Career
Brereton had several occupations and continued his writing, in 1896 he published Perdita, A Sonnet Record, and The Song of Brotherhood and Other Verses. These were followed in 1897 by Sweetheart Mine: Lyrics of Love and Friendship and by Landlopers in (1899), mostly prose, based on a walking tour with Dowell Philip O'Reilly. The verse in Brereton's earlier volumes was pleasant but not very distinguished, however Sea and Sky (1908), contained stronger work. In 1909 his volume Elizabethan Drama Notes and Studies proclaimed him a scholar of unusual ability and knowledge, and his studies in this period stimulated him to write his one-act play in blank verse To-Morrow: A Dramatic Sketch of the Character and Environment of Robert Greene. This is possibly the best Australian poetical play of its period, and has the merit belonging to comparatively few Australian plays that it is actable.
World War I led to Brereton producing a slender volume of verse published in 1919, The Burning Marl, dedicated to "All who have fought nobly". In 1921 he was appointed professor of English literature at the University of Sydney.
Brereton produced a volume of poems, Swags Up (1928), and a collection of his prose articles and stories was published under the title of Knocking Round (1930). The sketches of Henry Lawson and Dowell O'Reilly are of particular interest. His edition of Lust's Dominion was sent to the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium in 1914 but was thought lost in the German invasion; it was finally published there in 1931. So Long, Mick! a short one-act play in prose, was also published in 1931. Brereton contributed many letters and poems on diverse subjects to the Sydney Morning Herald, often under the pseudonym 'Basil Garstang'.
Read more about this topic: John Le Gay Brereton
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