Published when Robert D. FitzGerald was seventy-five, Product gathers the late work of a poet who helped drag Australian verse away from the bush-ballad tradition and towards something more philosophical, historically alert and formally exact.

FitzGerald spent much of his working life as a surveyor, and that trained attention to boundaries, terrain and measurement enters poems concerned with time, memory, inheritance and the changing physical shape of Australia.

These are poems full of Parramatta River ferries, colonial voyages, family legends, scars left on landscapes and voices recovered from written records. “Private Property,” for instance, begins with a sailor’s fatal decision to go ashore and worries at the way an uncertain event becomes family evidence through repetition. The late FitzGerald is less monumental than his earlier reputation suggests: more direct, personal and attentive to what disappears while people are busy turning experience into history.

Angus & Robertson hardback, first edition, 1977. Good condition with substantial rubbing and edge wear to the dust jacket.