Geniture
I was many people: the founder, the chief of the name and traitor, the refugee, the town clerk, the whaler, the architect, the colour sergeant leading on the bond-thief and the highwayman, the tide-waiter, the rum trader, the inventor, the failed clergyman, timber merchant and teacher late of Wollongong, the land steward, the farmer, the duffer, the fence, the thief, the grazier and worshipful grocer, the stationmaster, the station manager, the sausage-maker, the Mudgee Bee Hive storekeeper, the hammer-toed drover traversing the Macquarie Plains, the labourer, the newspaper proprietor, the gas-fitter, the teller, the fettler and butter churner missing half a thumb, the printer, the journalist, the deputy coroner, the businessman, the inn-keeper, the father of the infant boy.
A melancholy figure on the lonely windswept streets of Newcastle, David Musgrave occasionally emerges from his habitual funk to write books of poems, of which The Kool-Aid Dispenser is his tenth. Often he claims to be wandering to and from the University of Newcastle, where he teaches creative writing. At other times he desultorily discharges his duties at the independent publishing house Puncher & Wattmann, which he founded in 2003.