Kenneth Mackenzie
Kenneth Ivo Mackenzie was an Australian writer born on September 25, 1913, in Perth, Australia, to Scottish parents. His early life was marked by familial changes, including his mother's divorce, leading to his name change and a move to rural Pinjarra. He attended Guildford Grammar School but left by age fourteen, later pursuing studies at Muresk Agricultural College to manage the family farm. However, he shifted his focus to writing, producing his first novel, "The Young Desire It," at seventeen. Mackenzie moved to Melbourne and then Sydney, where he married sculptress Kathleen Bartlett. He gained recognition in the literary community, publishing poetry and novels that often explored complex human relationships and emotional isolation.
Throughout his life, Mackenzie faced challenges, including struggles with alcohol and financial instability, yet he continued to produce notable works. His experiences during World War II influenced his writing, particularly his novel "Dead Men Rising," which dealt with the Cowra prisoner of war camp incident. Mackenzie passed away in 1955, leaving behind a legacy that includes a posthumous volume of poems reflecting the depth of his literary contributions. His work remains significant in Australian literature, characterized by rich language and poignant themes.
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Kenneth Mackenzie
Author
- Born: September 25, 1913
- Birthplace: Perth Australia
- Died: January 1, 1955
- Place of death: Goulburn, New South Wales, Australia
Biography
Kenneth Mackenzie was born Kenneth Ivo Brownley Langwell Mackenzie on September 25, 1913, to parents of Scottish ancestry living in Perth, Australia. Several years later, when his mother, Marguerite Christine Pryde “Daisy” Paterson, divorced his father, Hugh Mackenzie, she had her son’s name officially changed to Kenneth Ivo Mackenzie. Mackenzie’s mother took him and his sister to live with her father in rural Pinjarra, Australia, until 1927, when she sent him to Guildford Grammar School, a boys’ boarding school in Perth.
By age fourteen. Mackenzie had left the school but its negative impression lingered. He next attended Muresk Agricultural College, intending to manage the family farm; instead, at seventeen years old, he wrote his first novel, The Young Desire It. A few years later he began work on his second novel, Chosen People. He left Muresk and attempted to study law at the University of Western Australia, but abandoned these studies. He scraped by on funds from his mother and sister and, in 1933, at age twenty, he relocated to Melbourne and finally, Sydney.
When he was twenty-one, he married Kathleen Bartlett, a widowed sculptress and ceramics teacher, who joined him in Sydney. Poet Kenneth Slessor helped Mackenzie get work as a proofreader for Angus and Robertson publishers. Mackenzie also wrote movie reviews for Smith’s Weekly as well as the Sydney Morning Herald and ABC Weekly. He became friends with poet Hugh McCrae and artist Norman Lindsay. In 1936, his daughter, Elizabeth, was born. In 1937, Mackenzie’s first book, Our Earth, a collection of poems illustrated by Lindsay, was published. That year he also published a rewritten version of The Young Desire It under the pseudonym Seaforth Mackenzie. His son Hugh was born in 1938, the year Mackenzie published a reworked version of Chosen People under his pseudonym.
In 1938, he won the gold medal from the Australian Literature Society for The Young Desire It. The novel draws on Mackenzie’s remembrance of boarding school. Like all of Mackenzie’s novels, it explores complex relationship triangles. The power of the book is in the poetic use of language as well as the descriptions of characters isolated by their desires and the natural environment that seems to mirror their emotions.
In 1942, Mackenzie was drafted and served in the army as an orderly room corporal guarding Italian prisoners of war in the camp at Cowra. The 1944 attempted escape of Japanese prisoners from the camp is the focus of his novel Dead Men Rising written in 1948, but unpublished in Britain and the United States until 1951, and uncirculated in Australia until some years later. In 1944 he published The Moonlit Doorway, a collection of poems dedicated to his lover, Jane Lindsay, who ended their relationship soon after.
Commonwealth Literary Fund grants supported Mackenzie in 1948, 1951, and 1955, but his excessive drinking, begun in the 1930’s, worsened. He and his family tried to live in makeshift shelter in the bush in Kurrajong, New South Wales, where, in 1952, he completed his novel The Refuge: A Confession, published in 1954. The family returned to Sydney a year later without him. Mackenzie drowned in 1955. A volume of poems, the majority of them written in his last ten years, appeared posthumously.