As a poet Robert Gray is a magical storyteller. His first poetry collection, Creekwater Journal (1974), marked out his key territory of interest: the small towns, rural communities, landscapes, and people of the New South Wales north coast. Although he has travelled widely and written about other cultures, cities, and characters, his poetry’s richness is still tethered to the textures, talk, and rhythms of his country town childhood. His word pictures immediately transport the reader to another place. The idea that ‘eucalypts are the blue of husky voices’ or the recognition of a long jetty and ‘a few gull­molested fishing boats’ are the images of a beguiling writer.

Gray’s most recent book, The Land I Came through Last, is described as ‘a family memoir’. In the preface, the author explains that in the beginning ‘this book was to be mainly about my parents’. Initially, he shunned the idea of an autobiography as distasteful or too difficult. However, in the process ‘of gathering people’s lives’, and as one memory led to another, that resistance was discarded.