Holocaust Island

Graeme Dixon was born in Perth in 1955. Between the ages of ten and fourteen he lived in a Salvation Army Boys Home, before being expelled from high school. He was in and out of reformatories and at sixteen ended up in Fremantle Prison where he spent most of the next nine years. His first poetry was written in prison.

At twenty-seven, Graeme Dixon began tertiary study and later completed a course at the Western Australian Institute of Technology (now Curtin University) on politics, communications and Aboriginal Studies. He has a strong interest in Aboriginal history and is currently furthering his studies at the University of Western Australia.

Joe McGinness,
memoir
Mabel Edmund,
life story

Graeme Dixon first saw the light of day in Katanning. His was to be a life of almost complete institutionalisation. His mother was Aboriginal, his father a migrant orphan from England who deserted the family of three children when he, Graeme, was two years of age. The next four years he spent in Sister Kate's home. Circumstances changed for his mother when she married again, but because he bore a resemblance to his father, his stepfather disliked him and in his own words, “I kept my distance from him and generally kept my thoughts to myself.”

Upon moving to the Gnowangerup–Borden area in the extreme southwest of the state, his stepfather deserted the family which had now grown to six. Two brothers and three sisters were placed in a home. This time the Salvation Army orphanage. But they were separated, his three sisters were placed in a different home to that of him and his two brothers. In Graeme's words “In the orphanage I soon discovered what type of kid the Salvo's desired. If you kept quiet and didn't show too much emotion you were classified as a good boy.” Many a time the administration tried to adopt him out, but he would purposely misbehave and they would change their minds. He was eventually not wanted at fourteen years of age for becoming drunk and was also expelled from the Hollywood High School. He was sent back to his mother in Katanning where for a short time he found some of the happiness which was denied him for so long. But the only friends he made were ex–orphanage Aboriginal boys and they altogether were enjoying their first real taste of freedom in their lives. But the type of freedom they enjoyed was to see the young Graeme Dixon in a reformatory at fifteen and at nineteen in the Juvenile Yard in Fremantle Prison and from then on he was to spend every Christmas and birthday, from his sixteenth year until he was twenty-four, in prisons. But in the prison atmosphere, where feelings are repressed and weaknesses taken advantage of, he began to write largely as he says in his own words “to get things off my chest”. Unfortunately, he destroyed most of these early writings because as he puts it “I didn't feel safe with my feelings lying around the cell for the prying eyes of the screws.” At twenty-five years of age he decided to keep out of jail and settle increasingly, but understandably enough, into a lifestyle of alcohol and drugs. Eventually, he was hospitalised and it was then that he met his wife Sharmaine, who recognising his talent as a writer, urged him to further his education and coaxed him into sending his poetry in as an entrant for the inaugural David Unaipon Award, which he won. Now he is also enrolled as a student at the University of Western Australia.

Most of his poetry deals with the life he had been forced to live in the past to survive. Others express the love and the loss of his Aboriginal people.

Now at thirty-four years of age, Graeme Dixon, Poet, has plenty of time to learn his art as a weaver of words and his craft as a writer of verse.