Petra White

Many years ago, as a young fruit-picker, I carried Martin Harrison’s The Kangaroo Farm around with me for a week. I was camping on the Murray in Cobram, and struck by Harrison’s vivid evocations of the landscapes like the one in which I was sleeping on rocks. His sense of light, the gristliness of things, the sounds, the movement of kingfishers. It was a world made up of particular details, of things attempted to be seen as they are, rather than being embroidered into any overarching narrative or self-proclaiming poetic. Harrison had a kind of honesty and closeness to things that I hadn’t yet seen in my early days of reading Australian poetry.