Notes from Sydney

I returned to Sydney after attending most of the splendid 'Poetry and the Trace' conference, convened by Monash University, and involving the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies together with the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research. It was a pioneering conference, in so many ways, and all credit is due to the convenors, and more generally, Monash University, for sponsoring it. As one who takes a keen interest in aspects of 20th century English modernist poetry, as well as our own 'Australian story', it nevertheless did highlight for me the relative lack of knowledge amongst our younger generation of poets about developments in our Asia-Pacific region. Perhaps this could be the focus of another conference at a later time.