It's not what we do with facts that matters, Robert Frost said, it's what the facts do with us. Fact: Matt Simpson was born in Liverpool to a Merchant Navy father whose roll-call of exotic places where ships had taken him included Tasmania's capital, Hobart. ‘When he mentioned Hobart’, the poet says, ‘there was always a twinkle in my father's eye that suggested some kind of romantic experience.’ Fact: Matt Simpson was from September to November, 1995, poet-in-residence at the QueenVictoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, Tasmania. Before he left England he had come across and read My Home in Tasmania, the journal of the writer and artist, Louisa Anne Meredith. Meredith, whose maiden name was Twamley, had been born in Birmingham in 1812, from where she emigrated to Australia newly-married to her cousin, Charles Meredith, in 1839. After a year in New South Wales they made a nightmarish ten-day voyage from Sydney to Hobart with their three-month first born, Charles. For the best part of the next forty years, which contained more than a fair share of hardship and during which they raised three sons (one died in infancy), they lived in various parts of Tasmania but mostly along its north east coast. After Charles’ death in Launceston in 1879 his widow moved to a £at in Hobart and, then, in 1895, transferred to Melbourne, where she died a few months later.

So much for the facts. What they did to Matt Simpson is evident from the following pages. The poems we now have are made up from two pamphlet-length collections. The first, a fourteen-poem sequence entitled To Tasmania with MrsMeredith: Explorations, was published by Headland Press in 1994, after the poet had encountered My Home in Tasmania but before he arrived on the island itself. The second, On the Right Side of the Earth, was published by the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston to coincide with Matt Simpson's final presentation of his work as poet-in-residence. The presentation took place on Friday 12th November, 1995, just two weeks after the centenary of Louisa Anne Meredith's death.