by Jonathan Roberts

Kevin Roberts, writer and scholar, sought reconciliation through poetic explorations of the colonized landscape.

“the poet, any colour, shock white haired

bemused but always

shimmering on the fringe of the Globe”

 –Settlement (2022).

Kevin Roberts was born in Adelaide, South Australia, a descendant of Cornish miners who sought work in the mines of Broken Hill. His mother was born into a family of prosperous carriage makers, who apparently scoffed at the invention of the horseless carriage, and soon went bankrupt.

Kevin’s father was a postal worker. After the early death of his mother, Kevin’s father wandered from city to city taking his young son Kevin with him. Kevin was embraced by his extended family, but shuffled from house to house without a permanent home. This sense of dislocation echoes through his work, in the form of questions about the significance of named places.

A redhead known to his mates in Australia as “Blue,” Roberts attended the University of Adelaide, singing in musical groups and playing Australian Rules Football.  After graduating in 1960, he worked as a teacher in Glossop on the River Murray, playing full forward for the town team.  Here he met his future wife, Maria Kourakis. When asked how they met, he said they were playing field hockey together and he noticed Maria when she “put a good pass forward to me.” Roberts was writing poetry at the time, but was too shy to publish.  Maria later became the muse of many of his poems.

In the mid-60s, Canada put out the call for teachers and Kevin responded. After traveling from Sydney to Vancouver on the SS Oronsay, he flew to Pouce Coupe, BC.  As he arrived, a red light lit up the horizon. It was his new high school burning to the ground, as described in Wiffenpuffs (Pilot Hill Press, 2021). He soon relocated, moving to Vancouver to attend Simon Fraser University.

While studying at SFU in 1965, Kevin lived with Australians and New Zealanders in a rental home known as “Fred’s House,” after the inflatable kangaroo in the top window, as described in She’ll Be Right (Pilot Hill Press, 2007).  During a student protest, Kevin hung from a rope above the academic quad holding a sign demanding the school be renamed as Louis Riel University, but the protest quickly fizzled he recalls: “They sent in the RCMP and charged us on horseback. Everyone scattered.”  In the next year, he asked Maria to join him in Canada.  She flew Qantas across the Pacific, and they were married in West Vancouver on August 15, 1966. Kevin then joined the newly minted Malaspina College in Nanaimo and stayed there until it grew into Vancouver Island University. Maria took up a position at Nanaimo District Secondary School and they bought a house on the water in Lantzville in 1973, where they raised two sons, Anthony and Jonathan.

Roberts had been writing for over ten years before he published his debut book of poetry, Cariboo Fishing Notes (Beau Geste, 1973), inspired by his fishing excursions to BC’s interior. It is here that conflict and exchange with Indigenous characters first appears, as Roberts recognized the land was a place that was both occupied and colonized:

“Pulled the boat over to the feeder stream

found grizzly tracks seven inches wide

deep and ominous in the sand and back

among the first two Indians

smoking fish for winter feed

rows of trout strung over

sweet alder smoke joining

the early haze of evening”

In 1972, Kevin began a PhD in English at the University of Exeter, while also writing West Country (Oolichan, 1975), his poetic sketches of Southern England. From here he visited Maria’s maternal home of Ikaria in Greece, during the right-wing “Regime of the Colonels,” as depicted in Winnowing Circle (2013). He then abandoned his PhD (apparently after a pub fight with his supervisor) and declared himself “a writer, not an academic!”

He returned to Canada with a burning desire to write and fish.  After spending three years as a commercial fisher in the Salish Sea, during which he wrote Deep Line (Harbour, 1978). Indigenous fishers appear in this work too, as involved but separate, in a fishery dominated by immigrants and misfits.  Kevin’s interest in Indigenous culture dated to the 70s, when he co-taught a course on Indigenous history with Chief Dennis Alphonse of the Quwʼutsun nation. He received a carved mask as a gift and kept it on his wall until he died. Many of his fishing experiences can also be found in his prose work, Flashers and Hoochies (Pilot Hill Press, 2019).

Kevin toured Canada as a poet, landing in places as distant as Dease Lake, BC, and New Glasgow, NS. During these excursions he met his close writing mates, George Amabile and Robert Allen, who he invited to read at Malaspina and at the Book Store on Bastion Street, operated by Thora Howell.  Margaret Atwood also stayed with Kevin in Lantzville. Maria recalls Margaret laying out the fishing lures in Kevin’s tackle box, and carefully choosing one for a fishing excursion. While Kevin was lecturing, Margaret rowed out into Nanoose Bay and returned with an enormous ling cod. Kevin hosted Mordechai Richler too, who expected Kevin to run around Nanaimo looking for Richler’s favourite cigars.  Kevin refused. Another visitor was Sam Selvon, beloved to Kevin.  Kevin returned the favour in Alberta with his colleague, Andra Thakur, producing an interview with Selvon entitled Christened with Snow (1994).

The early eighties was a period of intensive writing for Kevin as he produced beautiful publications in tandem with Ron Smith at Oolichan Books. He wrote another poetic investigation of colonization, S’Ney’mos (Oolichan, 1980), the story of Nanaimo as it grew from an Indigenous village to a coal mining town, and twinned it with a play called Black Apples (1980), about the showdown between coal baron Robert Dunsmuir and the desperate miners of the town. Black Apples was performed in Nanaimo and Victoria, and S’ney’mos became a CBC radio production.

