Gregory B. Shortis, poet whose work was 'wild, warm, and outrageous'
Gregory Shortis was a poet and university teacher of German language and literature but was better known to colleagues and students and to readers and audiences of his poetry as Gregory B. Shortis. He was a spectacular performer of his own and others' work and gained a following at literary cafes, hotels and festivals.
Gregory Bryan Shortis was born on 27 August 1945 at Camperdown and was named after his Uncle Gregory, who had been killed the previous year while fighting with 'M' Special Force in New Guinea. "Bryan" was his mother's maiden name.
Greg Shortis Credit:Winifred Belmont
His father, John McCauley Shortis, was an industrial chemist who with wife Mary Elizabeth ("Betty") Bryan, had three other children: John, Mark and Claire.
Gregory attended the De La Salle Brothers School at Kingsgrove, where he emerged Dux in 1962. He had no interest in sport but learnt piano, wrote a play, developed an interest in chemistry and joined the Club for Young Astronomers at Campsie, winning a NSW Science Award for recording the weather and barometric pressure. He was a great walker, and a good debater, a noted parodist, and taught himself German as a subject for the NSW Leaving Certificate. At Sydney University he studied German, French, English and Psychology, graduating in 1967.
In 1968, Shortis travelled with the intention of undertaking a masters degree on the Swiss language writer Conrad Ferdinand Meyer.
He attended lectures for a year in Munich before visiting a Spanish pen friend called Mercedes, who was studying English in Madrid. They became engaged and went to London together. Shortis travelled alone to Yugoslavia where he was stopped by a television crew and asked to sing the Australian national anthem. In German he sang Seven Old Ladies Locked in a Lavatory and later discovered that several people from Sydney University's German Department who were in Europe at the time were not impressed, although a friend of his student days, Tony Stephens (later Professor of German at Sydney) called it an "unforgettable act of heroism".
Shortis returned to Australia in 1970and his fiancee joined him but the relationship did not work out; as Shortis said: "It had been a romantic thing, not practical." He never married. He undertook part-time tutoring at Sydney University before landing a one-year teaching fellowship at Monash University. The following year, 1974, he was employed at the University of New England, where he stayed until 1996.
In Armidale Shortis was writing poetry, meeting others engaged in the same activity, and developing a drinking problem that he recognised and, after attempts at self-cure, finally mastered with assistance of AA. He gave up alcohol on 31 May 1985, and when people later asked him about willpower, he replied that he needed none, because he found life more adventurous without alcohol. He became as popular and influential in several states as a speaker on addiction as he had become as poet.
He began publishing in student newspapers, small-press editions of his own work, and in regional, statewide and national anthologies. His first poems were published in Nel Mezzo del Cammin, a Fat Possum Press broadsheet in 1980, followed by the privately-published Another Double Please (1981), Yarn, Rave and Red Herring, and The Comedy Human.
In the 1980s, he organised tours of poets to give readings in Sydney and also co-edited several collections of others' poetry, and in 1990 founded the Regional Poets Co-operative in Armidale, linking northern writers with others in Newcastle, Canberra and further afield. He also established, with Jim Vicars, the New England Review, which hosting writing from Australia and abroad. With Yve Louis and others, he was a co-founder of the organisation Poetzinc in 2002, which operated as a hub for New England and visiting writers.
He travelled widely as poet, exciting audiences with his outspokenly individual poems – work aptly described by poet Yve Louis as "wild, warm, and outrageous". Poet and critic Julian Croft recorded that a Shortis reading had "a distinctive flavour; just when you think you will never stop laughing, you realise you have been deeply moved; gravitas, coloratura and dramatic tautness have returned to poetry…"
Shortis was a spectacular performer of his own and others' work, and gained a following at literary cafes, hotels and festivals, including Montsalvat and Wangaratta in Victoria, the Tasmanian Poetry festival, the Bega Regional Poetry Festival, Sydney Carnivale, and other events in New South Wales and South Australia. He was a guest of the WEA in Sydney, and read on ABC and FM radio stations. Shortis was also in demand as a motivational speaker at health and rehabilitation organisations, where his sense of humour also shone.
With the advance of Parkinson's symptoms, Shortis left Armidale in 2004 and moved to Canberra to be closer to his family. He died at Jindalee Nursing home in Narrabundah. Missed by poets and listeners who relished his poetry and his brilliant conversation, Shortis is survived by the families of his brothers John and Mark and his sister Claire.
Michael Sharkey, Editor, Australian Poetry Journal