AustLit

'In his introduction to Fume, a collection of poetry primarily written on Country in Borroloola, Phillip Hall describes his struggle to accept the challenge of Gudanji elder Nana Miller ‘to embrace enough humility to accept that not all complications were easily navigable’ (18). Hall presents himself as having been at times ‘a missionary and a misfit’ (16) and an idealist (15); ‘interactions with spirits and magic’ offer ‘a potent challenge to my secular humanism’ (96), and his poem ‘Discharge’ seems to bluntly lay out some (old) underlying drives...' (Introduction)