Book Launch: Peter Skrzynecki, 'Appointment Northwest'

Abstract

Colleagues, friends, members of the Sloggett Family and so many others here today with a strong Jeogla background, and all others from the nearer Armidale/New England district, Michelle one of the Reader's Companion Bookshop proprietors, our poet - a longstanding friend of mine, and earlier student, - now come back home to our country; the distinguished, and now not at all so 'new Australian' poet, Peter Skrzynecki, Mrs Poh Woodland, another erstwhile exotic University of New England student and passionate lover of New England. I am more than excited to be asked to welcome you to the launch of a book which meshes in so superbly with the last reflective bush writings from Northern New South Wales, those of the then temporary (1880s) Armidalian, Rolf Boldrewood, in the 19th century, even as it does with Judith Wright's poetic Commonwealth Literary Fund inspirational inauguration of the culture of - and for - University of New England in 1955, or with another like milestone, the 1992 Wright College presented seminar, 'Poets on the New England Landscape'. Peter was one of those then closely studied by that fine group of your predecessors, the participants in that seminar, along with their close readings of Les Murray, Geoff Page, Ed Wilson, the Cornishman - Brefni Hoskins, Bryan Coleborne, and others the less well known bards all moved to verse by their engagements with the style and mores of this region. I know that you are all to become - and I do congratulate you on the fact - the first of the many who will read and be refreshed by the hugely moving and poetic chronicle of one young man's 'North-West passage', one occurring in our region, as he moved to his personal maturity by some personal pain, by his first employment, as a sole teacher in a bush school, one set in a fine and fresh world of bird, beast, and one of the mysterious gorges, and, at the same time, one filled with engagingly frank rural folk.