Mirror their flight in the Fortescue River —
Strong smoke is piling up.
At daybreak a cloud layer stretches in the sky.
Tableland Bushfire
Tapi in Nyiyaparli
kkarnalilila parnti kurntirrintirri kampakanampa
thaangurla? kurila yartuyulu Watumanti
warnili ngalingmarra thaangurla? Wiyanpala!
pungkupungku thalurapinpa Purnukurntila
Dawn, and smoke gushes and boils.
Where? Southward, same spot on the Tableland as before.
A flat sheet of cloud — Where? Have a look!
Making a thundercloud over the Tableland.
Mudrooroo (Colin Johnson) (b.1938)
Auntie Margaret
Doing time away in time
No woman and no Toyota
Went to see Auntie Margaret
She lives up on the ridge
It was Sunday morning
And she was getting ready to do some praying
And some testifying
Thought it would do me some good
Get my life flowing along again
She said: ‘Jesus helps’
And Christ, I was needing that
So we went to where the elect were meeting
And the preacher greeted us with whoops
A country hymn came booming out
And filled that hall
I shuffled and I felt the urge
For a cool can of something bitter
And just then there was a wavering of the firmament
And voices began to speak in tongues
Ooyah-be anya; yoonuah hepppa fall
Raindrops keep falling on my head
Ouninya-yunna-mash-potato
Well something like that
And I shivered and quivered
And lost the threads of language
But, guess what, when I came to
Gone was my feeling for that old Toyota
And that woman, well —
I remembered to forget her
In the words of gobbledegook
You know, Jesus does help sometimes
Images Artytypes Stereotypes
For the imagesartytypesstereotypes that fashioned me
Not in the hairdressers, not in the fashionable parades
The films, the videos, the magazines — I exist not
Only on the main street of a country town, the dog snarls
Stretching down into the fatness of a sleeping symbol
Brown and yellow, dark, a strange mongrel mix
Growling between the earth and sky
Forming, the stereotype, fashions me as I am
A hard rock blistering under the sun
A twisted broken branch wrenched away by floodwaters
Swirling me on, battering me to slick city hoedown
Sparkling drops of sweat, shining amidst the plastics, I speed on
Imagedartytypedstereotyped and transfixed in my cowboy clothes
A wide-brimmed stockman smelling of days gone, transformed I’m not
Still of the bush, floodwaters image me in muddiness
Flatten me out, stretch me from land to city
Then back again as I smile and grin oozing with the land
Mick Fazeldean (d.1990s)
Whirlwind
Kunangu in Martuthunira
pirtiyili kalpam
Pilarnuku ngatham
Wirnkara ngunu, ngurra thaningpinam.
A whirlwind rises high.
I am bound for Pilanu,
Where the Rainbow-Snake cut open the ground.
Ian Templeman (b.1938 d.2015)
First Death
I carry a faded image in the memory still:
a small boy trailing a stick,
walking a road edged by sand dunes, turning
to check his unfamiliar army father was following.
His backward glance both bold and anxious.
A seaside, wartime holiday out of season,
a child confused by strangers,
his mother’s newly revealed love of a soldier.
The scream may have been the cry of wheeling gulls,
a mother’s panic or squeal of the army truck
as it failed to take the bend, climbed
a power pole in a swirl of dust.
I remember the noise, splintering glass, a thump
as the truck collapsed, a crunch of metal and sparks.
Scooped up by my mother, I smiled my safe return.
A moment of silence, action suspended.
One truck wheel continued to spin
as my father ran to the accident’s confusion
and quickly gave orders to the men who had gathered.
Later he returned, lifted me onto his shoulders.
As we walked away he began to whistle.
I hugged his head with my knees,
curled my arms around his neck, my fingers found
his leather thong and name tag, knotted at the throat.
I traced the blood stains, inhaled his body smell.
Peter Bibby (b.1940)
Wornaway Bat
Christmas — the Newdegate School
is pleasant deserted, lean and still,
the tiny frontage green maintained …
someone here waters the hope.
tipped over; the big hitter of the year
concluded that defiant innings,
caught out on the boundary.
