Brian Ernest Matthews was born on 27 December 1936 at St Kilda, Melbourne. From 1967 until the early 1990s he worked at Flinders University teaching English and Australian literature, with the focus changing to Australian literature over time. Matthews wrote short stories, books, essays, articles, reviews, and biographies. Considered one of Australia's foremost scholars of Henry Lawson and Lawson's mother Louisa, Matthews works include Louisa, The Receding Wave : Henry Lawson's Prose, the Lawson entry in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Quickening, Magpie, A Fine and Private Place, The Temple Down the Road, Manning Clark: A Biography and Richie Benaud. Matthews helped to establish the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL). He wrote a column for the Australian Weekend Magazine from 1997 to 2001 and also wrote a column for Eureka Street. He died on 2 June 2022.