Ian Mudie

Ian Mayelston Mudie (1 March 1911 – 23 October 1976) was an Australian poet and author.

Early life and education Mudie was born in 1911 in Hawthorn, South Australia, son of Henry Mayelston Mudie, an accountant, and his second wife Gertrude Mary. Mudie attended Scotch College, Adelaide from 1920 to 1926, but did not graduate. After school he attempted to make a living from freelance writing but also pursued work as a "wool-scourer, furniture-dealer, grape-picker, and as a salesman of insurance and real estate". Historian David Bird has written that "Ian Mudie proved the most strident champion of the cultural line taken by Australia First and the Jindies, although he was not a member of either group at the outbreak of the war." In this period, P. R. Stephensen described Mudie's work as containing a "deep urge towards the elemental spirit of our own land, its courageous, fundamental Australianism".

He was a friend of Miles Franklin and Colin Thiele,

Works

Verse

Corroboree to the Sun (1940) This Is Australia (1941) The Australian Dream (1943) Their Seven Stars Unseen (1943) Poems 1934—1944 (1945) The Blue Crane (1959) The North-Bound Rider (1963) Look, the Kingfisher (1970) Selected Poems 1934—1974 (1976)

Editor Poets at War: An anthology of Verse by Australian Servicemen (1944) The Jindyworobak Anthology (1946)

Non-fiction Riverboats (1961) Wreck of the Admella (1966) The Heroic Journey of John McDouall Stuart (1968) Australia Today (1970)

Fiction ’’The Christmas Kangaroo’’ (1946)

Family Ian was the grandson of well-known Anglican minister William Henry Mudie. His father, Henry Mayelston Mudie, was influential in the growth of the Savings Bank of South Australia. He married Renee Dunford Doble on 30 October 1934.

He died in London and his ashes were scattered on the Murray River.