February 8: Freycinet Peninsula is utterly lovely, our rented house perched high among trunks and granite boulders. Behind is one of the steep pink Hazards. We get up, and even swim before breakfast in Coles Bay. No company but birds, all thoroughly at home. Thistledown and kookaburra days, in the teasing Tasmanian summer. ‘Wachdeuch!’ cry the wattlebirds, or is it only, ‘Macdowell’?

You don’t know how fragile and frazzled you are

Till you lose the key to your Hertz Rental car.

 At least we found it again. The granite bulks like orange pachyderms rosetted with green splodges. The Coles Bay water is like being dunked in sauvignon blanc.

February 17: On our way home again, after Launceston, gossip and the family tree, at major Taswegian length. Jane’s passing comment on Cheney: ‘He shot his friend. That’s not a good look.’ We return to flat Brunswick and to Carlton, with its literate, sparrow-haunted cafés. Here I was to daydream, ‘That is always not puzzling about this book. Yes, that can be puzzling, too.’ I am haunted by epistemology, it seems; and by ontology. As Tolstoy says, ‘Man’s mind cannot grasp the causes of things in their completeness, but the desire to find these causes is implanted in man’s mind.’

February 27: Being back at my sacred, surfy Separation Creek with Evan, I’m able to take it a little easy from reading all those novels for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, now that it has sailed back to Melbourne to go with those accompanying Games. The books tick along, strange words and phrases springing from their world English. ‘Berm’ seems to be an Old Norse version of brim; and we’re much enjoying ‘Street!’ and ‘Scene’, both from Zadie Smith. This morning’s rather nice dream was about a small poetry festival, rather like Jacques Rancourt’s, mainly of French and Spanish poets, in which I was about to perform a new work, not viva voce but pre-recorded: it consisted of separate epigrams or lyric epiphanies, delivered one after another – somehow this ligature joined Queneau with the Belgian poet I once met in Paris, linking both to today’s lunch with Chris Andrews. The dream was genial because today is both Monday and payday.

March 3: Heard from Jonathan Aaron, in Cambridge, Mass., who has a new book out. Now that’s something. He works with a slow, anxious intensity, which is one way for a creative artist to go. On the other hand, I seem to be one for cheerfully manic bursts.

De Tocqueville: ‘An abstract word is like a box with a false bottom; you may put in what ideas you please and take them out again unobserved.’

March 23: Dressed up ever so neatly, and then clad in bright plumage like an eastern rosella, I am given my Doctorate of Letters, Stuart Macintyre giving me an extremely pleasant encomium. Moreover, I actually keep the Henrician bonnet and robes.

April 13: Italian voters have narrowly defeated the criminal Berlusconi. Surprise, surprise, Nino Randazzo has won a seat in the Senate, prompting hostile reaction from some drongo in South Caulfield. I think it’s rather pleasing. Saw Nino in a North Carlton restaurant, where he explained that they sit for long periods in the Italian parliament.

April 15: We had morning coffee with Judith Bishop and Lisa Gorton, both members of the same writing seminar years ago. After all her degrees, Judith is now analysing handwriting for palm pilots at a place named after the canton of Appenzell; Lisa is writing, looking after little Kelso, and doing occasional consultancies. She says she still remembers three things from my seminar: (1) use lists; (2) avoid the definite article when you can; and (3) think hard about where to end your lines in a poem. Kristin talked about the frustrations of teaching in a history-less world, where everyone knows nothing. Still, the merriment rippled. After a while we kicked on from Brunetti’s to the Università, to continue our laughter.

April 20: Ovid’s birthday, they say. The very last stubborn backyard walnut has fallen. One young woman on the tram said, ‘They ought to have an Olympic event for running in high heels.’ Another, a few days ago, ‘I’m sick of hearing the word “ontology”.’ Young Max Riebl’s great question: ‘Could a Roman army defeat a late-medieval English army?’ Oh, those guns and ballistas on the go.

Later the same week, an appalling, nay, notorious cinema reviewer, favourably reviewing a new adaptation, described Twelfth Night as one of Shakespeare’s worst plays. That great comedy! As my brother would say, he ought to be taken out and punished.

April 27: The federal treasurer mysteriously said on television that there were unlikely to be any tax cuts for middle-income earners, because they don’t pay any tax. Surely he meant the rich.

