Tracy Ryan: Bill was a great encourager of other writers, while shy of admitting that he himself could turn a very fine poem when he chose to. I owe more than one of my first publications, and my first job as an editor back in my 20s, to Bill. Even before that, like others of my age, I learned in school English classes from anthologies he had edited. His influence on readers and writers has been immense. I loved how when the pandemic began he started a kind of email circle for sharing favourite poems, with his usual tongue-in-cheek tone. I think of Bill as always warm, wryly laughing, always ready to share a witty story or an irony, but also as a serious storehouse of information about Western Australian literature and its history. Our family will miss him very much.
John Kinsella: I first met Bill in a non-literary setting, though he wouldn’t have remembered that. But from the time I started publishing, I ran into Bill constantly. Not so much in recent years after he moved to Margaret River, though I did see him at a couple of events down there. Bill was a generous but blunt critic. If he thought something was good, he said so; if not, well he said so as well, but always with a laugh attached that made you feel as if everything was okay really. And it usually was — he would never abandon a poet. He and I had many conversations about Dorothy Hewett and Mick (Randolph) Stow, two brilliant stars in his firmament of friends. He cared deeply about them both, and about their work, and gave much of himself to affirm their work.
I dedicated the online anthology of Western Australian writing I did for UWA library to him, and Tracy and I owed him a great debt of thanks for his ground-breaking anthology work when we came to edit the Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry a few years ago. I remember a day seventeen years ago, Bill dropped off a sea-chest (no less) full of copies of old Swan River Colony newspaper poetry at York for me to use in any way that suited. He went out of his way to help if he could.
I have numerous personal stories of drinking with Bill back in my bad old days, but maybe I would retell them differently in my sober life. They weren’t just snappy stories full of literary-referenced self-irony; they were often empathetic and sometimes deeply personal. One very kind thing... one day, when I was at the bottom of my addiction barrel and living on my own in a flat near UWA in the early 90s, Bill turned up (having heard rumours I was in a bad way) and spent the day with me (drinking, but that was the way it was back then) just to see I got through... and an act made a difference to survival. I am sure I was one of many. Bill and Janet came around to celebrate after Tracy and I got married, bringing a couple of bottles of wine, only to discover I was trying to stay on the wagon, and with the skill of one in tune with the ups and downs of life, Bill said something like, Well, I’ll take care of them!
I spent decades trying to get Bill to write more poems, but he said he’d done with that. I believed Bill about everything else, but not that. Even if he wasn’t writing them down, I am sure he was thinking them. Poetry was part of him and he was part of Western Australian poetry’s essence.
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