January 19:

It’s happened at last, with the rain: I find it easier to write on a computer than by hand. Joke about a father who gave his son a book, and the latter spent half an hour trying to work out where to insert the batteries.

February 26:

Aargh! Those tangled Meanjin meetings begin again, as it were for ever: echoes of the Somme and Villers-Bretonneux.

March:

was all gigs and meetings, plus Brisbane. Some constructions from Riddley Walker, that most verbally inventive fable: No trubba; Dog Pry Mincer; Adom, the Littl Shynin Man. Also reading Richard Cobb; English Travellers; John on Pontius Pilate (not PILATES!) and a Montalbano thriller.

Aunt Violante: ‘cheese digests everything except itself.’ Off for a generous holiday at Swansea, Tasmania, in an 1820s farmhouse with beaches: plenty of brisk swimming.

April 12:

Coffee with Josh, and a leisurely Greek dinner with Evan who is going to lend us his house at Separation Creek – all that fishing on my sacred coast. But we mistakenly praised my Subaru, so that wicked Murphy’s Law operated.

April 15:

Nature’s paradox: rotten apples under a lemon tree; recalcitrant birds in the drizzle – backyard bright yellow with fallen walnut leaves, as we returned from spacious Bendigo. It’s a fine gallery collection, the queerest work being a copy of Burne-Jones’s Cophetua and the beggar maid.

Mayday, and Ihab’s back in town. The APC’s now busily under way, with meetings and launches: one has to keep crossing the Yarra! After the umpteenth Meanjin barney, I’m the token Leninist.

May 22:

Walking to work across Royal Park, I was accompanied by a swallow, enjoying my stirring up of insects – back to PG’s with healthy Peter Steele, who wants to get on with writing his linked poems about the Mass; glad to say he enjoyed ‘The Troubled Weather’. Reading a grubby biog-raphy of Beethoven, plus Proust’s orchestrated prose, in the Treharne translation (but I still view the characters through Philippe Julian’s drawings for that pale blue edition). Was I mischievous in calling it the most Australian of novels?

Hawk from a Handsaw is due next August; but now those dirty moggies next door have snuck under our house – a winter haven. It all stinks of cats’ piss, strong, eucalyptoid. Obsequies for genial John Blair-West, then a rampant throng at the NGV for Sonia Payes’s book of photographs.

June:

To Paris, with a window view of the desert, Danube delta, and then the Alps. Generosity of David and Mary underlies this. Overwhelming Kiefer show in the Grand Palais, ruined towers full of grouped pictures.

The kids’ problems to sort out, but I must realise that, in my seventies, I can’t solve everything.

I’ve completed co-judging the poetry Victorian Premier’s Poetry Prize: so many books! And I read a stout biography about Goethe, so famous at twenty-five that wondering people compared him with Christ. Ah, Sturm und Drang Germany with its cute little princely states – some writers still regarding printed texts as bourgeois. What happens when fame gets it right?

July 9:

Real winter, like in the old days: buds on a magnolia near at hand, Wimbledon over. I long claimed that I don’t get colds, but here I am with a real one – chill of the south, or weakened with jetlag? Josh and I talked about memories of France, characteristically about nature: ‘snake in the swimming pool’, bumblebees at Salazac, feeding the chooks there, and the animal drawings at Lascaux; also canoeing down river, under cliffs and a castle, water amazingly clear.

Lamb chops at last, then poached quinces: yum, as Jill would say.

July 13–22:

Days spent in the fresh un-city of Canberra, and amid those winter vine battalions of Mildura. Offended by last year’s diary, Poet M said, ‘Ah, you old reprobate.’ Well, well. I’ll try not to upset him, or the gondolier, this year.

HOT AIR BOOKINGS HERE. Need for food haiku, as in:

Lemon thyme served on
garlic and parsnip mash with
mushroom schnitzel stack.

‘So-called Zeitgeist of the carbon footprint.’ (Kinsella).

What will this century be like? Speaking in Mildura, John Coetzee sees America cursed for generations, as the infallibly doomed family of George W. Bush. Wonderful old Saxo-Saxon quartet at the next table, all so blonde and so attired in cream, he with no residual marbles.

August 21:

Marco Fazzini arrives from Vicenza. Mirka Mora’s lacy knickers in an Aspendale beach photo featured in Heide’s wretched display when I took Marco out there. Most of their collection was stashed away, the museum tricked out with genteel 1950s design. The only real meat was the Tucker-and-women show: far from popular, that stuff.

August 26:

Melbourne Writers’ Festival. Our old show with Jacob Rosenberg, then launched Judith Bishop’s book. Nice chat with Simon & Magica: great name, that. Back in Brunny for Marco’s risotto.

Dream of scholars in black gowns, a little hole in the garden: it led down into an archive where the world’s experience was stored in shelves of slim uniform volumes. Then, there were the children, black water and, around them, a dense blackberry jungle. I feared for those little kids, mucking around near their fathers’ heavy labour (see judges’ reports from Federal Court).

