Twenty-four years ago, on 19 January 1984, I was living in Katherine in Australia’s Northern Territory in the middle of the oppressive heat of that region’s summer. I had just received a copy of my maternal grandfather’s autobiography from a cousin in Canada. This autobiography was not the record of his entire life, just the part from his birth in England in 1872 to his marriage in 1901 in Hamilton Canada. I had browsed through but not read this one-hundred thousand word 400 page double-spaced narrative written “about 1921-1923,” by an autodidact, a self-educated man, when he was fifty years of age. As my grandfather indicated in 1953 when he wrote a brief preface to that work while living in Burlington Ontario five years before his death, it was his hope that his story would “arouse interest.” As I write this preface to the sixth edition of my autobiography or, more properly, this epic literary work, on 9 September 2007, it is my hope that this work will also arouse interest..
It has been nearly ten years since I finished the first edition of Pioneering Over Four Epochs. Since that time I have added a large body of my poetry among other additions, deletions and alterations. The poetry of history is rooted in the geography, the landscape, of each poet and the facts of the period of history in which the poets wrote. This is also true of my work. The addition of my poetry to this work seemed a natural process. It also helped to give a new lease on life to the writing of my autobiography which by 1993 was wilting, its vitality and the energy and enthusiasm I began with dissipated. As the American poet John Ashbery once said: “the poem is you.” Much of me, as Ashbery might have said, is added to this 2nd edition.
