Slessor was born Kenneth Adolphe Schloesser[2][3] in Orange, New South Wales.[1] As a boy, he lived in England for a time with his parents[4] and in Australia visited the mines of rural New South Wales with his father, a Jewish mining engineer whose father and grandfather had been distinguished musicians in Germany.[5]
His family moved to Sydney in 1903. Slessor attended Mowbray House School (1910–1914) and the Sydney Church of England Grammar School (1915–1918),[1] where he began to write poetry. His first published poem, "Goin'", about a wounded digger in Europe, remembering Sydney and its icons, appeared in The Bulletin in 1917.[6] Slessor passed the 1918 NSW Leaving Certificate with first-class honours in English and joined the Sydney Sun as a journalist. In 1919, seven of his poems were published. He married for the first time in 1922.[2]
