Olive and Ross

Dear Editor,

I very much enjoyed Helen Ennis’s article about Olive Cotton at Spring Forest (July–August 2013). I stayed there with Geoffrey Lehmann when, in the early 1990s, I was interviewing Ross McInerney and recording Geoff’s poems for an ABC radio feature. At one point Olive popped out of the back door and snapped a photo with her old camera. Helen Ennis’s article made me dig it out of the bottom drawer. It shows Ross in expansive mood, telling us one of his Spring Forest stories that became the basis of Geoff’s book Ross’s Poems, later renamed Spring Forest.