The foremost poet of Australia, Alec Derwent Hope, was born in Cooma, New South Wales in 1907. He was the oldest of five children of a Presbyterian minister and a former teacher, and was educated at home in most subjects by his mother and in Latin by his father. In 1911, the family moved to Campbell Town, on the east side of Tasmania. Hope was lucky enough to have access to his parents ample library of classical, English, and religious literature, which ironically, did not contain a single volume of Australian fiction or poetry, work considered at that time undeveloped by "cultured" people. Hope remembers his first verses being written when he was eight, "a pious rhyme in fifty-two stanzas - one for each week in the year - composed for my mother's birthday and designed to encourage her in her Christian duty." Hope recalls that his mother...