They went to church for social reasons, but I was always raised as an atheist. I suppose in some ways, I knew? I was raised as an atheist, but my parents did go to church. I’d written individual poems, but never an entire work. I’ve been a poet for longer than I’ve been any other form of writer, so this book of poems, my first book of poems, has come after 23 years of being a published poet.
I guess, then, I’m curious about what you knew about Darwin before: what sort of place he had in your understanding – your education – before, and also why poetry seemed the right way of achieving this, because as I understand it you hadn’t written poetry before, or at least not a book of poems before.Įmily Ballou: Not a book of poems. So The Darwin Poems is really a biography of sorts, a portrait biography of Darwin in verse, that came, really, from that day that I saw the plaque on the stone. So, I wrote several poems from the point of view of Darwin on the walk in the Blue Mountains, and I realised by the third poem that I had a voice that I was really comfortable with and one that seemed to flow quite easily for me, and I thought, perhaps this is a bigger project.Īt first I thought perhaps I would write about Darwin in Australia, and then as I travelled to the UK and to the Cambridge Library – the Darwin archives – and to Down House, I realised I wanted to write something a bit bigger than that. In the kind of clothes that he would have been wearing, he would have been quite miserable and yet he did this walk and was very pleased by it, and I thought, ?Who was this man, and what did he think of this place that I love so much? And I started to write about Darwin on that walk. Australia’s hot, you know, at a much lower temperature. The day that he walked to Wentworth Falls, it was reportedly 43 degrees. And he was fascinated by the geology of the area and wondered how it had been formed.īut one day I was taking this walk, and just near the cliff, just where the cliff opens out and you see the falls and the valley, I noticed affixed to a rock was a small metal plaque and it said, ?Charles Darwin passed this way.? And although I knew the walk I took was called the Darwin Walk, and that Darwin had visited Wentworth Falls and taken this path, for some reason it was seeing the plaque that really struck me, and I thought, ?Who was this man?
He took it on the way there and on his way back from Bathurst he stopped again because he said that it was exceedingly well worth visiting: it was such a beautiful valley with the waterfalls tumbling down the cliff, and also because of the eucalyptus oil in the air it actually is blue, the air is blue. had been told by Conrad Martens about this view, this waterfall, and he took the walk to the waterfall along the creek. He booked an overland trip to Bathurst and stopped at Weatherboard. I’d like just to start by asking you about your relationship with Darwin and how you came to the idea of writing about him.Įmily Ballou: I’ve lived for the last twenty years in Australia and I was living in the Blue Mountains, in Wentworth Falls, which in the 19th century was called Weatherboard, and Darwin went to Weatherboard on the tail end of the Beagle journey when he was in Australia.