David Campbell was a lyric poet of Australian rural life, and of love and war. Like others of his generation, particularly Judith Wright and Francis Webb, he contributed in distinctive ways to developments in Australian poetry. Born in the year of the Battle of Gallipoli, Turkey, Campbell was descended on both his mother's side and his father's side from long-established grazing families in New South Wales. Critics of Campbell's work have frequently noted the "squatter pastoral" strand in his poetry and its obvious relation to his family's history as pioneer settlers, his childhood on isolated sheep stations, as well as his own farming experience as an adult in the Monaro district of southern New South Wales. In the words of Manning Clark from the eulogy he delivered at Campbell's funeral, Campbell belonged by birth to the "Old Australia."

When he first published poems such as "Harry Pearce" and...