In 1994 a letter came out of the Antipodean blue. It was from the Australian poet and organiser of the Tasmanian Poetry Festival, Tim Thorne, inviting me to take up a poetry residency at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, Tasmania. Launceston is Tasmania's second city (it has in effect the dimensions of a small market town); Hobart is its capital and the gateway to Antarctica.

There was more than just good fortune to it. Yes, it was like winning the lottery without knowing that someone had bought you a ticket. But it was also in a very special sense the place my psyche and poetry had always been heading for. It was the next stage in the kind of exploring I had for 20-odd years been doing in my writing. Suddenly there was the possibility of achieving – or partly achieving – some kind of resolution, making a kind of arrival. If you believed in destiny, you would think it was meant, predetermined. It was, to say the least, serendipitous.

In my earlier work – most notably in my first two collections, Making Arrangements (1982) and An Elegy for the Galosherman (1990) – I attempted to explore (as someone pulled away from it by education and by years of cinema- and church-going) what I will call ‘Scouseness’ and my own particular brand of it. Motivated by certain losses, regrets and a wish to come finally to terms, I tried making poems by interrogating my background and upbringing in a working-class family in Bootle, a family that had a strong tradition of seafaring and working with ships, which I was made in some ways to feel excluded from. It involved, among other things, an attempt to come to terms with how much of my father's character and language I had inherited; how much was me and how much him, and whether it would ever be possibile to reconcile these aspects of character.

There was always a feeling as I was growing up (sometimes spoken – ‘there's your cousin John working on the trawlers!’ – but it was mostly unspoken, yet always there) that I was betraying this seagoing tradition by heading towards a career in teaching and also indulging in that unmasculine pastime, writing poetry.