Valentine Vallis

Valentine Thomas Vallis (1916–2009) was a Queensland poet, lecturer and opera critic.

Valentine "Val" Thomas Vallis was born in Gladstone, Queensland on 1 August 1916. His father, Michael was a fisherman and wharf worker. Vallis wrote of his father, mother Daisy and siblings in a number of his poems. After attending Gladstone State School and studying secretarial work at Rockhampton High School (1929-1932), Vallis became a clerk in the Gladstone Town Council. Throughout his childhood he had been an avid reader with a love for poetry. His extended family introduced him to opera. He enlisted in the Australian Army in 1940 and worked as a signaller, before being attached to the Army Education Service in New Guinea, using his secretarial skills. He was posted to Singapore after Japan surrendered, where he helped prisoners of Changi prison return to Australia. His unit's major, Tom Inglis Moore who was working with the Australian Army Education Service during World War II, encouraged him to write and read American poetry. Vallis submitted poems through the 1940s to The Bulletin, with his first poem being accepted by editor Douglas Stewart in 1944. Vallis' poems would primarily celebrate the sea, inspired by his youth in Gladstone.

Following his war service, Vallis enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Queensland, studying philosophy and English. He won the Monteith Prize for English in 1947 and Douglas Price Memorial Prize in 1948. He published his first book of poetry, Songs of the East Coast in 1947. He graduated with first class honours in philosophy in 1950. He was appointed to an Assistant Lecturer position in Philosophy, while he continued study toward his M.A. which he took in 1953. He was awarded a Birkbeck Scholarship to study at the University of London, where he took his PhD in philosophy and in particular, aesthetics in 1955.

After returning to Australia in 1956, Vallis lectured in philosophy and aesthetics at the University of Queensland rising to Senior Lecturer. He moved to the English department in 1965, where he would lecture on romantic poets, especially W.B. Yeats, aesthetics and Australian literature. He retired as Reader in 1981. His second book of poetry, Dark Wind Blowing was published in 1961. He edited The Queensland centenary anthology with R.S. Byrnes in 1959. Vallis' poems would feature on the Queensland Secondary School Curriculum for many years.

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