Welcome! I grew up in Bristol, a port city with a murky past in the south-west of England, arriving in Melbourne/Naarm in 1976 with one suitcase and a new hairstyle. It was August and freezing in South Gippsland.
Once I retired from teaching English in my late fifties I set about writing and trying to get published. RMIT insisted on it as part of its writing course. One of my pieces of non-fiction found its way into Playboy. A poem landed in The Best Australian Poems, selected by David Brooks who generously provided endorsements for my next two publications.
My debut collection, When I Saw Jimi was published as joint winner of the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize in 2013 (Indigo Dreams Publishing). The manuscript had been shortlisted for The Crashaw Prize, Salt, UK, Chris Emery describing us as ‘major new talents.’ It’s a memoir of growing up in Sixties’ Britain, its music and sexual awakenings. http://cordite.org.au/reviews/elvey-maclean-hannaford/
My latest collection of memoir poetry, Untidy Activity, published by Walleah Press, August, 2026, takes its title from a line in Elizabeth Bishop’s The Bight .’ All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful.’
It seems prescient since I was diagnosed in July this year with an advanced, aggressive uterine cancer. Symptoms appeared overnight after a weekend of bushwalking and feeling great. Surgical biopsies showed another story and a fair bit of chaos in there.
As I write, mid October, I’m four rounds of chemo in and awaiting welcome surgery at the end of the month. I’m in good spirits, feeling so normal I enjoy a glass of wine, a good laugh and grateful for a fabulous medical team and loving friends and family who are going above and beyond. I fully expect to be here in the New Year to celebrate life in all its mess, shock and awe.
Cassandra Atherton kindly wrote of this latest collection,’ As intimate as a mother’s final wave goodbye, Maclean’s poetry explores moments when ‘It seems impossible to erase the past/etched with ash and dust’. In searing poems spanning international landscapes and sometimes hallucinated dreamscapes, Maclean’s volume returns to Emily Dickinson’s life and poetry in intertextual hauntings of memory. Untidy Activity is a pulsing threnody and a Gordian ‘knot in the heart’. It affirms Julie Maclean’s voice as pivotal to contemporary poetic memoir and elegy. ‘
Available here, Amazon etc: https://walleahpress.com.au/Julie-Maclean-Untidy-Activity.html
My second full collection, Eye (Walleah Press, September, 2024) is a memoir of life in and around Oz and described by Anne Elvey as ‘unsettling and compelling‘.
Jo Langdon says, Alert and attentive, Julie Maclean’s Eye is quick yet focused in its gaze, forming worlds anew and closely felt. These poems hold scenes of ‘melon light’, with ‘two dolphins / one for each eye’, ‘bumblebees the size of fairy wrens’, and birds ‘growling … like dogs’. Traversing landscapes inviting and violent—haunted by colonial violence—Maclean’s language is colloquial and eloquent, nimble and expansive. With ‘eyes everywhere’, her poems show how what is troubling or dangerous can be rendered ‘So easy through the lens’
Maria Takolander says ‘Julie Maclean focuses her gaze on the grandeur and minutiae of a new country, the diversity and eccentricities of the modern world. Hers is a mission of ‘loving everything equally’: baby echidnas, 3D printers, anime, kangaroo paws. Maclean renders it all vivaciously, even as she mourns the unspeakable tragedy of climate change‘.
Available from the publisher: https://walleahpress.com.au/bookshop/product/maclean-julie-poetry-eye.
My most recent chapbook/pamphlet was red was love was joint winner of the 2023 Dreich Slims Poetry Competition and published in 2024. Marion McCready says these are ‘…poems that fizz with energy, wry humour and …bathos…life observed up close with, at times, biting darkness. Not quiet poems and yet lyrical and tender, love poems refracted through bold and unexpected visuals.’ Available here: https://hybriddreich.co.uk/product/was-red-was-love-julie-maclean/.
A chapbook/pamphlet, Kiss of the Viking was published by Poetry Salzburg in 2014. Reviewed here: https://sabotagereviews.com/2014/10/17/kiss-of-the-viking-by-julie-maclean/
It’s said that my poetry explores restlessness, the vagaries of love, loss and transcience. I collaborated with UK poet Terry Quinn in a pamphlet of reply poems, To Have to Follow (Indigo Dreams, 2016). Reviewed here: https://sabotagereviews.com/2016/11/21/to-have-to-follow-by-julie-maclean-terry-quinn/
Several Ginninderra Press Pocket Books have been published on the landscape of Oz: Mirage, Unsettled, Spirit, Wet Zone and Beak. Available here: https://www.ginninderrapress.com.au/chapbooks.html
Lips That Did was published by Dancing Girl Press , US. Available here: https://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/products/lips-that-did-julie-maclean
Poetry, fiction and reviews have appeared in The Best Australian Poems, Poetry Foundation, Southerly, Island, The Rialto, Event, The Antigonish Review, Overland, The Age, Mslexia, BODY, Shearsman and in a Smith Doorstop anthology, among others.
I have been winner and shortlisted in several poetry, fiction and non-fiction awards and granted a residency with Booranga Writers and attended a residency with Pascale Petit in Bezieres. A Forest went to Upton Cheyney for a Walk was selected for Wandering Words, Sensing Spaces and was presented at The Royal Academy, London in 2014.As feature poet I have appeared in LA Cultural Review, Pieced Work, Sundress, US, Tania Hershman’s blog and elsewhere.
I have enjoyed mentoring new writers, editing collections and conducting creative writing workshops in every genre. I currently live on Wadawurrung country/Surf Coast, Victoria encouraging native birds, reptiles and marsupials to make a home in my garden sanctuary, not mozzies or rabbits so much.
