Two summers ago I attended a Sydney Theatre Company production of Samuel Beckett's Endgame at the Wharf Theatre. If it were not a Beckett play (particularly Endgame) I should not have otherwise noticed, however, as it was I was struck by the caveat above the entrance to the theatre: 'Latecomers will not be admitted.' Waiting in the foyer and in anticipation of the performance, I was overcome by the thought that we are all 'latecomers' to the scene of history; indeed this would be one of history's qualities, most of it being ostensibly a priori. In Beckett, moreover, the discourse of history could be said to be at an eschatological, or late' stage: I would over the next two hours witness its death throes, its cruel, self-perpetuating 'endgame'. As it happened, the audience was admitted five minutes late - I wondered at the time whether this was a ploy of the director's, and whether the show had in fact begun with our being kept waiting. Upon entering the theatre I asked the ticket-collector if it wasn't the case that we were all, in a sense, 'latecomers'; he merely laughed, though I wasn't sure he hadn't taken me literally. Each of the poems in my manuscript dissertation, latecomers, engages the issue of historical contingency, in either a public or personal context. I was born in Sydney, 1978, and moved with my mother and younger brother to Bribie Island, Moreton Bay, Queensland, at the age of seven. In February 2002, immediately following my mother's death and at the commencement of this degree, I returned from Brisbane to live once again on Bribie. A sizeable portion of latecomers concerns my experience on the island (as well as my reading of the literature concerning the island, eg. Thomas Welsby's Collected Works regarding early Moreton Bay, Tom Petrie's Reminiscences of Early Queensland by Constance Campbell Petrie, Ron Donald's Fort Bribie: The Story of Wartime Fort Bribie and Toorbul Point, 1939-1945). Other poems depict relationships and experiences of an intimate or familial nature. I have divided the manuscript into three sections: I. a series of poems establishing the theme of historical contingency; II. poems concerning local and national narratives of historical contingency; and III. poems of a more personal nature that engage the theme. My critical essay - "Reflections on the Poetry of Michael Dransfield: Bachelard and Courland Penders" - is an attempt to bring Gaston Bachelard's analysis of the poetry of dwelling (in The Poetics of Space and elsewhere) to bear on Michael Dransfield's work, particularly the Courland Penders poems. It seems to me that Courland Penders, the decomposing family estate to which Dransfield refers throughout his work, epitomises Bachelard's notion of the oneiric, childhood home; and that, as a literary construction, Courland Penders emerges out of a dialectic of memory and imagination, as outlined in The Poetics of Space. In this essay I engage a constellation of images in Dransfield's work pertaining to the poetry of dwelling, in particular Courland Penders, which includes the 'vestigial' imagery of ghosts and cobwebs, the desolate chill of winter and of heroin, the intimate warmth of the nest and the hearth, and flight as both inspiration and imminent departure. I concurrently examine Dransfield's responses to the narrative(s) of history, as part of an understated encounter with my manuscript dissertation. In conclusion, and as an extension of the analysis of the poetry of dwelling, I draw a brief comparison between Dransfield's poetic and the artistic philosophy of Ian Fairweather, seminal Australian painter and hermit of Bribie Island.