AustLit

'Let’s begin at school in English class in the ‘new buildings’ around 1978, Geraldton High School, the new wing built to replace the asbestos demountable classrooms to the south of the old school main building. We are reading through Alexander Craig’s anthology Twelve Poets—an in-class reading session to get familiar with some Australian poetry in a more concentrated way than the odd poem here and there in a general poetry anthology. I am lucky enough via my mum, an English teacher at the school, to be already up with a few Australian poets—especially Judith Wright, who is already established and well known to school readers but not actually one of the poets in the anthology. These are newer poets, astonishingly eleven men and only one woman, but Gwen Harwood is no extra spoke on the wheel, she’s pivotal. As Judith Wright looms so large in my imagination, I am shocked into a different way of perceiving ‘landscape’ via the poetry of a once-local Geraldton poet, Randolph Stow, whose poem ‘Landscapes’ echoes off the page:...)