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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 have only 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 .

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 overseas, he met his wife, Rhonda, on a National Trust excursion into Ned Kelly country.

In London he met up with Rhonda again, they travelled Europe for several months and married in the Borough of Kensington/ Chelsea registry office.

With the couple 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.

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. He knocked back a tenured lectureship in commerce at UNSW, in favour of a scholarship in English at Sydney, 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.

Just before Christmas in 1983, he was offered - and accepted - a job at UWA.

"It was February 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."

During his ‘Perth adventure', Dennis overlaid his literary skills with impeccable logistical abilities and, for many years, was UWA's go-to man for big projects including setting up the Albany Centre.

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.)

Published in UWA News , 7 March 2011