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How does a working class kid from Sydney's western suburbs become one of our nation's most respected poets and one of our University's most highly regarded staff-members?

To find out, you only have to spend a morning in the company of Winthrop Professor Dennis Haskell , currently the Chair of the Australia Council Literature Board. Professor Haskell is due to retire from UWA soon, his career of more than a quarter of a century celebrated recently with a symposium organised by the Westerly Centre.

A critic, editor, scholar and author of 17 books, 26 book chapters and 36 journal articles, many of which focus on Singapore-Malaysian and Indian literature and culture, Professor Haskell was good at numbers at school: "algebra, not geometry".

"I never put my hand up to go to Uni when I was at school," he said.

Although he breezed into the accounting stream for his last two years of school, bits of the poetry he'd read in English lessons stuck with him "because of their rhythms": Pope's "The Rape of the Lock'; TS Eliot's "Ash Wednesday"; and Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale". With friends, he published a satirical class newspaper - and it was his skill as a cartoonist, as well as a writer, that was on show.

While he grew up in a house without books, he recalls his mother taking him to the Auburn Library occasionally. Also, he was part of the generation which benefitted from the words of the "articulate song-writers" - the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel - ringing in their ears.

After winning a Commonwealth Scholarship he completed a degree in commerce at the University of New South Wales, all the time becoming more interested in English.

At 21 he landed a job as the accountant for two building companies, despite his long hair, skinny ties and Beatles collection. Although he was offered shares in the companies, he decided there was "nothing creative" in this work, enrolled in the Workers' Education Association of NSW courses in writing, and started drafting "awful" short-stories, "pretty good" plays and, finally, poetry.

Two months before embarking on a holiday abroad, he met his wife, Rhonda, on a National Trust excursion into Ned Kelly country. On the bus on the overnight drive south, he realised he wasn't the only passenger still awake. Rhonda was the other - but, he laughs, she has never managed to stay up all night in their ensuing 40-odd years together.

They started dating and at about the same time, aged 22, he began getting positive comments about his poetry from prospective publishers. A period of separation followed, during which he read poetry and lived in Franco's Spain before spending four months hitch-hiking around the United States and Canada, rubbing shoulders with "draft-dodgers, Vietnam vets and red-necks".

In London he met up with Rhonda again, they travelled Europe for several months and married in the Borough of Kensington/Chelsea registry office. One of the witnesses was the first person who gave Dennis a lift in the US. Husband and wife were both 24.

With Rhonda seven months pregnant and expecting a December baby in a London winter, they decided to return to Sydney "the cheapest way". Because of his hair, Dennis was detained at Singapore airport for three nights before their ship sailed for Fremantle. He vowed to never return to the island republic- yet has been there about 30 times since, as a distinguished visiting scholar. The couple spent 24 hours in Perth waiting for their flight to Sydney, little realising it would become their home.

Baby Kieren was born in 1972 (Cameron followed in 1976) and Dennis taught accountancy at the University of New South Wales while studying for an Arts degree at Sydney University. At the former university, he was offered a tenured lectureship in commerce, but knocked it back for a scholarship in English at the latter, where he completed a PhD in the poetic theory and practice of WB Yeats while tutoring in English for four years.

During this period of looking for a permanent position, he experienced an "epiphany". He was in the university's Fisher library reaching for a handful of books on John Donne when he realised that he was actually being paid to read - and decided that the life of academia was definitely for him.

By this time, Rhonda had started her own successful podiatry practice - and it was on one memorable day of split parenting (Dennis and the boys wrapping Christmas presents while watching the midday movie, based on Graham Greene's Heart of the Matter ) that he received a phone call from then Head of UWA's English Department, Professor Bruce Bennett, offering him a job at UWA. Soon afterwards, Dennis met Professor John Hay (also from UWA) who was on holiday in Sydney.

"John was very frank," Dennis said. "He didn't say what a great place it was, but he did talk about change and I was impressed. So Rhonda and I decided to take the three year contract.

"It was 1984. I flew over first, on a Saturday, and walked from the motel where I was being put up (now the Mount Hospital) along the river to the Uni in a gale force wind. The term started on the Monday. It seemed like such an adventure."

The adventure is far from over. Dennis intends to indulge his adolescent aptitude in fine art and revisit his 1970 travel diary which may or may not yield more pay-dirt for poetry or painting.

He has no regrets that he, Rhonda and their sons made their lives here, " under WA's blitz of blue skies, skies like a perpetual shrugging of the shoulders".

*(Lines of poetry from Dennis Haskell's Acts of Defiance: New and Selected Poems, 2010 .)