David Campbell remembered John in 1935 as an established university poet and wit, strolling the streets in a large black artist’s hat, drinking tea with “terrifying Girton and Newnham girls” (one of whom, Katharine Hopwood, he married), writing and publishing verse and relating back to his origins through the re-working of Australian ballads. No doubt his friendship with David Campbell helped with this, as his admiration of the cut and vigor and post-colonial stance of Roy Campbell’s poetry also stimulated and directed him. He shared Roy Campbell’s detestation of the Audens and Spenders, immersing himself rather in the French Symbolists and the German Romantics. John also became interested in early music, and took up the recorder.

Narrowly escaping from Germany at the outbreak of war, Manifold joined the British army and was posted to Nigeria – I remember his emphasising to me “the virtues of a detached command”. Very John, that – and one of the reasons he settled in an outer Brisbane suburb, rather than among intellectuals in Sydney or Melbourne, when he and Kate returned to Australia in 1949. Later in the war he joined Intelligence and was in action in France, where one night he wrote, without revision, his most famous poem, and the piece that wrote him into Australian literature, ‘The Tomb of Lieutenant John Learmonth, A.I.F.’.

The Manifolds stayed in England for some years after the war: Nita and I sought out and met this merry couple, full of talk about the Workers’ Music Association, in which John took a leading role, in 1948. John’s first major collection, Selected Verse, appeared in the United States in 1946 and in Britain in 1948.

The Manifolds’ house at Wynnum, near Brisbane, became for twenty years and more, from 1949, a centre of radical, musical and literary life. The doors were always open, once you mounted the steps – the house, of course was on stilts – home-made musical instruments decorated the walls, and kittens played among the music manuscripts. It was a salon in a way, and John never hid his learning, but the semi-literate came, and the musical tyros, and the rough-round the-edges Party members and others; and, however overwhelmed they may have been at first meeting, they came back again and again and eventually learnt much, not so much by being told as by being made to take part. The whole thing was really rather extraordinary, all the more so since, to their credit, neither John nor the marvellous Kate ever played down to their audiences, ever pretended to be what they were not.

John’s scholarly (but largely ignored) The Music in English Drama appeared in 1956, his first collection since 1946, Nightmares and Sunhorses (published by Overland) in 1961, his Who Wrote the Ballads? and The Penguin Australian Song Book in 1964. His most recent collection verse, On My Selection, was published in 1983. Rodney Hall’s biography appeared in 1978.

Manifold was certainly a force in the folk-song revival, and did much field work, but it is doubtful if specialists would accord him the title of ‘folklorist’. He was perhaps less a collector than a creative adaptor, seizing material at hand and moulding it to his will, as was of course consonant with his major role as a poet. As a poet, his ultimate survival will rest with ‘Learmonth’, with some beautiful lyrics, often about his wife (who died in 1969), and on a handful of inspired light poems, where he allowed his whimsy, his extraordinary flair for language and words, and his anarchist rather than communist convictions to move into play.

Manifold’s poetry is Augustan and aloof, radical and earthy, committed and detached. He was, perhaps, not as sure of himself as he thought fit to appear. The fine lines from an early sonnet –

Nothing of Europe holds a hope for me.
Nor is the mistral worth the wind that blends
Bluegum and cordite with the southern sea.

– he never allowed to be reprinted, perhaps because he was sensitive about the chauvinism that some might see in them. He was uneasy when I included ‘Lawson’s Birthday’ in Nightmares and Sunhorses – I liked it as a jeu d’esprit with some memorable lines and images, but perhaps John saw it as doggerel. Yet in many ways an important part of his contribution was his unaffected love of country, and was his refusal to be a ‘serious’ poet. By so refusing, he became one.

Politically, and although he came to have doubts about Stalinism, John did not follow other intellectuals out of the Communist Party in the 1950s and 1960s. He held to atavistic bush loyalties, he understood that freedom was necessity, he felt omelettes more important than eggs. Intensely human, he was inhuman in this, but he was able to succeed in this stance because he had, perhaps in some subliminal sense deliberately, placed himself both ideologically and geographically in isolation. For all his love of the best in German culture, I don’ think he liked Middle European intellectuals or Middle European intellectuality, the casting-about, probing, dissenting, examining kind of mind. It is quite easy to imagine him, indeed, transposed slightly in time and space, as one of that long line of Englishmen who plumped, not for the Jewish virtues but for those of the desert Arab: pride in lineage, the honor of the sword, austere integrity, scorn of fripperies – the male rather than the female standard, the Yang rather than the Yin. John was a man for certainties, certainties which he made apparent in his work, and by which he stood. Here I would have liked him to be different, but if he had been different he wouldn’t have been John Manifold.

He and Kate were great people and left an impression on all who met them. They were talented spirits with a great sense of fun, but they were both free and disciplined spirits, and as they gave loyalty they attracted it, and affection, and friendship.

David Martin said once that Vance Palmer was perhaps the greatest Queenslander. Well, John was a great Queenslander too; and it was as though the freedom and anarchy in which his ancestors flourished on their squattings in Victoria, and the bush ethos in which he grew up, could only be recreated and relived by John on a new frontier, far from the sedate social order of his homelands.

After seven years in a nursing home, and a series of strokes, John Manifold died two days short of his seventieth birthday. In earlier days he had been very close to Overland. After Overland went ‘revisionist’ John cut off relations for many years, although we stayed in touch as well as we could with Kate. In latter years, and to my great joy and emotion, John re-established contact with Overland, and it was in that magazine that, not long ago, he wrote that piece ‘Death in an Old Men’s Home’ – no euphemisms for John. I have already quoted from it elsewhere, but I shall do so again, for it contains not only his epitaph, but his humor, his self-knowledge, his courage and above all the sense of being beyond any posturing:

On light and life,
His grasp grew lighter;
Till of some blight
He died, poor blighter