), poet and short-story writer, was born in 1907 at Grenfell, New South Wales. Goode was a pioneering farmer in the outer wheatbelt area of Western Australia before travelling to Victoria in 1932. He returned to Western Australia as a freelance journalist and traveled around the goldfields. He worked as a miner in Wiluna and, during World War II, in a munition factory in Victoria.

Goode had been radicalised by the Depression: its imagery recurred in the thirteen books he published between 1932 and 1973. Repudiating organised Christianity, he turned to rationalism and found his political faith in communism. While his books were mostly self-published in small numbers, some works—notably the ballad `The Bridge Party at Boyanup’—won a wider audience; he also gained recognition for innovative and striking sonnets, and had poems translated into Russian and Italian.

An enthusiastic participant in Melbourne literary circles, Good frequented the soirées of J. K. Moir and meetings of the Adam Lindsay Gordon, Henry Lawson, Australian Literature, and Australian Poetry Lovers’ societies, the Bread and Cheese Club (president 1979), the Fellowship of Australian Writers, PEN, and the World Congress of Poets. He wrote and demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and, with wife Jessie, travelled abroad during the 1960s and after retirement.