Kevin’s next publication was a collection of short stories, Flash Harry and the Daughters of the Divine Light (Harbour, 1982), which included gritty aspects of Vancouver life. The same year he travelled to Tahiti, inspired, but later repulsed by, the work of Gaugin, where he wrote the critically decolonial Stonefish (Oolichan, 1982). This was followed by Nanoose Bay Suite (Oolichan, 1983), again a history of colonization but also a warning about the nuclear future of the site. Shortly afterwards, he launched a journal, True North Down Under (1984), publishing Canadian and Australian poets.

These books were followed by a children’s book called Rags and the Magic Pumpkin, a book of short stories in Picking the Morning Colour (Oolicahn, 1986), a stage treatment of the life of Tommy Douglas (for whom Kevin had campaigned) called Dust on the Moon and a TV script for The Beachcombers, but in the late 80s, Kevin was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, undergoing chemotherapy and radiotherapy. His struggle ended in success, tearfully described in Cobalt 3 (Ronsdale, 2000), named after the radiotherapy room at the Lion’s Gate Hospital in Vancouver.

This traumatic period was followed by his most prominent novel, Tears in a Glass Eye (D&M, 1989). When he sold the film rights to a company in Australia, Kevin claimed he received “bugger all, after the lawyers took their cut.” In the nineties, Kevin returned to Australia to write the Red Centre Journal (1992), which portrays the search for family land near Mount Hopeless, the betrayal of painter Albert Namatjira, and a declaration that land can be “mapped but not known.” Looming large in this book is Uluru, a place where Indigenous identity is sung from the land. Regretting his decision to abandon his PhD earlier in his career, Roberts registered at Griffith University in Queensland to finish his doctorate in 2013.

Other works followed, including Opening Day (1998), Writing the Tides (2006), Helsingor (2010), and the Masque and other Yarns (Pilot Hill Press, 2014). His final poem, Hopscotch, published a year before he died, was about his granddaughter and contains a legacy statement about colonization and belonging:

Outside Harlington Crescent apartment blocks

…the Nepalese and Togolese kids

Canadians and Jamaicans all come running

… to try this old and universal game

on this new hopscotch field

in Halifax    hop and skip and jump knowing exactly

Without direction when to bend

To pick up the rock when to use

One foot or two when to face about when

To hop left foot jump right foot both feet

 

This is the way they will learn to find Canada

To hopscotch through school, teenage angst, love

Marriage, birth, betrayal

And tears…

-Settlement (2022)

Kevin leaves behind his beloved spouse, Maria Roberts and their two sons, Anthony and Jonathan Roberts, along with his grandchildren, Ama, Garry, Malcolm, Kaylee and Daisy.

**

ABCBookWorld Obit

BC author and poet Kevin Roberts, who was born in Adelaide, Australia, on March 8th, 1940, died in BC on November, 2023.

Roberts came to Canada from Adelaide in 1964 (he planned to take a teaching job in Pouce Coupe, BC but the school burned down so he moved to Vancouver). After completing a Masters degree in English at Simon Fraser University, he began teaching at Malaspina University College when it opened in 1969. He has a PhD from Griffith University in Queensland and he has studied in England and lived on the island of Ikaria in Greece.

Roberts published 13 books of poetry, three books of short stories, four novels, three plays and two books of non fiction.  Both his poetry and fiction have been widely anthologized, and two books of poetry, S’ney’mos and Stonefish, have been produced and broadcast by the CBC.

For five years Roberts ran a salmon troller in Georgia Straight and on the West Coast of Vancouver Island. He was a visiting Professor of English at colleges in Nan, Thailand, and Shanghai, China. In 1985, he was Writer-in-Residence at Wattle Park College in Adelaide. He made several treks into the Red Centre of Australia. Under the auspices of the Canada Council, he toured as a writer and reader of his work across the breadth of Canada.

BOOKS:

Poetry:

Cariboo Fishing Notes (Beau Geste, 1973)
Five Poems (Cambridge School of Art, 1974)
West Country (Oolichan, 1975)
Deepline (Harbour, 1978)
S’Ney’mos (Oolichan, 1980)
Heritage (Harbour, 1981)
Stonefish (Oolichan, 1982)
Nanoose Bay Suite (Oolichan, 1983)
Above Marshall Lake (Eleftheria, 1985)
Red Centre Journal (Wakefield, 1992)
Poems (Hawthorne, 1993)
Writing the Tides: New and Selected Poetry (Ronsdale, 2006)
Lions (Pilot Hill Press, 2014) 9781927046302

Short Story Collections:

Flash Harry and the Daughters of Diving Light (Harbour, 1982)
Picking The Morning Colour (Oolichan, 1985)
Masque & Other Yarns (Pilot Hill Press, 2014) unpriced 9781927046340

Novels:

Tears in a Glass (D&M, 1989)
She’ll Be Right (Pilot Hill Press, 2007) $20 1896687989
The True Story of Hamlet and Horatio (Pilot Hill Press, 2010) $20 18966879701
Wiffenpuffs (Pilot Hill Press, 2021) 9781896687544

Plays:

Black Apples (1980)
Rags and the Magic Pumpkin (1980)
Dust on the Moon (1991)

Non-Fiction:

Cobalt 3 (Ronsdale, 2000)
Flashers and Hoochies: A Memoir (Pilot Hill Press, 2019) unpriced 9781927046562