Kenneth Mackenzie is the least known but the first of the "precocious" literary talents to come out of Western Australia. Like Randolph Stow and Tim Winton, he wrote a major work at a remarkably young age: the first draft of his best-known novel The Young Desire It: A Novel (1937) was written when he was seventeen years old. In his comparatively short life--he frequently compared himself to John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley--he wrote hundreds of poems, four completed novels, radio playscripts, and many short stories.

At the insistence of his father, Mackenzie, born on 25 September 1913, was christened Kenneth Ivo Brownley Langwell Mackenzie. He was the son of parents whose families originated from Scotland: Marguerite Christine Pryde (Daisy) Paterson and Hugh Mackenzie. When Daisy later divorced Hugh, she went to the trouble to have her son's name officially changed to Kenneth Ivo Mackenzie. Much of Mackenzie's personal correspondence is...