September 7:

Topics with Ian Fried over a merry lunch included Liverpool as City of Art; Manchester childhood; pleasures of St Kilda; notions of character; A.S. Byatt’s mind; Ian’s Henry James review; seductiveness of Margaret Walters’s voice; childhood holidays in Donegal; Banville’s The Sea and his great spy novel; creative writing PhDs(!); second-hand bookshops; floods in West Midlands; Fiona Sampson; Alastair in the Great Park; ‘blend of the conversational and Wallace Stevens’ in my long poem; Melbourne’s 1880s; Len French; John Armstrong’s aesthetic; not thinking of Christima Stead as being Australian; summer teaching in France; Auden; Germaine’s panache. Then, as a coda, he met Tony and Gary Foley.

Peter Porter writes, ‘We are not put on earth to be happy but to ensure / The effective production of Daihatsu Hatchbacks.’

September 21:

I can’t reveal secrets about university micro-politics, but its ramifications and arm-wrestling go on, and I don’t escape, despite my grey hairs. Ian Britain keeps giving us hell: what a fighter!

September 22:

People who love dogs and read Stead need to have a balanced view about Lacan. Carrie Tiffany and Peter Ellingsen to dinner: very ardent company, too, with an eye (or two) for the visual and minds for the verbal. Little yarns of the Lacanian mini-culture – Carrie’s revulsion against alcohol: even the figs-in-wine were too much for her.

Geelong beats Collingwood in a tough one and tomorrow we’re off to an actual wedding, like in the olden days, when Grandma was a baby (old song). Now I’ll start reading Mr Pip, universally recommended – and it’s looking OK.

September 23:

Marriage at the Stokehouse, crammed with suits and smart frocks – a band, the sea below, unclouded sun. Ancient anecdote, it goes without saying, and lawyers laid on with a trowel. Overjoyed to find an editorial mistake by Jon Stallworthy the unworthy.

September 26:

A frenzy of slurs (Age headline), after which I was to have a night of violent dreams: the first about an elephantine monster I had to shoot in the Achilles tendon. (Did the Achilles tendon bit come from my current reading of the brilliant translation of the Odyssey? Unputdownable, it is.)

More disconcerting dreams – having associated with the IRA, I kept having to find boarding-houses in which to escape from the authorities. The next evening J. came round in tears to explain that everything was going wrong. And we’d just seen that excellent film, the French Lady Chatterley. Went to bed quite destroyed but, after a while, amiable. A quiet day followed.

Alan Loney finds Melbourne ever so much less threatening than NZ, partly because the size of the city creates far more middle-ground between any warring cliques.

October 6:

Off to Hobart, in which mountain-shadowed town, K.’s aunt-in-law was to marry the mentor of Australian dung beetles. It was held in a mid-Victorian bishop’s house called Runnymede. Kristin played a lot of Scarlatti there, and I read most of ‘Two in the Campagna’, finding some Browning in the glass-fronted bookcase: and there being beetles in this intriguing love poem. Attractive select-retrospective of Janet Dawson’s work, ranging from her Londonish abstractions through elegant fantasies and large eucalyptoscapes, a nude Michael Boddy and on, colourfully, to Morandiesque still lives, cabbages or beguiling cauliflowers.

October 11:

Jason Steger rang, asking me the appropriate questions if Les should win the Nobel Prize: Doris Lessing won. We discussed an earlier year’s notion that Gerald Murnane should get it; but he would never go to Stockholm. ‘He could go via Budapest,’ I suggested.

October 12:

I was snoring, so went off to a Snoring Bed, not realising that Kristin had already gone to another bed. When you go to write up a diary, you forget what should be going into it.

Overheard: ‘It’s all just too knowledgy for me.’

Cheques, and commissions, rolled in just when they were most needed. Mariella brought in the ripe new book I’ve done with Tommaso and George. Somehow, I keep drifting into wantonly arcane ‘artists’ books’ – Bruno’s influence.

October 13–14:

Off to the Strathbogies for Bop’s tennis weekend. Picturesque farm, granite outcrops, lucid trout stream, and a gravel court. But I snored too much: unpopular in this. Like R., and also the late F.. Dead animals on the Sunday morning macadam, including several kangaroos, a wombat and a koala. A cheery echidna was going about its business, echidnaciously.

K., of a male with fertility problems: ‘He’s a slow swimmer.’

Zany TV programme on the neanderthals and new-chum Homo sapiens, pointing out that they must have inter-rooted sometimes; lots of nice face-painting, and instruction in mammoth hunting. Joel on being a speechwriter: poetry remains his source; but he and Brendan both spoke about ritual in Catholic boyhoods. For me, it was hymns, not ritual.

Feeling fit, but it’s time to go to bed, switching on the ‘free mini-series of the night’. What will it be? The big Portugal dream with its pit of victims?