May 24: Got back to some work on the long poem, which seems to be either ‘The Serious Songs’ or ‘The Troubled Weather of Mankind’. It is progressing stealthily, but covering ground, nonetheless. A few verbals now, which I’ve harvested of late:

stealth; strengths (longest monosyllable in our language)

‘a good laugh releases endorphins’

a dead cert; a dead ringer; going like clappers

‘It’s the mouse-god.’ (Toby)

(overheard) ‘and she, like, cut her finger’

pettifoggers; hospidars; tincs

croquembouche is apparently French for bongo

Elizabeth Bishop’s poems as good as ever: better, indeed, so very themselves – Jorie Graham’s, intelligent but lacily prosy in the end. The other day I rediscovered this remark by Alec Hope: ‘Christianity is the police-state of omniscient love.’ Wow!

June 8: Like Fay Zwicky, Kevin Hart, and Andrew Taylor, I have survived in academic life while being committed to the vocation of poetry. This has not always been easy, but I built from it by taking early retirement seven or eight years ago. To some I might well seem a camelopard or gryphon, trying on many things, just as my verse dances between different dictions or registers. I have just published a hybrid long poem, a book of literary essays, and a translated canto from the Purgatorio: all these are facets of what I am. One versatile poet to whom I am imaginatively close is the Jesuit priest Peter Steele, with whom I’ve enjoyed a weekly pizza for two or three decades: we share many zigzag intellectual interests beyond the ‘small super special for two’. Overheard in the street: ‘After that, I had bladder trouble for three days.’

I jump forward for a moment here. At the year’s end, incidentally (to use Andy’s favourite adverb), Fay sent me a fine letter, analysing why I might fail to get the point of Bach, especially of his keyboard music, having cited the late George Russell’s remark that he wanted music, not mathematics. Her argument sounds most convincing, but I’ll never know, as I can’t play an instrument.

June 24: Too much society brimmed this day altogether. In the middle, I contrived to give a talk on Adam Lindsay Gordon, that feckless jockey. The audience entirely miscellaneous, my fellow comedian well informed. Nobody, alas, quoted from ‘The Sick Stockrider’, but I met some old Gordon fans. Off, then, to distant Monash for Angela Brennan’s exhibition: every soul of her generation had turned up, and the show itself was full of colour and promiscuous vitality. For me the best works would have to include her big pink abstracts of the mid-1990s, but she’s a natural painting animal. Vivacity is one of the cultural virtues.

July 6: The world gets worse every day, the news appalling. I keep coming back to Alec’s great line, ‘Taken full strength, truth is a drug that kills’. Accordingly, I thought of new tasks to keep me sane and to keep Georgia’s Mephistopheles at bay, once again.

She once playfully accused me of being too healthy, and hence of having killed off almost all my male friends. I think she does like me to be healthy, in fact, but she’d also like me to be a wise, serious oldster.

Kristin asks, ‘Did women wear black in the 1950s?’ Well, migrant women did.

W.H.A.: ‘The Country of Unconcern’

July 14: I can’t remember the name of Lisa’s little son. It’s one of those Gaelic names like Kitto and Mungo, begins with a hard C, I think; I’ll have to make do with Kiddo, I reckon, for now. It’s a bad sign, this slippage of names, when it’s not even in a crowd. When will Alzheimer’s step in, as it has with the great Zanzotto? Ah, the name is Kelso.

August 1: The bloke who dropped a dead cat in our bin overnight has surely earned Australia’s national revenge: a dead possum in his water tank. But, even if I found him, he probably doesn’t have a water tank – yet. At least this is a diversion from west Asia, where Sunnis and Shiites, Israelis and Hezbollahs, blast away, making sure that there will be no peace in the area for the next two centuries. But was Thomas Hardy right in declaring (in God’s voice) that ‘The world is as it used to be’? Be that as it may, I went on to record my ABC talk on clichés.

August 7: The big Portugal dream: We were at the margins of a small town, waiting for a bus to the centre. I realised after a while that it was a Sunday, and the bus wouldn’t come. We began to walk north-west along the road, which then curved through green paddocks north-east, townward. We were going to ask for directions, but we were in Portugal, after all. And then I saw a small group of men working round a wide pit amid the grass, and found that I could speak the language after all. I asked what was in the pit and they replied saying it was the remains of twenty-four men who …

Apricot petals strew a corner of the rapidly greening backyard. My belief that Ravel’s Quartet is really about Red Indians. Remembered my father’s expression from childhood, ‘Open thy gob and put forth thy lolligar’. And I did like Barnaby Joyce on the sale of Telstra 3: ‘You don’t take a sick cow to market – unless you think it’s going to die.’

