Mr Frederick John Blight AM

Poet / Accountant

Frederick John (Jack) Blight (Class of 1931) was a poet and accountant.  Born in Adelaide in 1913, the family moved to Brisbane when Jack was a baby.  He first attended Taringa State School, then Brisbane State High School from 1928 to 1931, where he began writing Wordsworthian verse. He loved the countryside and "tried to paint the Australian bush in words, in comparison to the setting of the English landscape" (Blight 1978).

Following high school, the family shifted to a rural property west of Brisbane. However, Jack did not enjoy the isolation and so, having studied accountancy, he obtained a job as a tax accountant in Bundaberg.

Early in World War II, Blight served at Enoggera with the Citizen Military Forces before being released in 1942 for employment as an investigation officer on the staff of the Commonwealth prices commissioner. On 18 April that year, he married Beverley Madeline D'Arcy-Irvine, a clerk-typist,   at St Stephen's Anglican Church, Coorparoo. They set up house at Bardon. His official duties took him to Cairns and, briefly, to Canberra, after which he returned to Brisbane. He was one of four commissioners whom the Queensland government appointed to inquire into the price and quality of timber produced and sold in the state (1949–50).

For six years from 1950 he was the cost accountant with Wilson Hart & Co. Pty Ltd, a timber business at Maryborough. Afterwards, he part-owned sawmills in the district and led a busy working life while also writing poetry and playing golf. 

Fascinated by the natural environment, Blight particularly loved the sea and enjoyed surfing, cruising local waters and holidaying at the beach. He became known as a poet of the sea.  He chose the sonnet form as the best means of conveying, in compressed thought, one clearly identified subject.  Blight wrote four volumes of sea sonnets: The Two Suns Met (1954), A Beachcomber's Diary (1963), My Beachcombing Days (1968) and Holiday Sea Sonnets (1985). Between these years, Blight wrote poems about social and political topics that were published in several books. The recipient of a Myer award (1964), the Dame Mary Gilmore medal (1965), the Patrick White prize (1976), the Grace Leven poetry prize (1976) and the Christopher Brennan award (1980), he was appointed AM in 1987 for his services to literature and education.

He retired in 1973, after which the Literature Board of the Australian Council for the Arts (Australia Council) supported his writing through its guaranteed-income scheme and an emeritus fellowship (from 1984). He deposited his papers, including more than eight hundred letters and the manuscripts of over four thousand poems in the Fryer Library, University of Queensland. Although he hoped to die at sea, he passed away at the St Andrew's War Memorial Hospital, Brisbane, on 12 May 1995. An obituarist described him as "one of Australia's most distinguished poets".