Biography Rex Ingamells

Poet Biography

Rex Ingamells was a poet and the founder of the Jindyworobak movement. He was born in Ororoo, South Australia. He gained his education at the University of Adelaide, prior to becoming a high school teacher. He also worked as a journalist and publisher’s representative. In 1951 he lectured in Australian Literature at the Melbourne Technical College.
Ingamells wrote his prose manifesto ‘Conditional Culture’ (1938), and founded the Jindyworobak movement in that year, in response to L.F. Giblin’s urging that poets in Australia should portray Australian nature and people as they are in Australia, not with the ‘European’ gaze, an article in the Age concerning Australian Literature (February 16, 1935) by G.H. Cowling, and The Foundations of Culture in Australia by P.R. Stephenson. Ingamells was named as a judge of the Commonwealth Jubilee Literary competition in 1951.
Ingamells is the recipient of the 1945 Grace Levin Prize for Poetry.