The Maggie Poem

Mountain View: [Shelton Lea], No date.
First Edition.

29.5cm x 21cm. [4] pages. Single folded sheet.

Poem printed in Lea’s usual 1980s photocopy Mountain View output, this piece about his relationship with the red-headed Irish prostitute Maggie, and her death by his side in a Melbourne park. Georgeff’s Delinquent Angel tells the story: “Shelton had, at various times, fallen into the arms of prostitutes. There was a history of unconditional mateship between Shelton and those girls, even from his early days in Kings Cross. They’d provided a safety net for him and he had reciprocated. Shelton believed in the notion of the good-hearted prostitute. ‘I’ve met a whole lot of them in my life and they’ve treated me kindly. They don’t treat themselves very kindly.’ Maggie was an Irish girl with mad flaming hair. She was a junkie. She was the girl Shelton had gone to after the break up with Barbara. Candle, her hoon (pimp) had her installed upstairs in a building in Fitzroy. ‘Any nap-jack could come and fuck her for ten bob, and Candle would take the money.’ She wanted to get away and Shelton had fought Candle to take her. They went to the seaside for a few days. When they came back, they took a flagon of port and went to the park, the dying ground, with the blackfellas and shared it with them. Shelton fell asleep in the sun on the grass, near the highrise flats. ‘Maggie slid around the corner for a dose of methadone. She came back and drank more port and when I woke up she was lying next to me dead.’ He wrote a poem for Maggie and said he thought it was grand and full of life. ‘That’s what it is to be a poet, to sing about life. There’s no time for bitterness, but I don’t walk through that park when I don’t think about Maggie …’ A single copy recorded in Trove, at the State Library of Victoria, a further copy also located in the Papers of Shelton Lea at UNSW.

. Fine Condition.

AU$300