AustLit

'I: A note on Indigenous Australians

'A great many Australian poets are in an interesting and ironic state of dispossession, although perhaps only a small proportion of them actually feels that way – that proportion, let’s say, whose subjects and predispositions draw them towards the landscape, its flora and fauna, and their human experience thereof and thereupon. And perhaps we are speaking only of a proportion of this proportion – although even as we contemplate this we cannot exclude the possibility that some proportion of those great many who turn their backs upon such subject matter do so themselves out of some unacknowledged sense of impropriety or dispossession.' (Introduction)