So, when it came to writing there was never any clear goal such as, at an early age, bedevils or enlightens many writers. It never occurred to me to worry about such abstractions as being a ‘good writer’, or ‘well-known’ or ‘popular’. I could in my late teens imagine what it was to be a good cricketer, however Hugh de Selincourt’s marvellous novel The Cricket Match, along with Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, is one of the few actual titles of books I can vividly recall, just as I can still remember sitting, Saturday afternoons, on seats near where the players would emerge from the dressing room at the Fitzroy Cricket Ground, waiting lor Ray Harvey and Roy Hagger to waddle out onto the field, spotless and red-capped, to open the Fitzroy innings in a district cricket match.

But there, I suppose, the genesis of later interests is to be found (these retrospective phrases can never be quite the same after Philip Larkin’s lovely dig at the had-I-but-known school in ‘I Remember, I Remember’!). I mean both the interest in our ways of transcending reality via idyllic situations (our sporting heroes, for example – the Harvey family were a Fitzroy institution, after all!) and another source of passionate feelings and identification, the social struggle, epitomised in those now classic itinerants, the Okies from the dust bowl country whom Steinbeck made so memorable.

I was then a slow developer in the skills of ambition and perhaps still am. My later life surprised me by its success. There was no sense of trying very hard to write better poetry, ‘polishing up one’s craft’, so that one felt at times an impostor, knowing that others worked harder, for longer hours at their own specific skills and yet got no better pay. The Protestant work ethic implies a correlation between effort and reward, and my later life has been a continual effort to outgrow its crippling assumptions. I doubt whether one ever does, but unless one does, there is this sense that you have received far more than you’ve been given. Certainly, it’s something of that sense that puts me under obligation to answer letters from students and unknown fellow writers (the one exception being religious enthusiasts – to respond there has always seemed to me to be to court disaster – a secular iron enters the soul, knowing how compulsive such correspondents can be … ). I have been extraordinarily fortunate in the circumstances of my friends, supporters, and critics, and in the fact that my first collection appeared at a time when there was an opening in the literary traffic, not the hectic peak-hour of 1970s and 1980s poetry-writing and publishing. That source of good fortune has also led me to think: ‘What the hell? If I never wrote another thing given the eccentricities of the pitch as many players have found it, I’ve had a terrific innings!’ That, too, leads me to a sense of bemusement when asked one of those questions about how it feels to have done something, won something … As though this was happening to someone else who could respond in kind, rather than stand flat-footed and shamble-sided before the fact. I don’t think one can ever account for good fortune, not pay back more than interest on the capital advanced. That being the case, I’ve written (until recently) very few poems about writing poems. The process has been too mysterious, off-hand, to encourage me to present myself, consciously, as an ‘artist’ … Several times in the last few years however, I have written poems relating to the process of writing, poems such as ‘Creative Process’ and ‘Kummerstadt’, but also a poem (‘On Being Fortunate’) which is very much about the feelings I’ve just mentioned, and is sort of a charm against pride. Odd, isn’t it? Especially since I don’t see others in the same light – pride in things well done is as natural as breathing and yet, in one’s own case … I have always been particularly fond of the early Arthur Miller play, The Man Who Had All The Luck. I can understand that feeling whose origin lies, I know, in superstition, but is no less ineradicable for all that … There is a lovely poem of Zbgniew Herbert’s, ‘Routine of a Soul’ where, it seems, he anticipates something like the final drouth of ideas:

What will happen

when hands

fall away from poems

when in the other mountains

I drink dry water

this should not matter

but it does

what will poems become

when the breath departs

and the grace of speaking is rejected

will I leave the table

and descend into the valley

where there resounds

new laughter

by a dark forest.