And cast aside this half a bat,
baking in the wheatbelt sun,
banged in a scratch of crease
worn to a stump with attack.
Three cork balls dehisced
like pods, whacked and lost
to the outfield dust —
pick ’em up after the holidays.
They never put anything away.
Machines bask — their shed
the opalescent sky — paddocks
to harvest, and the bell went.
Andrew Taylor (b.1940)
Swamp Poems
I
Thought moves over the surface
of a windless reach
like the birth of a breath
here where water thickens with intention
and the inattention
of tides
I glide within a mirror
of attendant trees
egrets placing fastidious feet
and sitting-down ducks
comfortable as pets
yet out of reach
in a secret stretch
of this river stranger
than the neat suburb
outlandishly near
but out of sight
tiny fish
scurry
water dimples
thoughts under stillness
II
Rivers are full of old men
the stumps of their jetties stick obstinate
and disfiguring from the shore
their sunk boats snag lines
slopes of lantana and looping couch
proclaim their delight in felling trees
the stumbling footings of shacks long gone
are their legacy
I saw some as a child
I watched as they chopped holes
and planted the skinny poles of their hopes
of a little leisure and I went
with my father in patchy boats
night fishing and never
was I one of their world
which was my father’s world
after a war that was theirs
but not mine
I navigate it now
inspecting such decay and loss
as could rip the shell of my craft
with new and circumspect
respect
III
The river women
They sat on the banks with the littlies
cooked up butter and fried
the fish they all ate
when the boys came back.
Occasionally one of the littlies
decided to drown —
then they figured a day or two
in the local paper.
Most of them watched the lines
they were left to watch,
some cast out on their own
and were cursed or ‘never
mentioned again.’
My mother
— bless her dwindling soul —
stuck to the shore
while my father floated
into his polished grave
where he used to fish.
She vanished at last
into extreme age
where they’re both waiting.
Whatever line they’ve cast
I have still to find
hooked though I am.
IV
Water thickens
under these trees
clots of whatever breeds here
unite and each stroke of my paddle
meets their resistance
I am being welcomed into the swamp
by this resistance
I am being told to be quiet
to be still as the egret in the grass
breathless as the wind is
now in these trees
which watch with the faint scent
of having watched it all before
my pause
as I balance my paddle
as I sit without a movement
with hardly a heartbeat or breath
as the swamp glides forward to embrace me
V
The pelicans are folded down
like camping equipment
balanced as though any shift of breeze
might topple them
from their overloaded roost.
But when a vertical
and capacious yawn
opens among them
the pied cormorant on a nearby bough
shuffles theatrically
while the swamp water
silent as ever
becomes a little silenter.
VI
Early rain
Swamp is in love with rain
but the rain this swamp remembers
fell in a rolling world of granite
and parched uplands
nine months ago
Here
brackish tides bring jellyfish
that bob like bumpy parachutes
higher and higher upriver
and if I’m lucky the submarine
purposive reconnaissance
of a dolphin
inspects and respects me
It will rain again in the hills
next month
the swamp will cool and freshen
its water clear and darken
its salt flush back to the sea
But rain like today’s
decorating the melaleucas
swamp grass and eucalypts
with its glitter of sunlight
is merely pretty
VII
Swamp is perhaps where older people
might gather to be alone.
One never sees another here
though the wake of their passing
rocks the water grass
and birds are just beginning again
to settle
as you stake your claim
unwittingly
for a bit of their shade.
Nothing of the swamp is old.
The rotted trees the water clotted
with microalgae the stench
of its growing —
it’s the smell of youth
which people who are older
should manouevre
with the touch of a paddle
the rearrangement of a ripple
respectfully
as befits their age.
VIII
River dweller
Haunted the edges of rivers
the vagaries of tidal reaches
unimpressed by mangroves
but among melaleucas
and swamp gums
a shifting and adaptable spirit
bearing silt on his heels
his bare feet leaving the impression
of one moving lightly
and dwelling deeply
whom ducks came out to greet
and darters with their leery necks
watched but didn’t fly from
and pelicans sailed grandly past
and a dolphin honoured with its calm disinterest
as their paths converged
surprisingly upriver
when he died
an egret waded the watergrass
immaculately white
clearly not to be startled
prematurely into flight
IX
Though almost by definition
swamps look after themselves
— who would want to oversee
the forgotten? — three months
is a long time not to have visited
my swamp.
