A lyrical life
Remembering
David Malouf AO 1934–2026
A lyrical life
Remembering
David Malouf AO
1934–2026
We are mortals, not gods. We die. Death is our nature. Without that fee paid in advance, the world does not come to us. That is the hard bargain life makes with us – with all of us, everyone – and the condition we share. And for that reason, if no other, we should have pity for one another's losses. For the sorrows that must come sooner or later to each one of us, in a world we enter only on mortal terms.
– David Malouf, Ransom (2009)
Reflections from Simon Farley, Fryer Librarian,
The Fryer Memorial Library of Australian Literature
When I received the sad news that internationally renowned author David Malouf AO (Bachelor of Arts 1955, Honorary Doctor of Letters 1991) had died at the age of 92, I was attending a presentation by our 2025–26 Fryer Library Fellow, Professor Rosita Henry, who was speaking on the topic of the role of patrol officers in Papua New Guinea in the lead-up to independence in 1975. That was the same year David’s iconic Brisbane novel Johnno was published by The University of Queensland Press (UQP), edited by Craig Munro, UQP Fiction Editor from 1972 to 1980 and Publishing Manager until 2000. It was Craig who called me to convey David’s passing.
When UQ presented David with a Doctor of Letters in 1991, the official statement addressed to the Chancellor read:
Queensland, and Brisbane in particular, have never been celebrated more lyrically than by one of this University's graduates, David Malouf… For his imaginative writing in a variety of genres, especially poetry and fiction, his contributions to the understanding of Australian culture and his never-failing willingness to help the cause of education, I present to you David George Joseph Malouf, Officer of the Order of Australia, Bachelor of Arts of The University of Queensland, Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, for the conferral of the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, to which he has been admitted by the Senate of the University.
In 1992 David was named the inaugural UQ Alumnus of the Year, an award created by the Alumni Friends society. Money raised through its annual Alumni Book Fair funds student scholarships. The society celebrates its 60th anniversary in 2027 – the same year the Fryer Memorial Library of Australian Literature will celebrate our centenary.
Throughout its existence, Alumni Friends has been essential in helping us with collection building. One of our most prized manuscript collections, the papers of David Malouf, began with a gift from Alumni Friends, previously known as the UQ Alumni Association. In 1984 it funded the acquisition of the manuscripts of two early novellas by David Malouf, Child’s Play (1981) and Fly away Peter (1982). Both these novellas won literary awards.
David, in a letter published in Alumni News in August 1984, wrote, "I want especially to say how very pleased I am that two manuscripts of mine now find a place in the Fryer Library and to thank the alumni … for making this possible. I have the warmest memories and a great affection for the Fryer."
In 2023 Alumni Friends established an endowment in David’s honour, the Dr David Malouf AO Scholarship to support coursework students experiencing financial hardship.
The Fryer Library’s Malouf papers now include drafts for his novels, short story collections, essays, opera libretti and books of poetry along with a vast tranche of correspondence from admirers and fellow writers and artists including Patrick White, Jeffrey Smart and David’s close friend the poet Judith Rodriguez. First editions of all of David’s works are held, along with foreign language translations. The Fryer’s founder Dr Frederick Robinson, or ‘Doc Robbie’ as he was known, was David’s favourite teacher when he studied at UQ in the 1950s.
I first encountered David’s work when studying Australian literature here at UQ in the 1990s, around the time his Miles Franklin Award winning novel The Great World (1990) was published. We read his sublime novella An Imaginary Life (1978) that tells the story of the Roman poet Ovid, during his exile in Tomis. The beautiful prose captivated me, and I went on to read all his works. Years later, David kindly signed my battered copy of the book, which had travelled with me to different parts of the world.
On a crisp winter afternoon in June 2024, I drove with my son Sam to Mt Tamborine to see David reading from An Imaginary Life accompanied by a haunting musical composition inspired by the work created and performed by Craig Munro’s son Simon Munro of Nausicaӓ. The event, held in a delightful garden setting, was organised by Calanthe Poetry. Later that year our Fryer Lecture in Australian Literature was delivered by David’s friend, the novelist and academic Emeritus Professor Nicholas Jose on 10 October at Brisbane’s Customs House. It was a memorable occasion celebrating David’s 90th year.
A version of the lecture was later published in the Sydney Review of Books (SRB) as David Malouf’s Surprises. The SRB piece includes links to recordings of David reading his poems made when my colleague Tanya Ziebell and I visited him at his apartment at Surfers Paradise overlooking the Pacific Ocean in November 2024. It was a joy to spend time with David and enjoy lunch with him and a convivial and wide-ranging conversation. His warmth and wisdom will always stay with us. In 2014 Tanya had organised a dinner at Customs House that marked David’s 80th birthday.
When he lived in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s David met the Italian writer Italo Calvino. I fondly recall a conversation David and I had about Calvino's essays on literature published as Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988).
Calvino’s novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979) includes a character named Mr Cavedagna. When Cavedagna was a young boy, he would hide books in the chicken coop behind his parents’ farmhouse and sneak there to read. As an adult, after many years working as an editor, the mystery of authorship had been somewhat dissolved. One passage reads:
For many years Cavedagna has followed books as they are made, bit by bit, he sees books be born and die every day, and yet the true books for him remain others, those of the time when for him they were like messages from other worlds. And so it is with authors: he deals with them every day, he knows their fixations, indecisions, susceptibilities, ego-centricities, and yet the true authors remain those who for him were only a name on a jacket, a word that was part of the title, authors who had the same reality as their characters, as the places mentioned in the books, who existed and didn’t exist at the same time, like those characters and those countries. The author was an invisible point from which the books came, a void travelled by ghosts, an underground tunnel that put other worlds in communication with the chicken coop of his boyhood.
David Malouf’s words first came to me as messages from that liminal space, the private realm of the imagination where writers connect with readers. Whether reading his novels, short stories, poems or essays, or listening to his voice on the radio during his Boyer lectures in 1998, when I had returned from living for a year in Japan, he made me feel connected to 'the great world' beyond my door.
Getting to know him as a wise, compassionate and kind-hearted human being was a privilege for which I will always be grateful. David’s papers in the Fryer Library, traces of his literary labours, are treasures forevermore.
His legacy will be long lasting.
The Fryer Memorial Library of Australian Literature was established in 1927 following a gift of £10 received the previous year from the University Dramatic Society in memory of student and WWI veteran John Denis Fryer. In 2013, Philanthropy Australia included the Fryer Library in its list of the top 50 philanthropic gifts to the nation. Gifts to the Fryer Library support our research scholarships and collecting initiatives.
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