John Manifold died in Brisbane on 19 April 1985. At his funeral a few days later the Eureka Flag covered his coffin, some of his own ballads were sung, and three fiddlers played. His death removes us from one of the great idiosyncratic talents of Australian letters. Colonial aristocrat, English middle-class intellectual, Australian nationalist and international socialist, his poetry at its best looms as large as any written in his time.

Scion of one of the first Western District families, John Streeter Manifold was born in Melbourne in 1915 and, after early education by governesses on the family properties of Purrumbete and Milangil, was sent to Geelong Grammar, where at the age of seventeen he wrote a translation of a lyric by Catallus which his Classics master, Chauncy Masterman, thought the finest he had seen. In 1934 he was sent for a year to the University of Tours, and subsequently studied at Cambridge. Here he joined the Communist Party, to which he remained affiliated until his death.