October 8: Travel to Oxford, etc., grows closer, and we pore over maps, trying to take in the essence of places – did the travel insurance – alternately reading Ulysses and War and Peace, the former far richer from page to page, at least in our tongue. Meanwhile, Ken Gelder has written the most appalling attack on literature, and especially on the concept of style, in the latest Overland. His anti-aesthetic position is, of course, indistinguishable from that of John Howard and the right-wing philistines. It has been so for a long time: the right and the far-left in materialist cahoots.

A truly summer evening, by the grace of God. In the course of translating François Jacqmin, I have been hunting out the word ‘cardamines’, which turns out to identify a large family of cruciferae, all bitter cresses, among them the cuckooflower or lady’s smock. Yarned with D., the latest complexity of whose life is the challenge of having to run an electric fence around his inner-urban backyard to keep the possums off his cherry tree. Also ran into Robyn Davidson for coffee; she’s tired of still being the camel woman, twenty-eight years on. She’s moving into Georgia’s street next, after the darkness of the McGeorge House. We discussed nomadic habits, about which she genuinely knows a lot.

October 16: Dreamed this morning that I had to visit a brothel: a fibro cottage, of four rooms. Although merely a reporter, once inside the front room I had to pull out my dick for a female attendant to wipe with a disinfectant cloth; she was doing the same for three or four other men in the room. The next night’s dream was far more attractive, concerning my preparations to cross the mountain to get to beautiful Wineglass Bay.

And now packing is more or less over: I’ve finished sorting out Europe on the e-mail. Dined on quail at the Abruzzo Club.

Late October and early November: We travelled around England at the behest of poetry readings, and meeting plenty of old friends. The highlight took place on the Queen’s domain, Alastair and Helen Niven throwing a merrily literary party for us at Cumberland House, Windsor Great Park. Among the writers present were Peter Porter in full voice, Jamie McKendrick, David and Helen Constantine, Margaret Walters and Michael Alexander. To our general displeasure, the party was crashed by lumpish Mark O’Connor, who is, in Kristin’s words, the Widmerpool of Australian poetry. He gets around everywhere. But it was an event to remember, and generously informal.

In London, there was an intriguing full-scale retrospective of David Hockney’s portraits, in so many idioms. It led me to write this little tribute:

Overloving his still parents
like an unweaned heifer, or dove,
he paid them perpetual clear
tribute through his crayons
till, sobering and bone-deaf, he
became his recent father
and accepted the charge
as a labouring of love,
never to be worked off,
not even by genius:
never in human time.

November came around, sunnily enough for the dusty Old World, and then it was off to Rome for monuments, a magical Paul Klee exhibition, and M.J. Hyland’s launch of a little bilingual book of mine. After all that classical stone, it would be Heathrow and home, aided by the comforts of Qantas Club lounges. If there’s a rich patron somewhere out there, let her or him comfort a poet further with a few business class flights. Going halfway round the world doesn’t get any easier.

November 8: Rome, after thirty years, shows again its boundlessness in size (even though compact, like Bonox) and time. The palazzi are giant children of the ruins; the rusticated stone and the usually incomplete marble columns are part of the same family romance. No surprise that wonderful Sigmund mapped the consciousness as Rome: yet he also wanted to be Hannibal, conquering it this time. And, despite the horrid ‘Wedding Cake’ above Piazza Venezia, it is subtly uncentred. The seven hills took care of that from the start, so the Campidoglio could never quite have its own way over other readings and alternative viewings. But I do like Kierkegaard’s quip, that ‘Marcus Aurelius helps himself in a lot of little ways – by being Emperor’. Think more about the Arian heresy and its defeat?

November 19–20: While I was still digesting plaques or fragments, tesserae or epiphanies, of Rome and London, it was off again ‘as a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend’, to the ridge-top farm at Terip. After lunch it would be my workshop/reading at the famous Ruffy Produce Store, notable not only for its garden but also for rhubarb chutney. The usual charming, disparate, eccentric group of writers and listeners. Bernie’s excellent beef for lunch, and Sari’s salads, plus her hungry conversation.

Not much animal lie spooted (‘life spotted’, rather), bar the usual fussy echidna exploring the roadside and a rapid rabbit; but we had seen a big matronly koala lolloping across the ground and scaling a box-tree, first butterfly then crawl. Hills like those of Piero, prettily dotted with darknesses. An outcrop like a Pharaonic temple. So tranquil then, tooling along alone in a brand new hire car, even having the impulse to look at a dead fox, granite formations, the dry plains eaten down to their grass roots, bodies of roos, a hovering hawk, one hill of exquisite shape, leading one to ask Picasso’s question, ‘Does God have a style?’

