Left: early colonial “Australian Aboriginal” map displayed at Imperial Archive, Queen’s University, Belfast; right: October 1885 map of Western Australia from the Perry-Castañeda Library at University of Texas at Austin inscribed: “Physical Sketch Map of Northwest Australia showing the surface characteristics of the country and discoveries of the most recent explorers.”
I met Robbie Wood in the fall of 2006, when we were coparticipants in a seminar at the University of Pennsylvania. Both from Commonwealth countries, and from quite remote areas, we bonded over our shared experiences of the oddities of living in a big city in the USA. Our senses of being at home within the American version of the English language and comfortable within our new cultural milieu were complicated by our distinct but related experiences of more overt and obvious forms of settler colonialism.
I first met Lawrence Joseph nearly thirty years ago. I was a sophomore in high school, with verses in hand and trouble in mind. He was a young professor at the University of Detroit School of Law, where my father served as dean. A serious poet with a steady job, Joseph struck my father as a good role model for his freshly literary son, so he sent us out for lunch at a diner near campus.
The second installment of Pam Brown’s feature “Fifty-one Contemporary poets from Australia” (ordered, “[i]n the interest of objectivity,” by “a recently invented ‘downunder’ method — the reverse alphabet”) includes work from Pete Spence, Jaya Savige, Tracy Ryan, Gig Ryan, David Prater, Peter Minter, Geraldine McKenzie, David McCooey, John Mateer, and Cameron Lowe, along with artwork by Spence.
