Darryl Stuart Book Launch "The Anzac Legacy of CJ Dennis"

To commemorate 150years since his birth, The Anzac Legacy of C J Dennis  provides a new insight into Australia’s most popular and prolific poet – C J Dennis. It is the first collection to bring together his Anzac poetry from 1908 to 1938, including classic verse alongside 44 Anzac Day and Armistice Day poems never before collected in one volume.

Presented chronologically, the collection offers a rare record of how the Anzac legacy evolved from the immediacy of war into a broader sense of Australian identity. It captures the spirit and sacrifice of those who served, and the passing of their story into our national memory.

Featuring a foreword by General Sir Peter Cosgrove, The Anzac Legacy of C J Dennis affirms Dennis as a defining voice in Australia’s culture of remembrance.

Edited by Stanthorpe resident Darryl Stuart, the book will be launched at the Stanthorpe Art Gallery on 12 Sep from 10am. It deals with the men who went to war and the men who returned from WW1.  In Dennis’s laconic style it records how communities like Stanthorpe welcomed returned servicemen and how remembrance became part of Australia’s egalitarian culture.

CJ Dennis – the Laureate of the Larrikin

Born in Laura SA in 1876, CJ Dennis became Australia’s most popular poet, selling over 500 000 books of poetry in his lifetime. Dennis was famous for his use of the vernacular (slang) spoken by millions of Australians at that time. Using this language Dennis’s verse stories captured the humour, romance, and struggles of everyday life and thus his epithet ‘The Laureate of the Larrikin’.  He portrayed working-class Australians with the dignity and virtues more often attributed to a more genteel class or elite, giving voice to our distinctive national character.

“I picked it up as an attractive and unusual opportunity, but read it cover to cover, smiling and laughing at CJ Dennis humour and insight, and from time to time, slowing down to absorb the pathos and sadness that is part of the Anzac legacy.” 

“Across three decades, Dennis recorded not just a war, but how a Nation came to remember it.”

General Sir Peter Cosgrove AK CVO MC

“Dennis became not just the poet laureate of Anzac, but the conscience of commemoration”

“CJ Dennis’s Anzac verse put into memorable words Australians’ feelings of loss in the years after the Great War. He spoke for that Australia, and a century on, his poetry still speaks to us.”

Prof. Peter Stanley, FAHA

UNSW Canberra

Author: CJ Dennis

Edited By: Darryl Stuart

ISBN: 978-1-923720-15-2 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-1-923720-16-9 (eBook)

Publisher: Big Sky Publishing

Release Date: 1 September 2026

Format: 250mm x 250mm, Hardback, eBook

Pages: 208 pages

Price (incl GST) $44.99

All royalties donated to Legacy Australia

Genre: Adult Non-Fiction, Military History

Contact: Darryl Stuart on 0409 742 291 or cjd150@cjdennis.com.au