November 24: Dreadful Meanjin board meeting; much blood on the carpet later. Home to a house cramped and thumping, new pergola complete, front rooms turning aqua or bright yellow or comforting white (with some name, of course: ‘Whisper’ in this case). Back rooms and studio are choking with disorderly furniture. It’s all like the madwoman’s knitting.

November 27: Betjeman review finished at last. It’s a pity I can’t remember anything he said the time I had lunch with him, in 1971, but Boom Period architecture tickled his fancy. The book is no good at all, even though it’s by A.N. Wilson, whom others admire.

Saw The Prairie Home Companion which will surely turn out to be the best film of the year, however brilliant Helen Mirren may be as the queen; this film is so full of the intelligently variegated high spirits at which Altman excels – he’s still alive, isn’t he? My advance chapbooks arrive, pleasingly, from efficient Picaro.

You can’t say I’m not keeping busy. Little ulcer on my heel remains displeasing, though; I don’t expect to be unwell, disapproving of sickness. 

December 21: Lost my cheque book, but what the heck. Reading Terry Eagleton’s outstanding new book on poetry for ABR. What a writer he is, for an academic! Everything here is as lucid as spring water, fresh as berries. Finished the Henning Mankel early this morning, gripping as ever: makes one want never to visit Sweden. But I would still like to see the Highlands, the Western Isles and Orkney. More flotsam follows:

caravanserai          

The Penny Drops

Ghost Riders in the Sky

pieface

Nipper Jumpkins

roadkill; treadmill;

disaster-prone; politically supine

rotary hoe; Plymouth Hoe; Westward Ho

Free association is the brother of invention. Back to the animals: tapir; okapi; golden agouti; sloth; bonabo; rhinoplasty – and why is ‘rhino’ the latest slang term for men’s pussy-watching clubs? Goat-coloured hair; randy as a stoat. Slessor’s wonderful evocation of Holland, with ‘Fox-coloured mansions, lean and tall’. He also devised ‘Tirdouf!’ for gunfire. A cunning old dandy, he was. I only met him twice or thrice.

The smoke which is so aromatic and painterly for us in town spells loss and disaster for scorched or stranded folks in the High Country: no news is good news. The longest day passes, sfumato. And clever Guy Rundle has proved, like Josh Wilson, that it’s possible to write good travel pieces for the press.

December 28: Lovely inland day after southern clouds, at the valley and vineyard of Tallarook. Brisk dry, stony walk, with good conversation, partly about Patrick’s lack of interest in his own childhood. Barbecue under the big eucalypts, between faint hillsides and the intense green of the orchard and vines. Guns, puns and motorbikes at the end. Kevin Hart has written a wonderful essay on religious faith in the latest number of Meanjin, full of philosophical clarity, plus Aquinas, whom I’ve never read. A favourite poem of mine there, too. Apropos lyric poetry, Philip Mead has produced a fine selection of David Campbell, now unduly neglected.

December 29–30: A year winds down happily towards its end, with mild days (something between the recent times of fire and snow), with good books (Hazel Rowley and Inga Clendinnen), poems to journals, letters to write and a new essay on Auden. Saw The Queen, an ideal vehicle for the marvellous Helen Mirren (strange symbolic image of the fourteen-point Highland stag, beheaded like Charles I). Internet ‘down’ in the office, which made me cross yesterday, less so today, and still not half as bad as a restless cat in the bed or the big pale spider in my sandal this morning. Endless apricot-picking this week. And last night off to Surrey Hills to see our genial deaf friends, both overweight and certainly stressed, I fear; though their elegant son Jack is in good fettle, with his charming historian’s imagination, and soft suasive speech. Peter, the father, dwells much in his past, grasping it back in easy desperation.

What have I learned this year, apart from how to keep harvesting happiness? Glimpses into the possible meaning of the God who probably isn’t there, though I must read that review by Terry ‘Skeleton’ on all this. Here is some of it: ‘He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects …’ So there we go, with the celebrated Marxist an erstwhile Catholic. Or still one? You can’t take Ireland out of the boy from Salford, can you?

Meanwhile the world is well rid of Pinochet and Saddam Hussein, while a third villain in Rumsfeld has been dumped at last. But the blood just goes on flowing every day, with no abatement.