'Our Free Library"

Neilson biography by Hugh Anderson & Les Blake

The Minimay Hall Committee is organising John Shaw Neilson commemorative events for the 19^th October. There will be poetry readings by school children and members of the John Shaw Neilson Society, and an official dinner in the Soldiers Memorial Hall, with the unveiling of a Neilson portrait by Ron Penrose.
John Shaw Neilson was born on 22 February 1872 at Penola, South Australia, eldest son of Scottish-born John Neilson bush-worker and selector, and his wife Margaret, née McKinnon. Known as Jock, he attended the local school for less than two years and as a small child worked as a farm labourer for his father.

The Neilson's cottage originally at Penola, now re-constructed at Nhill

In 1881 John Neilson senior and his half-brother Dave Shaw joined the South Australian farmers making the long trek by wagon over the border to take up selections under the Victorian Land Act and were each allotted 320 acres north of Lake Minimay.
In the first year on their Minimay selection, the Neilsons cleared 6 acres and ploughed, sowed and harvested by hand, but after deducting the money owed to the storekeeper found they had made £7 from the crop. Impoverished and bankrupt, they were forced to seek station work to exist, and only devoted their spare time to the selection where the family lived in a crude mud-plastered house for eight years. Neilson Senior asked for extensions to pay the annual rent year after year, until in 1888 the storekeeper foreclosed.

The John Shaw Neilson monument at Dow Well

By June 1889 they had shifted to Dow Well, a few miles west of Nhill. Although he did his share of clearing and working the land, Neilson found time to wander the swamps and woodlands as a keen observer of nature, gathering eggs and listening to birdsongs, foraging for mushrooms, and tracking wild bees, and for some months went to school at Dow Well/Tarranginnie East State School in 1885-86, leaving when he turned 14.
Neilson and his father generally worked as farm-hands, timber-cutters, or roadmaking workers for the Lowan Shire council, but were also staunch unionists when shearing. Both belonged to the local literary society, and both won prizes for verse in the Australian Natives' Association competitions in 1893. Neilson Senior was a published bush poet, who appears to have started writing verse when he was about 30, and contributed to local newspapers and Adelaide Punch. He won another prize for verse in 1897, but achieved his widest popularity in outback shearing sheds with a song, 'Waiting for the Rain'. Although he lacked 'the outstanding poetical genius of his son', he was a writer of some achievement in the face of a lifelong bitter struggle for existence and little schooling; his verse was issued in book form, The Men of the Fifties, in 1938.
John Shaw Neilson wrote the poem 'Our fee library' about the Nhill Library.
Frank Shann, editor of the Nhill Mail, printed verse by Neilson for some years. Most was conventional and undistinguished. The family moved into Nhill in mid-1893, still deep in poverty and existing on municipal contracts and farm work, but by May 1895 they were on the road again travelling north to take up a scrub-covered Mallee selection near Lake Tyrrell, which had to be rolled and burned and grubbed before ploughing and sowing.
With poor health from heavy labouring work and failing eyesight Neilson moved to Melbourne, where he was employed by the CRB (Country Roads Board) in 1928.
John Shaw Neilson died on 12^th May 1942 in Melbourne.

The Minimay Hall Committee is encouraging former school students to attend the celebrations. For more information and/or to book contact members: Geoff Carracher (53866261), Jenny Chenhall (0416264113) or Dick Smith (53866241).