November 3:

Perhaps I’m at ease, apart from intermittent hay fever, and ruddy Meanjin, which trickles on. Here we all are, doing the same things, slowly, watching poetry standing on an islet, like the unicorn, as Noah’s flood of electronic publicity rises all around. Spry conversation with John Clarke yesterday, about Auden’s profusion of ideas.

November 6:

There’s a hole in the side of my handbasin that I nightly take for a cockroach and blench. Quiet Cup day but a good race, Mahler leading from the front, coming in third. Sorted out my correspondence with a Leonard Woolfish virtue. Bob Priestley has just died, so we popped into Evan’s on the way home. He was in a sorry state with black eye, damaged nose and hiccups. A letter from Peter Porter says that he would like to be able to vote every day; he also says poets are a particularly nasty lot.

November 7:

My hypnopompic phrase this morning was ‘It’s unique on doors’. Later did some surrealist accidentalising with Bruno, for a droll whatnot. Hachibombatar! Liverpool put in eight goals, the last one coming off Babel’s backside. Piano group filled the house, so I went round to Toby and Soph’s for tea, stonkered after struggling for three sets: can’t play singles, these days. Saw Gertrude in Carlton, who was properly subservient and sycophantic: thus order is restored.

A traditional courtship or seduction table: older Italian bloke, with not much English but a lot of proximity; young Skip woman, being beguiled.

November 8:

Interest rates up, which might chill Howard. I’d put Carroll, Tiffany and Fagles’ Homer down for ‘best book of the year’; I’m leaving out poets, having done enough ticking and launching in their territories.

Cockatoos on campus, tearing up aural galvo,

Josh down the coast yabbying; Toby back from Laos and Hanoi (from a Vietnamese family herself, Sophie said, ‘Too many Vietnamese!’)

November 21:

One is always going to Canberra: this time for the thirtieth Harvard Chair (currently held by Stuart Macintyre). Quite a cluster of types and characters.

Election night itself was exciting, gripping our attention like the last overs of a test match. Figures rolled in, confirming most predictions to within a seat or two. But we waited for Bennelong, which, delightfully, fell into place, although the victor was courteously slow in claiming her victory. As for Peter Costello, the scribes can’t be sure whether: ‘He’s falling on his sword / Or if that metallic sound / Is the sharpening of blades.’ I see it as his Shakespearean revenge on Little Johnny. Neither of our major parties appears to give a stuff about the fate of the planet. They’re busy smarming the electors, most of whom have far too many material goods, anyway, and have carbon gumboots.

December 1:

Slowly now we have to get used to the way life continues normal, even with an eleven-years’ regime rolled or toppled over. The daily is pervasive. Still, rural often re-mains ravishing – if you’re not a farmer, nor dependent on our dying river systems. Hot days now: hibiscus, jacaranda, oleander, and choric crickets of an evening.

December 7:

Terry Eagleton’s lecture was charming, fluent, insubstantial; but he did talk about ‘ontological thickness’: deep down, he yearns back toward the Leavis years. Next evening, dinner in South Yarra with our Veneto visitors. Last threads of our Meanjin year drift out of sight – DV.

December 18:

Delightful to see old friends from Dunblane this arvo. Later, dinner with Patrick and Jean McCaughey and the Senbergs in North Melbourne. Naturally courteous, Patrick doesn’t care for the work of female artists (cf. my brother’s notion of suttee for artists’ widows!). He’s an ardent fan of Roger Kemp; appalled at what the Joe Brown donation has done to the NGV; forgot to ask him about Gordon Bennett, which might have been explosive. And he’s keen on seeing Australian art in global terms – equals American?

Jim D. on the three Tin-Tins, the other two having been Vin Tin-Tin and Lynne Tin-Tin. And one young poet murmuring about another: ‘It’s not really fair. She looks like a supermodel.’

December 21:

At the solstice, with its sticky airs, I get the last of 2007’s work done, and post off the last of our animal Christmas cards. We stumble over and out. A nasty residue of Mr Howard’s Australia was found in the outer-Sydney residents who demonstrated fiercely against a new Muslim school. His canny, implied racism has cut deep.

Overheard: ‘My dad goes, like, you can only drive it so far.’

Vindicators of the evanescent; Christmas approaching, I think about bubbles and Foo, on the guest role: ‘one has merely to keep smiling, and keep pushing forward one’s glass.’

Not happy about the world. Those who support unqualified ‘free enterprise’ should all be imprisoned at Guantanamo, if the Castro brothers don’t mind. As a philosopher observed, nobody can look more than fifteen years ahead. Fortunately, I’ll be dead when Earth descends into plagues and uncivil wars, but I do worry about my granddaughter.

Lastly, the year gave its crown of stupidity to little Johnny’s ‘If I was running Al Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008, and pray as many times as possible for a victory not only for Obama but also for the Democrats.’ Lost the plot already, eh?