Cirrus@Austlit

'There was 9 hours of footage about Robert Adamson’s works, his personality, and his effect on the contributors as individuals and the wider Australian poetic community. A ‘paper- draft’ was created first, the step where an editor writes a transcript, and from that text, is able to more easily pluck out connected themes, similar topics discussed, and then group them together. This was particularly interesting to do, as many contributors had different memories of the same moments of Robert’s life. The facts may be different, but the essence they were communicating was always the same. Keeping these contra- dictions and individual perspectives seemed important -- intentionally matching the correctly remembered facts side-by-side with the misremembered details -- in an attempt to elevate the work away from simple ‘reading the facts’ to a more human-centred recollection of a man, the portraiture of who he had become in the mind of others. In this sense, there isn’t one Robert talked about in this documentary, but twelve -- one for each person who spoke about him.' (Introduction)