John Shaw Neilson Biography | Poet

John Shaw Neilson (22 February 1872 – 12 May 1942), was an Australian poet. Slightly built, for most of his life John Shaw Neilson worked as a labourer, fruit-picking, clearing scrub, navvying and working in quarries, and, after 1928, working as a messenger with the Country Roads Board in Melbourne. Largely untrained and only basically educated, Neilson became known as one of Australia's finest lyric poets, who wrote a great deal about the natural world, and the beauty in it.