Cheer that cold column headed ''Deaths'' with flowers,

Or mix me up with Births and Marriages;

Surround the tragic statement of my death

With euchre-drives and good-times-had-by-all

That, with these warm concomitants of life

Jostled and cheered, in lower-case italics

I shall go homewards in the Western Star.

From ''Country Press''

In what became one of her best-known poems, after visiting a country newspaper a young Rosemary Dobson wrote that ''Births, deaths and marriages … all come homewards to the Western Star''. This week, Dobson herself, as she'd once requested, came homewards in the Western Star.

The poem, ''Country Press'', was among those read at her funeral yesterday at St Paul's Anglican Church, Manuka. After the final verse, her son Ian Bolton revealed that his brother, Robert, had arranged for their mother's death notice to appear in the previous day's edition of the Western Star.

Dobson, the last of Australia's great postwar poets, died last week in a Canberra nursing home, aged 92, only a month after her life's work, her Collected, was published.

Speaking at the service, novelist and poet David Malouf described Dobson as ''a very singular woman'' who came from a generation that had ''radically changed the tone of our culture''.

''Rosemary's poetry did all of that,'' he said. ''She became so much of what we now see as our significant past, and she is a significant part of that.'' Malouf recalled his last memory of Dobson at a poetry reading in Canberra with her, possibly her last. ''The tone of her voice was wonderfully memorable, unforgettable really.''

Robert Bolton said: ''Rosemary's concern was to press on and create. Her legacy to us is that we should do the same.'' As she wrote in ''Reading Aloud'', dedicated to her husband Alec Bolton, and also read at her funeral: ''From books to life, your thought: 'Forgive, learn from the past. Press on.' And I press on.''

The cover of the order of service noted: simply: ''Rosemary de Brissac Dobson Bolton. Poet. June 18, 1920 to June 27, 2012.''