On Wednesday the 6th September I received a 2024 Queensland Writers’ Fellowship from Arts Queensland, and the State Library of Queensland to write my next collection of poetry “The Eromanga Sea”. The name comes from the Eromanga Sea, a shallow inland ocean that occupied large parts of Queensland in the Lower Cretaceous Period around 110 million years ago. These linked-narrative poems will be in 4 sections (The Lower Cretaceous, The Pleistocene, The Anthropocene and Torresia & Cooksland). The Eromanga Sea will explore Queensland’s geological, ecological and socio-cultural evolution as a ‘state’ from the Cretaceous period through to the current Holocene epoch, looking at the major climatic and human impacts in these ages and how deep time and human activity has shaped not only Queensland’s physical landscape, but also the consciousness of the people who live here. 

---