Victor James Daley

Victor Daley was born on 5th September 1858 In the town of Navan, in County Meath, Ireland. He took one of his pseudonyms Creeve Roe from local name for Navan, (it translates as Red Branch).
His father died when Daley was 3 and his mother re-married 10 years later. On her second marriage the family moved to England where Daley was educated at School for about a year before taking a job with the Great western railway.
At the age of 20 he set off to stay with relatives in Adelaide and disembarked at Sydney thinking that Adelaide would not be far away! After a short spell as a gardener in Sydney he moved on to Adelaide and from there to Melbourne. He found himself a job writing for the sports pages of the Carlton Advertiser but soon became a leader and verse writer for that paper.
At one point he left to join a friend gold prospecting but failed to meet up with his friend and without sufficient skill on his own, he soon went back to writing, this time for the Queanbeyan Times.
By 1882 he was back in Sydney earning his living as a freelance writer for the Bulletin and Punch. Over the next 10 years he lived in Sydney, Richmond, Melbourne before settling down and living at various locations within Sydney including a spell on a house-boat in the Harbour.
In 1902 Daley became ill and undertook various moves to try and find a suitable climate in which to recover, including a sea voyage to a number of locations including Santa Cruz and the Solomons. However Daley found little relief in these locations and returned to Waitara in the Sydney suburbs where he died on 29th December 1905.
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