Australian Dictionary of Biography

Jas H. Duke, (right), with Alan Wearne, 1987.

Photograph by Darce Cassidy.

James Heriot (‘Jas H.’) Duke (1939–1992), poet and anarchist, was born on 16 October 1939 at Ballarat, Victoria, eldest of four children of Arthur Duke and his wife Mavis Noel, née Brown, both locally born schoolteachers. Educated at Dana Street State School, Ballarat, and Box Hill Boys’ Technical School, Jim won an Education Department senior technical scholarship in 1955 and commenced studies in aeronautical engineering at the Royal Melbourne Technical College. From 1959 he studied part time while working as a laboratory assistant in the Commonwealth Department of Supply. In his youth Duke tried being a communist, but he drifted towards anarchism. When instructed by leaders of the Communist Party’s Eureka Youth League to paint the words ‘Pig Iron Bob’ on a bridge, he annoyed his comrades by painting the words upside down.

In 1966 Duke travelled via the United States of America to London, where he worked for Rolls Royce Ltd and was part of the ‘politico-psychedelic underground’ (Duke 2003, 8) centred around the anarchist movement. In this milieu he met the Australian anarchist Ted Kavanagh and his German wife Anne, née Butz. In 1968 he moved to Brighton, England, where he found work as a laboratory assistant at the University of Sussex. He befriended the experimental film-maker Jeff Keen and appeared in several of his films. Having begun a relationship with Anne Kavanagh, he followed her and her son to West Germany, where their own son Ben was born in 1972. Duke was ineligible for a German work visa and returned to Australia the next year. Remaining in contact, he visited Anne and Ben for two months in 1983.

Back in Australia, Duke was employed as a draughtsman and later a research officer at the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works, his work in the sewerage department inspiring his controversial ‘Shit Poem’ (1981). His skill at the lunchtime chess competitions was legendary and he was devoted to the game, which he also played by correspondence. Living a private single life in Richmond, his flat was off limits to all but a few. He was known to his family as Jim, but to the poetry and arts community he became known as Jas H. Duke.

Duke’s time in Britain had laid the foundation for a career as a poet. His father had introduced him to varieties of English poetry, but it was his encounters with jazz and beat poetry that ignited his poetic voice. His plain-speaking verse, both on the page and in performance, was often combined with innovative Dadaist inspired sound and visual poetry. For two decades he was a fixture at Melbourne poetry readings and festivals. As his friend and colleague the Greek-born poet π.o. later asserted, ‘Jas H Duke helped introduce the Melbourne underground to spoken word, dadaist, concrete and conceptual poetry’ (Bock 2022).

Among the periodicals Duke supported and to which he contributed regularly were Ear in a Wheatfield (1973–76); visual poetry’s Born to Concrete (1974–79), for which he edited the first issue; the workplace poetry publication 925 (1978–83); and Migrant 7 (1983–87). He wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Destiny Wood (1978), and was closely associated with the anarchist cooperative Collective Effort Press, contributing to its visual poetry anthology Missing Forms: Concrete, Visual and Experimental Poems (1981). The press also published his two volumes of poetry: Poems of War and Peace (1987), which was shortlisted for the poetry section of the Victorian premier’s literary awards; and the posthumously published Poems of Life and Death (2003).

A stocky man with a shaved head and a solid beard, Duke was forceful in his speech and in the delivery of his poetry. He later recalled: ‘I started performing as a timid person with a stutter but the spirit of the times soon converted me into a bellowing bull’ (Duke 1987, iv). Taking an interest in Australian and world politics he was both humanist and democratic, remaining on the electoral rolls to discharge his civic duty, but writing the likes of ‘The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of Wisdom’ and ‘Hang Fraser’ on the ballot papers. Yet he viewed some conservative politicians with detached sympathy, reserving his strongest venom for those he judged to be thugs, traitors, and hypocrites. His political stance was apparent to anyone who heard his performance poem ‘Stalin,’ in which he repeated his subject’s name until falling down exhausted.

Duke had a prodigious general knowledge and did not merely parrot what he had read, heard, and observed. His bluff manner often hid an essentially shy man, though his temper was explosive if he believed anyone was making fun of him. If his energy was enormous, physically he was more fragile, and he suffered later in life from a hereditary blood disorder. On 19 June 1992, days after falling and shattering bones in a leg, he died of a heart attack in St Vincent’s Hospital, Fitzroy, and was cremated. He was survived by his son Ben Kavanaugh, who inherited his estate.