Cirrus@Austlit

'The book isn't much to look at.  It's a small-format paperback from Jacaranda Press in Brisbane, who used to produce educational texts that had an appeal beyond the classroom. The has a small drawing of seventeenth-century caravel, with a bowsprit sail, two mainsails on the foremast, and a lateen sail on the aft mast. The picture sits below the title and the name of the editor Douglas Stewart. The top left-hand corner bears the legend Australian University Paperbacks. (Was this an early advertising ploy, suggesting at once that the book was 'set' by universities and, more cunningly, reminding anyone who saw the thing that there were in fact such things as Australian universities? Nowadays, any sort of poetry book is 'set' for university study.) The poems are listed at the bottom left-hand corner of the page: "Five Visions of Captain Cook" by Kenneth Slessor, "Heemskerck Shoals" by Robert D. FitzGerald, "Worsley Enchanted" by Douglas Stewart, "The Wind at Your Door" by FitzGerald, "Christopher Columbus" by William Hart—Smith, and "Leichhardt in Theatre" by Francis Webb. Stewart didn't jib at including a work of his own in the anthology: an interesting matter to me, since Peter Porter told me years ago that it wasn't done to include one's own work in a book one was editing. Not that I've seen much evidence of lack of hubris in anthologies printed since that time (1977) — or before: including one's own work in an anthology of acclaimed writers can be taken merely as suggesting one wants to be regarded as 'seriously good'. But neither Stewart nor his publishers needed to convince anyone by the end of the 1950s that he was full bottle.' (Introduction)