Cirrus@Austlit

Victor J. Daley was born in September 1858 near Armagh, Ireland, and educated in several Christian Brothers' schools. In 1878 he migrated to Sydney and began a career as a journalist and poet, working for the Queanbeyan Times and writing for Sydney Punch and the Bulletin. In the late 1880s and early 1890s he was one of the most popular balladists of the Bulletin, receiving more space than any other poet in the Bulletin's A Golden Shanty (1890). In 1898 he published his first book of verse, At Dawn and Dusk, which was later taken as the name of a literary club frequented by Daley and other writers such as Henry Lawson, Norman Lindsay and Frank Mahony.

Daley died in 1905 from tuberculosis. But two posthumous volumes appeared during the next six years, enhancing Daley's reputation. While he was most admired as a lyric poet and considered, along with Roderic Quinn, as a Celtic poet, he also wrote a great deal of satirical socio-political verse. Written mainly under the pseudonym "Creeve Roe", this verse was reappraised and edited in the 1940s. While Daley's reputation is not as great as it was during his lifetime, a significant sample of his work is found in most anthologies of Australian verse.