In the meantime, one continues … Living in Queensland as I have done for the last fourteen years (and for three years from 1963–65), and living here, in a provincial city of innately conservative temper, my literary lifeline, I suppose, has been the fact that I’ve been a teacher for all of my second term there, and that, for a teacher, there are a broad range of satisfactions which can offset the isolating effect of distance in this most dream-like of Australian states (where else would as inept and absurd a political figure as Mr Bjelke-Petersen have survived so long, and with such extraordinary encomiums to his prowess from the media? Hans Christian Anderseen should be living at this time!). Those satisfactions are dependent, of course, on the extent to which one respects the need to read texts and become a student among students. That has ensured the necessary discipline of reading and thinking about the implications of the poetry, novels, short stories, plays, essays read, which, I’m sure, is invaluable for one of as inherently lazy a temperament as myself. While there is obviously a close relationship between reading and writing, I’ve been struck by the number of young people who imagine writing as something which should, properly, take over completely when one has got the knack of it. Peter Porter, launching a book published by the Darling Downs Institute Press here in Toowoomba, pointed out that, for every writer, the thing being written at the moment is like the first thing a writer has ever written – it has, in the mind of the writer, all the perilous vulnerability that seemed associated with the first … Other writers will recognize the truth of that; whatever you have done becomes as nothing, like Everyman you face the inscrutable robed figure (Death? Life?) before whom you stand alone, without even Good Deeds to speak up for you … Well, actually that’s grossly overdrawn, of course – the situation is closer to that of a home handyman who tackles a bit of carpentering a little outside his usual line of work., but decides to have a go, being philosophically prepared for using the botched job for kindling if that’s how it turns out …

It’s one of the paradoxes of writing and other imaginative situations that ‘hanging loose’ can be a prelude to a successful piece of work, preventing that verbal hyperventing that can inhibit effective action. We all admire the thing that appears to have been easily wrought, effortless, ‘right’, and if the appropriate predisposition of our senses and imagination could be consciously arranged, who wouldn’t be Shakespeare? Or so we think. Or would think if we didn’t realize that so much writing is a ‘given’, after all. For example, those dramatic monologues which are amongst the better-known things I’ve written., impressionistic early ones like ‘Enter Without so Much as Knocking’, ‘And a Good Friday was had by All’, ‘First Corinthians at the Crossroads’ and later ones like ‘Pleasant Sunday Afternoon’ and ‘Open Invitation’. are as mysterious to me in their origins as a child’s first steps, or (a little later) a child’s first jump. Our elder boy, Brian, when a toddler, one day jumped for the first time, in the lounge room of the first house we lived in in Toowoomba. Our delighted response, of course, prompted him to try to repeat the experience and a series of gyrations and contortions went on for some time afterwards but without success. Our first essay into a new form can be similarly rewarding and puzzling, and I’ve wondered often what convergence of ideas led me to write, say, ‘Enter Without So Much as Knocking’. Had I been reading Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy and been influenced by the camera-eye and newsreel interludes? Was it Kenneth Fearing’s exciting poem, ‘Dirge’ (which is certainly, in its concluding lines, behind my later poem, ‘Falling Asleep Over TV’)? Or was it to somewhere in that lively part of the forest where the complex vines of E.E. Cummings’ typography trip up the traveller that the track, if found. would lead one back? Who knows? The path is soon overgrown, and one’s next ‘jump’ will be as surprising and irrecoverable as one’s first.

Because my later adult occupations have given a transitoriness to life like that which my earlier family life had given me, I have depended very much on the opinions of others. There is an advantage in some isolating factors for the writer, especially in Australia. Isolation of a kind, to a degree, can protect the writer from the coterie and the clique – from the pressure of accepting too many views and values unmediated by the sense of self. On the other hand, the person who finds themselves in something less than direct weekly contact with the literary world will, like me, look forward with doubled enthusiasm to those occasions when the opportunity comes to rub shoulders with, spill beer over, and talk late into the night with, others of the writing fraternity. This will account for that sense of the dog-off-the-chain pleasure others will detect in folks like me who never stay quite long enough to wear out their welcome.

I have just remembered, at this late juncture, that this particular piece of writing is presumed to be a self-portrait of one kind or another and, as so often happens, I have grave misgivings as to whether even an indulgent editor will be able to see it as such. I shy away from mirrors – handy things to shave one’s stubble by, and useful sources of metaphor, but things to forget as far as telling the individual truth by. Others are the more interesting mirrors, and all the fascination which eludes one in contemplating one’s own phiz or psyche up close exists without end in those other selves which make up the hall of mirrors called society. There the real interest lies, and I’ve always been particularly drawn to those writers who present the multifarious images of human nature. Thus, a writer like Edgar Lee Masters, or The Greek Anthology which so influenced the form of his Spoon River Anthology – or those moving sonnets of Edwin Robinson – have never, on rereading disappointed me. In an odd way, our view of others is our truest mirror – or rather, it lies on the side of truth. It is what we would be if we could live up to what we see. Some, perhaps, can. But for those who can’t, art exists as another, and equally true reality. I take my share of reassurance from that, as do many others.