Poet Shelton Lea was adopted into the Lea family (famous for Darrell Lea sweets) and grew up in Toorak, Melbourne, but at twelve he ran away from home and school and lived on the streets, stealing to survive. He was detained in various reform schools and in Pentridge jail. It was in prison that he discovered poetry, later writing that poetry 'allowed me to live for several years inside/ because it altered my point of view' ('doing times'). He was later to be influential in raising the minimum age for jailing teenagers, speaking in an interview on the ABC's programme Stateline in 2004.
On his travels around Australia he formed bonds with Indigenous people and was 'adopted' into an Aboriginal family. He had a life-long commitment to write about Australia's black and white troubles, and his book Totems contains all the poems he wrote about black/white relations between 1988 and 2004.
The poet PiO recognised and encouraged Lea's talent when Lea was still in his teen years, publishing his Drunk and the 'Steve' Poems in 1962. In the 1960s he lived in Kings Cross, but later moved to Melbourne, where, as part of the Heide set, he worked with his life-long friend and mentor Barrett Reid on Overland.
Lea regularly performed his works, sometimes with a jazz group. He read at festivals and in pubs, schools, prisons, universities and under trees around Australia, and also represented Australian poetry overseas. He received two Australia Council grants and Arts Victoria funding to read his work throughout rural Victoria. He published several chapbooks of verse as well as his larger collections. He has been referred to as 'the godfather of Melbourne poetry'. His bookshop DeHavillands on Wellington in Clifton Hill, Melbourne, traded in fine books, specialising in Australian poetry, and his Eaglemont Press published six books, including the first bi-lingual Romani/English poetry book (Lee Fuhler's Dogstown, 1996).
