AustLit

'It’s a classic. It feels good. I’m talking about a poem. And I’m talking about a t-shirt. What’s a t-shirt? A t-shirt is something an Australian poet on an international tour with three others might wear. A t-shirt is something an Australian poet on tour with three others might wear and wash, or refuse to wash; might refuse to stop wearing. I’m talking about π.O.’s tour t-shirt. I’m talking about π.O.’s dirty t-shirt tour, which materialises here, four decades later, as the chronicle-in-verse called The Tour.'  (Introduction)  

'Georgiana Molloy, one of the first wadjelas (white people) to encroach on Wardandi Noongar country in the nineteenth century, collected seeds and specimens for Captain James Mangles, a botanical connoisseur living in London. In 1840 she wrote to him, ‘I discovered a plant I have been almost panting for, a very small neat white blossom, on a furze looking Bush’. Molloy’s use of the verb ‘panting’ indicates the depths of her obsessive acquisitiveness, which was informed by a nexus of loneliness, boredom, and her ‘prevailing passion for Flowers’ (as she described it in another letter of 1840), as well as the wider colonial project of collecting.'  (Introduction)