Considering that the whole affair might have gone differently

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.

Before we left, an invitation came to deliver the inaugural Peter Steele Oration at the 2018 Melbourne Writers Festival. It would mark six years since Peter had died. I had known Peter since the 1970s as a teacher, then a mentor, a fellow poet and finally as a colleague, but had not known him as closely as many others. I was told that this oration was a chance for a poet to speak on behalf of another poet. Poets don’t often get to speak to large general audiences in Australia about poetry or its place in the life of the nation, so the University of Melbourne was hoping, for this occasion, to have a poet speak. After explaining that I would be away in a virtually inaccessible outback region at the time of the festival, there came a further offer to fly me back to give the talk, from wherever I was at the time.