Geoff Page – November 11 2018

Geoff is an anthologist, critic, reviewer and prolific award-winning poet. His grandfather, Sir Earle Page, was the founder of the Country Party (now National Party) and his family has a long with association with the Clarence River district. Geoff’s first solo poetry volumes, Smalltown Memorials and Collecting the Weather, established many of his continuing preoccupations, especially with history, both the history of his own family and Australian history more generally, with a particular emphasis on the violence and loss incurred through wars and the destruction of Aborigines and their culture following European settlement. Geoff holds an Arts degree from the University of New England and after moving to Canberra, taught English and History in local schools until his retirement in 2001. Geoff’s other works include 29 collections of poetry, two novels, four verse novels, as well as anthologies, translations and a musical biography of the jazz musician, Bernie McGann. Geoff has interviewed a wide range of jazz musicians for the National Film and Sound Archive, and has written plays for radio, television and the stage. His poetry has been translated into five languages and he has read his work and talked widely internationally on Australian poetry.

Freehold: verse novel
Brandl and Schlesinger, 2005; ISBN 9781876040703
A compressed epic of conflict, identity, love and loss. Whitby Downs, a famous cattle station on the Clarence River, has been in Whitby hands since the 1840s but now they are selling up. Or are they? Family conflicts, generational splits, commercial opportunism – nothing is black and white in the fight over Whitby Downs. Freehold, Geoff Page’s third verse novel, from its opening section, a parallel exchange of nineteenth century letters, takes a profound look at what land can come to mean to its owners across a hundred and fifty years. Or several thousand…
Author’s Note: … Some of the material in parts 1 and 2 of this work has appeared, sometimes in very different form, in Invisible Histories and The Great Forgetting.

Lawrie and Shirley, The Final Cadenza: a movie in verse
Pandanus Books, 2006; ISBN 9781740762144
An amusing and affectionate account in verse of a late-life love affair, Lawrie and Shirley, The Final Cadenza presents an autumnal romance between an 82 year-old former ‘ladies’ man’ and a 70 year-old widow who attracts his undivided, and unprecedented, loyalty. Sadly but amusingly, Lawrie’s adult son and Shirley’s two problematic daughters conspire to disrupt the affair. Lawrie and Shirley, The Final Cadenza shows in a light-hearted way how late-found happiness for those of ‘the third age’ can upset the smug comfort of younger people, and confound social expectations. Geoff’s sardonic yet poignant sequel is the verse novel, Coda for Shirley.