This past week I’ve been in Brisbane, attending the Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference. Academic conferences often leave me feeling dispirited and glum; this one has me elated and full of scholarly pop and crackle. Five splendid days in fine company – learned, friendly, irreverent, open-minded and welcoming. It felt a model of what I’d like to present to people as what academic life should be.

Highlights? Michael Falk and Dylan Chng talking on fictions of and in AI (Michael offered a particularly exhilerating reading of a single word in a Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker story). Anita Heiss’s keynote on Black words and resistance. Sarah Holland-Batt’s the next morning on the histories of poetry and diplomacy, and how they intertwine. Holland-Batt’s collection THE JAGUAR I found in a store the next day; its opening poem will be worrying at me a while still. Dashiell Moore, Kedong Liu, Jiayi Wang and Brenda Machosky spoke on “Narrating Indigenous Pasts and Futures”. Susan Lever was witty and wise launching Julian Croft’s NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (and then Julian was wise and witty launching Susan’s LIFE of A. D. Hope). Graham Ackhurst! He was in conversation with Julieanne Lamond, and then I read his novel BORDERLAND in more-or-less one go in my hotel room that night. Darby Jones, Grace Lucas-Pennington and Rhianna Patrick offered challenging thoughts about First Nations literary criticism. Jeff Sparrow got us excited to read his LIFE of Lesbia Harford. Eugenia Flynn spoke on “Sovereignty in Practice: Indigenous Writing and Literary Culture in the Era of Artificial Intelligence”. Susan Lever was (again) witty and wise on A. D. Hope, this time on his writing to and from Fay Zwicky. Giacomo Bianchino poked and prodded at how poetry might fit in postwar socialist realism (oddly, was his conclusion). Wayne Bradshaw won me over completely to his case for “a vernacular renaissance” in the “Ocker highbrow” (take that Max Harris!). Lachlan Brown and Verity Oswin are new names for me as poets, and ones I’m glad to be following up in the weeks to come. And plenty more: my notebook is full of books and articles I’m now to follow up.

Just down the road was Archive Fine Books, almost as rich and various in its Australiana as Gould’s in Sydney used to be, but somehow a neat and tidy version. I bought a bagful of Thea Astley, Peter Steele, Fay Zwicky.

Brisbane will never be one of my Places: too hot, too sultry, too drawn-out and riverine for a “pallid child” of a “beer-and-whisky / Guilt culture” out of the “Gothic South” like me. But I caught a ferry from one side to the other, saw two pelicans quite self-contented and satisfied in a mangrove shoreline, wondered at a fig tree’s roots and generally managed to marvel at it all.