Nostalgic Adelaide, by Geoff Goodfellow, Em Dash Publishing 2026, was launched by Mike Rann at the North Adelaide Community Centre on 10 May 2026. The launch was sponsored by the Labour History Society SA.
I was unusually nervous about this book launch and more so since I received the following note from the organiser: “Tomorrow’s launch is a rather high brow event with an educated audience exceeding in literary discernment those who attend ‘Writers’ Week’. We request that you speak for only 40 minutes, but no more than 45, thereby allowing time for Mr Goodfellow to read from his poems. We also ask that you refrain from making jokes against Geoff or telling salacious stories about him. Above all please emphasise Mr Goodfellow’s literary renown and his multiple awards rather than refer to him as an “ageing chick magnet” which could be seen as distasteful. Remember too that this is meant to be a dignified event in South Australia’s arts calendar not an amateur production of “Carry On Poet”. He is not Sid James and you are not Kenneth Williams. Instead, concentrate on Mr Goodfellow’s poetry and trace its historical influences through comparable genre here and overseas. This audience doesn’t need you to explain why Geoff’s poems seldom rhyme. Rather than writing limericks Geoff’s free verse poetry navigates deep epistemological currents. So he isn’t bound by conventions such as iambic pentameter or a Dylan Thomas style villanelle which as you and the audience would know utilises five tercets followed by a quatrain”.
I will do my best. But first, why am I here doing this? Well, Geoff is a mate. He’s also a talented poet, teacher, performer, loving father, loyal friend, pugilist and good bloke whose character and essential decency is accurately defined by his surname.
For four decades Geoff has taken his poetry and performed it in schools, prisons, youth detention centres, universities, pubs, factories, construction sites, police academies and board rooms as well as at literary festivals around Australia and overseas. His poems have been translated into Mandarin, where they apparently rhyme, Greek, where they don’t, Italian and Spanish.
Geoff is also a member of a group that meets once a week at the Central Market. These meetings are conducted in the manner of Socratic Dialogues which, given the amicus curiae nature of its membership, often discuss the deepest issues of jurisprudence and normative ethics as well as current affairs.
As for my qualifications for standing here. When I was living in Rome I was the direct legal guardian of the mortal remains of Keats and Shelley and before that, in the UK, I shared responsibility for the graves of Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke.
Geoff despite his strong Greek friendship circle doesn’t try to emulate Keats in writing Odes to Grecian Urns , or Shelley in writing odes to the West Wind, or like Brooke write lofty lines such as “there is some corner of a foreign field that is forever England”. No chance of that.
Instead Geoff’s poems focus on the everyday experience and challenges faced by working class people. People like him, dealing with real life and its small triumphs and sometimes much bigger tragedies. I was very moved by a previous collection of his poems “Waltzing with Jack Dancer: A Slow Dance with Cancer” but I will talk about that a little later.
But first, I will try to follow my instructions.
Where does Geoff fit in the poetry spectrum? What is his genre? Who are his inspirations?
I thought about that and settled on Alan Ginsberg, known for his raw, conversational and counter-cultural poetry exemplified by his anti capitalist poem ‘Howl’, an intense critique of American society and ‘Father Death Blues’, a poignant poem confronting mortality. Geoff’s ‘Poems for a Dead Father’ was similarly acclaimed here in Australia. But even though the two poets connected personally in the US my analogy doesn’t really work. I just can’t see Geoff follow Ginsberg to become a Hare Krishna. Ginsberg was the leading anti establishment figure of the Beat Generation and Geoff has always been more of a Bodgie than Beatnik, with stylish clothes and Teddy Boy winkle picker shoes, a fashion cross fertilisation of Col Joye and Johnny O’Keefe, with a touch of Peaky Blinders.
In Europe I could trace similarities to Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo who received the Nobel Prize for Literature. The marvellously named Quasimodo was an outspoken social critic and anti fascist who is often remembered for his famous poem ‘Life is not a Dream’. There are also Geoff connections to Hungary’s Jozsef Attila, the proletarian poet who wrote provocative and revolutionary poetry and was expelled by the Hungarian Communist Party because of his interest in Freud and advocacy for humane socialism.
But in my world wide search the closest to Geoff I could find was Sam Hunt, a Kiwi icon who writes in a colloquial and uncomplicated way about everyday life, family, landscapes and love and like Geoff often reads his poetry in pubs and schools. Sam performs his poetry, with a similar gravelly voice, giving his work energy and power.
Meanwhile the poets Geoff most admires are Charles Bukowski, who also focused on the blue collar experience and whose poetry readings were legendary sometimes with a drunken raucous audience fighting with a drunk, angry poet. We’ll see how we go this afternoon. Geoff also admires Pulitzer Prize winner Sharon Olds who has written in raw and unflinching language about domestic and political violence, sex, intimacy and family relationships; and he likes Raymond Carver, of the “dirty realist” school.
Geoff is most associated with Semaphore and Adelaide’s western suburbs, plus a love of the Port Adelaide Football Club, but as a child his family home was in Broadview, not far from the Islington Railway Workshops which, as he points out in one of these poems, is now a Bunnings.
Geoff’s Dad Johnnie was a Desert Rat and in peace time became a technical and scientific glass blower, nicknamed Captain Hornblower, and later in life became a salesman. Geoff’s Mum, Lois, of Scottish descent, was a seamstress and dressmaker. Both contributed to Geoff’s fashion sense. His Dad was a snappy dresser and his Mum taught him about quality fabrics and told all four kids that “poor people can’t afford to wear cheap shoes”.
