Gregory Bryan Shortis, poet and university teacher of German language and literature at UNE for more than twenty years, died peacefully at Jindalee Nursing Home at Narrabundah on 13 November 2016 after years of increasing incapacitation with Parkinson’s disease. Better known to University of New England colleagues and students, and to readers and audiences of his poetry as Gregory B. Shortis, he was born on 27 August 1945 at King George the Fifth Hospital at Camperdown in Sydney, 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 Shortis’s mother’s maiden name.
At the time of his birth, Shortis’s parents were living in Dulwich Hill, awaiting the completion of their house at Earlwood. His father, John McCauley Shortis, was an industrial chemist. He and his wife Mary Elizabeth (‘Betty’) Bryan, had three other children: John, Mark and Claire.
Shortis attended St Bernadette’s Catholic Infants School at Bexley North, and Our Lady of Fatima Primary School at Kingsgrove before proceeding to the De La Salle Brothers School at Kingsgrove, where he emerged Dux in 1962. At school, 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 he taught himself German as a subject for the NSW Leaving Certificate. He matriculated to Sydney University, and in 1963, commenced study in German, French, English and Psychology, graduating with an honours degree (2.1) in German and French in 1967. Friendships with fellow students Udo Borget (subsequently Foundation President of the German Studies Association of Australia) and Richard Givney (subsequently teacher at Newtown Boys High School) began at the University.
In 1968, Shortis travelled with the intention of undertaking a Masters degree on the Swiss language writer Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. With Borgert and Borgert’s wife Joy, Shortis went by way of South America, stopping at Curacao, Acapulco, Lisbon and London. He attended lectures for a year in Munich, and a further ten months at Zurich University. He visited a Spanish pen friend called Mercedes, who was studying English at Madrid, became engaged. The couple went to London together, and Shortis travelled alone to Yugoslavia, where he was stopped by a television crew and asked to sing the Australian National Anthem. He sang, in German, ‘Seven Old Ladies Locked Up in a Lavatory’ and later discovered that several people from Sydney University’s German Department who were in Europe were not impressed, though 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 1970, and was for a long time unemployed. His fiancé flew to Australia but the relationship did not work out; as Shortis said, ‘It had been a romantic thing, not practical’. He never married.

The dole office directed him to brain-numbing short-term manual jobs, and 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.
At 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 will power, 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.

As poet, Shortis 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, (Fat Possum Press, 1982) and The Comedy Human, published by Tony Bennett’s Kardoorair Press in 1996. In the 1980s, he organised tours of poets to give readings in Sydney and won a following among some pioneer members of the ‘Generation of 1968’, a grouping that was often subject of his parodies. He also coedited several collections of others’ poetry, and in 1990 founded the Regional Poets Cooperative in Armidale, linking northern writers with others in Newcastle, Canberra and further afield. He also established, with James Vicars, the New England Review, which hosted 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.

The warmth of empathy stemmed from his sense of personal tragedy and overcoming, and from joyful immersion in classical Latin poetry and that of Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the English-speaking world. Nonpareil as a writer of tender lyrics as well as parody and satire, Shortis bequeathed among other work an imitation of Bertolt Brecht’s ’Ich benôtige keinen Grabstein’:

I need no epitaph
But if you need one for me
Put something like this on the stone:
‘He made suggestions
We gave him a hearing.’ That way
We’ll all be honoured.

With the advance of Parkinsonian symptoms, Shortis left Armidale in 2004 and moved to Canberra to be closer to his family. He lived for six years in a unit at Goodwin Village in Farrer before removing to Jindalee Nursing home at Narrabundah. Much missed by poets and listeners who relished his poetry and his brilliant conversation on literature and culture, Shortis is survived by the affectionate families of his brothers John and Mark Shortis, and his sister Claire Shortis, to each of whom I am indebted for details of his early life.

Michael Sharkey
Editor, Australian Poetry Journal

michael.sharkey@bigpond.com