C. W. Peck was raised in the New South Wales suburb of Thirroul. In 1891 he was taken on as a student teacher there, and later worked as a school teacher in South Australia where he signed on with the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). Towards the end of World War I Peck served with the AIF in Egypt and Palestine.
Peck was eventually decommissioned in September 1919 and went to live with his family at Bondi in New South Wales. After the 1925 publication of Australian Legends, Peck also published an account of the 'Last Man-Making Ceremony In Coastal Queensland' in the Sydney Mail on 16 May 1928.
During the 1920s Peck was Secretary of the Waratah League, an organisation which aimed to have the waratah declared Australia's national flower. Peck's interest in the flower remained, and as a result Australian Legends contains many dreaming stories relating to the waratah.
In the 1930s Peck gave several talks on Sydney radio about poetry and his AIF experiences, and in 1936 he wrote a series of articles on local Aboriginal rock carvings which were published in the Sydney Sun newspaper. His short stories were published in the Bulletin and Sydney Mail.
Peck's papers in the Mitchell Library contain two books of unpublished poetry, including one poem lamenting the fate of Australia's Indigenous population.
Peck continued to teach and write poetry throughout the thirties and early forties, however he did not publish any new Aboriginal dreaming stories. This may have been due to the fact that his main source for the second edition of Australian Legends, Illawarra Aboriginal elder Ellen Anderson, had died in 1934.
Peck died at his Bondi residence following a brief illness. Michael Organ argues that "his work in compiling and publishing Aboriginal stories from south eastern Australia merits recognition, despite the fact that many of the stories were "anglicised" and apparently stripped of much of their original spiritual and cultural context."
- Source: Michael Organ (http://www.michaelorgan.org.au)