Young Geoff was enrolled at the Holy Family primary school in Enfield and then moved to Hampstead Primary. His High School years were spent at Adelaide Boys Tech, from which he was expelled and then at Nailsworth Tech.
He and his siblings were introduced to poetry by his father who, when he was in his cups, which apparently was quite often, read poems…sometimes with an Irish accent…and often from a book called Around the Boree Log and other Verses published in 1921 and written by poet Patrick Joseph Hartigan, who was a priest in the Riverina but who wrote under the pseudonym John O’Brien. It was a collection of simple, accessible verses about life in the outback and Irish-Australian culture. This clearly influenced Geoff.
I mentioned that Geoff was a pugilist who fought as an amateur and once professionally. This may have assisted his early working life as a bouncer at the Finsbury Hotel. Boxing was a family tradition. His dad was South Australia’s featherweight champion in 1938 and his late brother Brian was featherweight champion of South Australia in 1973, then lightweight champion in 74, 75 and 76. Their other brother Mark was welterweight champion in 1971. Meanwhile his late sister Annette was a swimmer and champion in freestyle, breast stroke and backstroke in the 1960s.
Geoff has always been Labor and knew many of the party’s characters over the years and had a particular affection for Nick Bolkus and John Bannon. After Geoff won the inaugural Carclew Fellowship in 1988, John wrote a terrific letter of introduction that was helpful to Geoff in setting up his poetry tour of Canada, the US, Europe and China. Years later, in 1997, JB and Geoff joined with Keith Conlon at the State Library to give a poetry reading together to celebrate “Bloke Day”.
Geoff became a builders labourer working on construction sites, and later a self taught carpenter who set up his business focusing on outdoor living, building decks and pergolas. That all stopped and his business was closed when Geoff, aged 32, badly hurt his back. That was the turning point in his life when he pivoted towards poetry, a career not often associated with financial reward and a move derided by many. He became the CFMEU’s poet in residence and in addition to performing on building sites, became writer in residence at Yatala Labour Prison and read his poems in prisons in every state, including Pentridge, Long Bay and Fremantle jail.
In 1990 Geoff opened forums in Hobart and Launceston on combatting violence in Australian society. Three of his poems prefaced sections of the official report of the National Committee on Violence.
All of us have a vision of Adelaide’s past and those places and experiences which became signposts of our own life stories. Geoff’s poems, for many people here today, will revive memories of their childhood and teenage years. As Chris Sumner reminds us in his foreword..”Familiar local items from the 1950s, most now a distant memory, make an appearance: valve radios, Bush Biscuits, Balfours Frog Cakes, Simpson Pope appliances with wringers and levers, Actil sheets, Hills Hoists, Castelloy pressure cookers, Lightburn concrete mixers and the Green and Gold Cookbook”.
I came here in the late seventies but I found fascinating Geoff’s glimpse of our city, its sinews, back alleys, its community based footy culture and the pubs where a young Geoff sold hot meat pies as he explores the artefacts of his memory trawled over three quarters of a century. I’m sure you will too. Reading this wonderful collection also made me think that, with South Australia’s bicentenary of European settlement just ten years away, thank God we have people like Geoff telling our stories and leaders like Jane Lomax-Smith fighting to protect our city’s heritage.
Geoff’s book prompted my memories of my first experience 49 years ago of safari suits(which I’d only previously seen worn by David Attenborough) made of polyester or even crimplene, a new wonder fabric developed by ICI which made people sweat and smell. In Don Dunstan’s office all the blokes wore safari suits. Don’s was made of the finest cotton and was “ivory” coloured not white, and mine was almost the shade of blue I’m wearing here today.
In commending this book to you, there are a couple of other things I want to say about Geoff. Even though he has a disdain for literary pretension I believe he should be our State’s or city’s Poet Laureate given his role as both a chronicler of our times and as a bridge to young and marginalised people. Without Geoff’s influence and encouragement most would have had little or no opportunity for poetry to enrich their lives, let alone have seen lives like theirs featured as the focal point of Geoff’s poetry and advocacy over the decades. He truly is the People’s Poet.
Many people in their 70s and 80s endure lives interrupted by frequent medical appointments. Conversations with friends of the same age often become organ recitals.
Geoff has fought cancer, of so many different varieties, for 18 years. He has been saved by the medical profession and at times been treated very badly by some members of it.
But through all the tests, biopsies, MRIs, surgery and chemo Geoff keeps going. He keeps writing, teaching and travelling, with Tasmania a favourite destination. Geoff honours his commitments to friends and family, and the people from whose ranks he comes and whose side he’s on.
Geoff is not only defined by his surname but also by two other attributes: firstly, a raw, unflinching honesty which is at the core of his credentials. He doesn’t pander or backdown on his principles. He punctures pomposity and pretension. He means what he says.
And finally, for me Geoff exemplifies courage in the face of hardship, pain and peril. He doesn’t throw in the towel. He fights cancer and injustice with the same determined strength of will. Geoff is above all resilient and each time he is struck down, he gets up off the mat, just like the true, brave pugilistic poet he is.
– Mike Rann
Mike Rann is Chair of the South Australian Film Corporation and Chair of the UK Climate Group. Mike was Premier of South Australia and Minister for the Arts for nearly ten years and was leader of the SA Labor Party for more than 17 years. He was National President of the Australian Labor Party during the Prime Ministership of Kevin Rudd. Following his political career Mike served as Australian High Commissioner to the UK and then as Australian Ambassador to Italy and Albania. He has had several of his poems published in New Zealand poetry journals.
You can contact Geoff Goodfellow at https://www.geoffgoodfellow.com/
