Biography

Ray Stuart

Ray Stuart was born in Sydney in 1939 and died on September 20, 2005. In the latter years of his life he lived with his wife and children at Kersbrook in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia, where he accommodated his writing between helping to manage an equestrian centre with his daughters and operating his own horticultural consultancy.

A graduate of the Royal Military College, Duntroon, Ray served as an infantry officer between 1960 and 1981, attaining the rank of Lieutenant Colonel before retiring to take up a management position with CSR Limited. Since 1989, he worked as a consultant, specialising in garden design.

During his Army career, Ray had tours of duty in the Philippines, South Vietnam, and in Papua New Guinea between 1961 and 1964, and finally between 1971 and 1973.

Ray commenced writing poetry in earnest in 1990, with initial encouragement from Nancy Keesing and Martin Langford. Earlier, as a teenager, he stood in awe of Kenneth Slessor, a frequent visitor to his parents at Ingleburn in NSW, often in the company of the Gallipoli veteran poet Harley Matthews, and the war correspondent Ronald Monson.

Ray’s poetry was widely published in literary magazines and newspapers, and in Adelaide’s Friendly Street collections since 1994. He won Friendly Street’s Satura Prize in 1994, and was Second Prize Winner in the 2004 Hobart-based Write-Stuff National Poetry Competition. His first collection To Fly Again was published by Ginninderra Press in 2001, and has been well reviewed. He was a full member of the Australian Society of Authors since 1979.