I choose my title from the last line of “Galaxies”, a poem from “The End of Sail”, the second of my several maritime sequences. This was composed about 1980 during Malcolm Fraser’s “Razor Gang” era, when there was high unemployment in Canberra, by which I was intermittently affected. So my day-to-day imagining used to brood on how a person’s well-being reacted to the sensations of redundancy. How might I depict morale as a historical condition whenever the planet seemed to say to a person, You are no longer needed? At that time I wrote in the mornings, then devoted my…
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