AustLit

'Having been accorded the honour of delivering the annual Greg Dening lecture, I sought guidance from Greg's abiding demeanour and ardour, to help me offer an account of an archive that I'm currently immersed in. The archive is a collection of films that have been compiled by three generations of a farming family in the Wimmera, which is the poet John Shaw Neilson's inspiring country, as well as Wotjobaluk ancestral country. The archive is a record of inter-generational and multi-modal investigation that leads us into history, into country, into relationships meshing people, things and the lively world. I think Greg would have loved the archive. My collaborators and I are trying to do it justice, to know the exact calibrations of its peculiar insights. Which is like trying to know the weather. I take this idea (and run with it) from one of Neilson's Wimmera poems, where he imagines old farmers encountering each other in town: 'Fill up! fill up! today we meet: / What of the wind? Who knows the weather?' These lines have always made me think of Greg, of the delicacy of his hermeneutics, the grounded quality of his research and the palpability of his insights.'  (Publication abstract)