Vincent Thomas Buckley (1925-1988), poet, critic and professor of English, was born on 8 July 1925 at Romsey, Victoria, second son of Victorian-born parents Patrick Buckley, carter and sometime farm labourer, salesman and postman, and his wife Frances Margaret, née Condon, a librarian and schoolteacher. Vincent spent his childhood in the Romsey district, an area of hilly farmland, much of it in the hands of Irish Australians. The poet was to celebrate this environment in his memoir, Cutting Green Hay (1983).