pp. 155 illust Signed #2018 The poems in Singing Granites: Poems of Devon and Gondwanaland comprise alternating sections by Phillips and Anne Born, an English poet who shares his love of granite.

Phillips’s poems in this collection display stronger technical control of feeling and thought. Perhaps this is because here Phillips is on familiar ground, namely the granite-based areas of Western Australia. The poems playfully unroll a series of colourful images beyond their materiality, as if the speaker cannot resist the pull of the land.

Granite outcrops are salient features across southwestern Australia from the Darling Scarp eastward to Eyre Peninsula. Within this broad geographic area, the southern part of Western Australia forms the focal region of the following discussion, which has relevance also for granite exposures in other regions of Australia. People have used the outcrops ever since they first arrived on the continent, primarily as a water source. Aborigines used the rocks as campsites and took advantage of the natural water holes, which were carefully maintained and frequently safeguarded from disturbance by animals and pollution. In contrast, the first Europeans who included nomadic pastoralists quickly modified such water sources by constructing simple wells and dams for use by both humans and stock

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