Cirrus@Austlit

'As my 20-year working life at the University of Melbourne was coming to its natural end by teaching for the last time an introductory subject on modern poetry during the first half of 2018, Andrea and I were planning to spend the following four months travelling in the far north of Australia, first crossing the Great Sandy Desert on the Tanami Track up from Alice Springs to revisit a community in that desert where we had lived for most of the past two years, and then crossing and recrossing the area of Western Australia known as the Kimberley, a craggy region of spinifex, boab trees and laterite still sparsely populated and still unforgiving to the unprepared. This is the country of the Bunuba, Warrwa, Ungummi, Ungarinyin, Ngarnawu and Munumburra, Walmajarri, Kija and other Indigenous peoples.' (Introduction)