Milton Taylor

In Longreach Queensland in 1943 Milton Taylor was born, and born into bush poetry. His father Godfrey was a reciter of verse and also wrote poetry, usually dealing with events connected with his family. As a dedicated reader of Shakespeare, Godfrey's love of language was passed on to his son. Milton never had the same passion for the bard as his father, but learned to love the words of Paterson and Lawson very early in his school years and read the verses of the Sentimental Bloke avidly. This is a pretty good foundation for a bush poet.

In those pre television times, when radio was the only alternative to live entertainment, spoken word was common and popular, and exponents of poetry and yarn spinning, many of whom were employed in the shearing sheds where he first went to work, were well respected for their ability to entertain and communicate. Although quite a number of them were illiterate, these fellows were a great example of how the mind can be trained to memorise and they have always been Taylor's benchmarks.

As a shearer who worked in all eastern states and New Zealand, he has been blessed to have been in a workplace where not only opportunity to perform prevailed, but a constant source of story telling material was on hand for subject material for poems. He left western Qld when he married Loveen in 1967 and took up residence in Portland in the western part of the Blue Mountains of NSW.

When their kids arrived a few years later, poetry went on to the back burner as his time was occupied in family directions. He worked in various other jobs as his kids grew, and the cement, coal mining and construction industries provided him with inspiration for poems as he participated in them. Despite enjoying these workplaces he always described himself simply as "a shearer doin' somethin' else." He returned to his old trade in 1987 and started a migration pattern of Longreach for the winters and the mountains for the spring & summer, a regime he still follows.

It was during the early 90's that he worked as a performer at Banjo's Theatre in Longreach where he hosted a show in which he told the story of the wool industry in verse, song and story and demonstrated the traditional shearing shed skills of manual woolpressing, shearing and woolclassing. He discovered bush poetry festivals in 1994 and has enlarged his extended family ever since. He still attends as many venues where poets gather as possible and is inspired by his peers to write more poetry. Since his introduction to the competition scene has won various titles for performance and has achieved success in written competition as well as awards for recorded verse. He has produced eight albums of poetry and a book, with a further volume of his written work in the pipeline. In the years since he took his poetry seriously he has progressed (or degenerated) from "a shearer who does a bit of poetry" to "a poet who shears a few sheep." He also conducts a schools' program and derives immense pleasure from working with kids. And he reckons that's about as good as it gets. And it is.

Milton Taylor's poem Down Memory Lane

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