I can plead an opera in Dresden
and two in Berlin and some time
in Prague — snow, a holiday
one has to have a holiday from swamp
its insistence its continuity
is all too consuming.
But its slow waters
its half-drowned trees and half-starved
mussels and sleek egrets
and darters and the lordly way
swans turn their back on it
called me.
Paddling through it today
I snag on an underwater branch
note a tree newly fallen
and watch sunlight filter down
like a dream infusing waking
with wonder.
X
The river bears its unsurprising
mementos of summer —
milk cartons, condoms, shopping bags
a cushion from some fisherman’s chair
plastic bottles and several
months-old magazines —
washed now that rain has come
from its banks. Late autumn
does the spring cleaning here. Jellyfish
have gone, the water is dark and clear.
But the swamp is reluctant to change.
It will see this out as it saw out summer —
vague, turned in on itself, resisting
wind, brash sunlight, even rain.
It will perch with hooded eyes on a dead branch
or sail unruffled into evening
or stand vigilant as punctuation
marking the indecipherable sentence
of swamp grass and silence.
Summer, autumn have ended
our dolphin is returning to the sea
but the swamp is endlessly beginning
its ageless smoulder of decay.
Dick Alderson (b.1941)
Skein
Sometimes she would ask one of us
to help, to hold up a skein
while she wound the wool into a ball
we’d sit facing each other
on two chairs in the kitchen
our child-hands held towards her
in an almost embrace, the wool
passing between us like a gift
she had given us to give back to her
holding one of her boys still for a moment
while she took the soft thread.
Alan Alexander (b.1941)
Limestone at Margaret River
There is something eternal about limestone
Because it gives way; as if land and sea
Companioned intensely.
And so the mouth alters when it says
Cliff, bluff, gennel, bench, everbeautiful fossil.
Responding lady.
But
limestone at Margaret.
Wet today, it crops up in all my walking
Through scrubland and quirky timber.
It says Be Porous and I say Yes,
I have known you underground as
Pure reflection, table, flowstone, here
Where marsupials lay touching the music
When Freycinet, D’Entrecasteaux
Shut their spyglasses and turned away.
Gennel: Northern Irish word meaning a stone sluice.
Lee Knowles (b.1941)
Opportunity Shop
country town
Among wilting petticoats, wigs no one dares wear
and half a dozen stiff-ribbed plastic roses
stands one dressed dummy. Its squared hips,
work-worthy thighs ensure the dress’s respectability —
no hint of danger here.
Drowsing in the heat,
the street accepts one renegade —
a straw-limbed girl skateboarding round the town,
a self-conscious pocket of rebellion.
Skateboard girl, go ten times round the town,
past teetering shops, verandahs sunk in apathy,
figures spread in doorways among flies,
a stirring in the pub’s wide bed
that gathers many men in.
And you may find your feet are heavy on the board,
your hair dies at the roots, your smile thickens.
The opportunity shop is open
and the dress fits.
from Batavia Islands
After the wreck of the Dutch Ship Batavia in 1629 off the Abrolhos Islands, Western Australia, the fleet’s commander, Francisco Pelsaert, left for Java in a small boat. Meanwhile the under-merchant, Jeronimus Cornelius, gained control of the islands and ordered the massacre of 125 people.
Abrolhos Arrival
‘Open your eyes,’ said Houtman and we do to these
scatterings
flat as plates, currents and secret reefs.
The Wallabis and now Southern Lady II is tied to the sprawl
of Beacon Island jetty where an electrical storm shifts the
sky apart, the decks peeled white, thunder deepening.
Birds crash into the light as the skipper carries
a petrel in his hand. Others fish, their buckets jumping
while dodging the moths that hitched a ride from Geraldton.
Beyond distractions we’re off the most savage of islands.
Far more than a ship was lost here
by the old Dutch. We bring our own massacre.
Beacon
The nervous edge of evening and hundreds of birds, as
though on wires, circle the few wind-beaten trees.
They cry round our ears to settle in the ground