Melbourne University offered me the position of Lockie Fellow in Australian Literature and creative Writing in 1965, and I returned to Australia with mixed feelings. I had expected to live longer outside Australi, but it was not an easy life in Rome without money, and with la dolce vita so conspicuously around me. I taught at Melbourne University until the end of 1979, when I wonan American Council of Learned Socieites fellowship to study contemporary American poetry in the USA. In the same mail, I was offered a Lectureship in English at Adelaide University, which I also accepted.

I spent a year at the State University of New York in Buffalo, reading American poetry and meeting the poets. The English department was dynamic and exciting, with extended visits from Alan ginsberg, Ed Dorn, Gregory Corso, Galway Kinnell, WS Merwin, Dianne Wakowski, Erica Jong, robert Bly - with whom I had the opportunity to meet and talk with at length. Since then I have been a regular visitor to the USA, where I have many contacts. After periods at Berkeley and Yale, my base in the USA for the last ten years had been Cornell University in upstate New York.

From 1971 to 1992 I taught in the English Department at Adelaide University. During that time I pyublished ten books of poetry, including a Selected Poems (1982), and a book of translations of four women poets writing in German. Miracles of Discontent contained poems by Christine Lavant, Ingeborg bachmann, Sarah Kirsch and Ursula Krechel, translated by Beate Josephi and myself.

While in Adelaide I also worked with Richard Tipping and Ian Read to found Friendly Street in 1975. this has proved ot be Australia's longest-running poetry reading venue and is a publishing entity as well, with numerous individual books of poems and more than twenty annual anthologies. Richard edited the first anthology, Ian and I the second. In 1985 I helped to establish the South Australian Writer's centre, and was its first chairperson. This was Australia's first Writers' Centre, and it became a model for others.

I've always felt it important to get a just deal for writers - not only poets, but anyone who writes for a living. Since I have had an academic salary most of my working life, I have tried to spread the benefit of that to others by working in various voluntary ways. I was a member of the Literature Board for 1978 until 1981, and its Acting chair for almost a year; chairperson of Writers' Week at the Adelaide Festival in 1980 and 1982; and a member of the Committee of management of the Australian Society of Authors for over ten years. I have been on Government arts funding bodies in South Australia and Western Australia, and judged plenty of prizes.

I moved to perth in 1992 to become Foundation Professor of English at Edith Cowan University, where I still am. I travel abroad extensively - one of my books of poems is called Travelling - yet feel very closely bound to Australia, especially as I get to explore and know it better. When I was asked a couple of days ago whether I was Australian or not, I had to reply that of course I am. Australians today are not tied to this continent by the huge cost, and time, of travel that made my first 'overseas trip' - by boat, and for two years - pretty close to a declaration of exile.

I write when I have time - which is usually late at night, or when I am a way from my job, either on holiday or travelling on business. Actually, I write almost every day, and edit down ruthlessly. My main distractions are the frustrations and delights of gardening and travel, incompatible pastimes which somehow I manage to juggle.