π.ο.

But why is this word “Genius” being bandied around so much in poetry here, in Australia in particular – the noun in particular — not so much the adjective which very loosely is a synonym for ‘ingenious’ meaning “well thought out”. Genius, the noun sounds more like it belongs to the era of the Industrial Revolution, in an age that included the steam-whistle and train shovel — when industrialists & merchants took 2 round cast-iron plates and had them riveted together — perhaps they were merely being “engine-ious”. Was Ned Kelly a Genius?’

So much has been written on the Heide group of artists, Nolan, Tucker, Hester, and their patrons John and Sunday Reed that it is hard to imagine anything more could be added. π.ο.’s Heide however, though holding this group of communalism, camaraderie, and free love as its centre, radiates backwards to the history that precedes the Reeds’ utopian endeavour, and continues into its aftermath.

What is this obsession with facts, so insistent in Fitzroy: The Biography, that their enumeration appears to be fundamental to the composition of the book? One obvious explanation would be that the foregrounding of fact dramatises the encounter with history, which after all presents itself primarily in the form of documents and testimonies. But this can’t be a full answer, first because while the outlines of the featured characters are drawn from historical sources, the facts that embellish them generally are not; and second because π.ο.’s interest in the poetic use of facts and statistics goes back decades, well before the writing of Fitzroy: The Biography.