Cirrus@Austlit

In Blue Notes ( p.96) Duggan has described his Blue Hills poems as a 'discontinuous sequence begun in ... The Great Divide.' (1985). The sequence continued in later selected works and elsewhere.

Duncan Hose in Jacket 39, 2010, makes this comment about the sequence;:

Blue Hills was a serialised radio program produced in Australia from the late 1940s until the 1970s, and the Australian poet Laurie Duggan picked up the name for a long series of occasional poems about being in Australia. As they have advanced numerically ('Blue Hills 14', 'Blue Hills 15'... 'Blue Hills 60'), these poems really have become thrilling little instruments of sensitivity, proceeding by plucking out the contingent details of scenes of Australian life, and resting everything upon them. There is nothing that cannot go into a 'blue hills' poem, yet as little mobiles, Duggan's structures are, gravitationally, extremely precise, and plainly an aesthete's delight. In many parts of Australia, if you haul yourself over one set of blue hills, you are likely to see the horizon replicated as endless blue hills: it is a flat figure of surface abstraction and a figure of echo. The poems are little complexes of ideologies, aesthetics, and the ethical charting of Australia's historical deliverance to the commodity market. Duggan's 'Blue Hills' open up an invitation to trespass on new ways of thinking Australia through poetics, and is one of the more lively mechanisms of the modern Australian canon.'