Australia Needs a Poet Laureate Steven Schwartz[1] Oxford-educated and possessed of considerable charm, Michael Massey Robinson was a rogue and a scoundrel.[2] Convicted of extortion in London, he was sentenced to death in 1796. Luckily for him, convicts with his education were desperately needed in Britain’s antipodean colony. So, instead of dangling from a noose, Robinson found himself clinging to the rails of the ship that transported him to New South Wales. He arrived in 1798 and immediately went to work as legal secretary to the newly arrived judge advocate whom he had befriended on the voyage. After only a…