No one was likely to have predicted that Gwendoline Nessie Foster, the child born on 8 June 1920 in semirural Taringa, part of the city of Brisbane, would become one of Australia's major poets. In retrospect, however, as she told Stephen Edgar, one of several interviewers who sought her out in the 1980s, she could see that "everything I needed [to become a writer] was present in my childhood: my grandfather's library, literate and lively-minded adults, teachers with a passion for good grammar and no interest at all in self-expression from those whose parsing was less than perfect." This somewhat dry prescription for the making of a poet is dramatized in her depiction of a much-loved teacher, Fred Bennett, during the verse address she delivered on receiving an honorary D.Litt. from the University of Tasmania in 1988:

For Fred, if poetry existed,
it wasn't there to give us joy.
When...