On this day both John Shaw Neilson and Norman Lindsay were born. (However, if you check around the Web enough some sites list Lindsay's birthday as the 23rd. I'm taking my cue from AustLit.)
Lindsay, the better known of the two, was born in Creswick, Victoria (near Ballarat) in 1879. At the age of sixteen he left Creswick for Melbourne where he joined his brother Lionel working as a journalist and artist. He soon became known for his "sexually explicit" (ie nude female) drawings and paintings. You can get an idea of his style by visiting Art Galleries Schubert website. In 1911 Lindsay moved to the Blue Mountains outside Sydney with his second wife Rose. He remained there until his death in 1969. Amongst his writings he is best known for the eternal children's classic The Magic Pudding - which Philip Pullman considers his favourite children's book. In other news, John Baxter (whose latest book was reviewed in "The Daily Telegraph" on the weekend and listed here yesterday, is working on a biography of Lindsay. No known publication date at this time.
John Shaw Neilson was born in Penola, in South Australia's south-east, in the middle of what is now the Coonawarra wine district, in 1872. The son of John Neilson, a bush poet of some note in the 1880s, Neilson published his first poetry in The Bulletin in 1896, and continued to work until his death in 1942. You can read some of his poetry here.
