Coffs Harbour remembers one of Australia’s greatest poets and former local, Robert Gray

ROBERT Gray, the acclaimed Australian poet and former Coffs Harbour schoolboy, died in Sydney on 17 November 2025 from complications related to Parkinson’s disease.

He was aged 80.

Born in Port Macquarie in 1945, Gray spent much of his childhood in Coffs Harbour, growing up on a banana plantation near Bruxner Park, later living at Orange Trees on Coramba Road and in Curacoa Street.
He attended Coffs Harbour Public School and Coffs Harbour High School, where early encounters with literature helped shape his devotion to poetry.

He recalled when he was 12, a teacher read to the class a passage from “The Wind in the Willows”, describing butter dripping from Mole’s hot toast like honey from the honeycomb.

“With that image,” he writes, “I was aware that I had just seen something in imagination more intensely, more sensuously, than I ever had in life.

“I was always very conscious of being sensuously overwhelmed by the world and the vividness of it was very exhilarating to me.

“Sort of a Wordsworthian response.

“That was my main recourse when I was young – the exhilaration of looking.”

Gray’s memoir, The Land I Came Through Last, revisited his childhood on the banana plantation in Coffs, offering an intellectual and social portrait of the era and exploring how the landscape shaped his identity as a poet.

A member of the Facebook page Coffs Local History – Remember When noted, “It is a fascinating read.”

Long-time friend and fellow poet Geoffrey Lehmann paid tribute in the Sydney Morning Herald, writing, “One of his earliest influences was Ted Hillyer, a highly talented yet underappreciated Australian realist landscape painter who lived in Bellingen, and who later became his close friend.

“He is remembered as a humanist: a poet who treated life gently, without grandiosity, honouring both its fragility and its wonder.

“Robert Gray was regarded as an outstanding landscape poet and, alongside Les Murray, one of the most significant Australian poets.”

Poet Kevin Hart also reflected on Gray’s impact, writing, “Gray was an imagist without a rival in the English-speaking world”.

His first book of poems, Creekwater Journal, was published in 1973.

Over his career he published 13 books of poetry and, with Geoffrey Lehmann, co-edited three anthologies of Australian poetry.

He is fondly remembered by many in Coffs Harbour.

By Andrea FERRARI