AustLit

'I wasn’t entirely prepared for the Canberran rain and cold. Late November, ostensibly summer, and my last trip to the capital at the same time of year almost a decade earlier had shocked me with a week of perfect blue-skied thirty-degree days. Naively, I’d expected the same this time around. I’d packed a raincoat but no umbrella; still, I preferred to turn my hood up against the showers as I trekked through the centre to the bus stop. I sheltered under the canopy and boarded a bus Google reassured would take me to my destination. My memory of this same journey years ago was sketchy, and this city looked different shrouded in grey. My recall sharpened as I alighted and walked through the University of Canberra’s campus, searching for the lecture theatre that would host the opening keynote of this year’s Australasian Association of Writing Programs conference.' (Introduction)

'Australia has a strong history of poetry, albeit largely white and male. Henry Lawson, Banjo Patterson, Adam Lindsay Gordon, CJ Dennis, AD Hope and Dorothea Mackellar are all notable figures in Australia’s colonial history and literature. Why is it, then, that poetry collections are largely ignored by our major literary prizes?' (Introduction)

'There was a Facebook message from Hetti Perkins, which was an odd coincidence. I was working on a poem about her late father Charlie for a collection, which I would later abandon as I grew aware that I lacked the precision for poetry. The early interest I had attracted leading to these opportunities was more about a literary industry driven to uncover diverse new voices than an acknowledgement that with hard work and patience I might become a great writer. Attention that provided motivation but pushed emerging writers in directions at once exhilarating, confusing and premature. At the time I was considering using the title ‘Peeling’ for the poetry chapbook when I noticed her message. The poem was about her father’s role in the Nancy Prasad incident, where a five-year-old Fijian girl was deported to Fiji, symptomatic of Australia’s racist immigration policies of the 1960s.' (Introduction)