Both Barefoot Stereotypes

BOTH BAREFOOT STEREOTYPES


Remembering the thick hard shoe-like
soles of lifelong discalced who
callous up of barefoot experience
I see before the very picture
of kicked-off contradictions
in presumption about

For the last people in
late entrants into athropology
out of the Great Sandy Desert
the Bindubi come from that sand
into the gibber and cut-stone country
make for their long sand-softened
feet sandals for a season or more
woven on to their feet from
the string-long bark strips
torn form a duneside bush

Pandanus

PANDANUS

Usually perched oasis-like on
the very brink, taking their big drink,
edging along a long bar of open water

Pandanus spiralis, on elbows, its palms
of long leaves lean up off slouching stalks
in twisted waves of air-swimming hands

unwashed, untidy, shambolic as any bushie
they lounge across all the best places
sticking the place up with gun-spines

that hide the water's edge, that cover
up the small paths down, the wallaby tracks
or pirate haven carnivore-eyed drinking places

beside the lagoon, billabong, water-hole
where crocodiles might be if water-roads
channel them in, like palm-skin relatives

of the ancient orders of life, reptile
and palm, old allies of the primordial
times now relic under jet-trailed skies

where pineapple-like clusters of pandan fruit
attract flying foxes, those night-fruit bats
that drug-sniff them out orange-red and ripe.

Live As We Go

LIVE AS WE GO

Watching the road,
watching the wide road
a picture rolls out to us
a pavement goes under us
right and left brushes the sides;
better than movies,
bigger than TV;
a never-ending unscripted
picture-show coming live
as we go,

Watching the wide
wide roads, world's slow
to a stop and go past us,
country gets over us
and by us, we're pilgrims
watching the road to find
which way to go, where
to go for a way to be,
for a place to belong, or
a new direction to turn.

Watching the road
wide of the atlas
looking for a map of
the heart; discovering
the directory of the soul,
poring over side tracks,
and possibilities, possible
ways through the pathlessness,
searching for the next bend,
the right way, for a call
which echoes home.

Watching the uncharted
road, and going there
where we're watching,
off maps of roads already
travelled, or beneath them,
on a journey to the outer-
most step, at the stockgrid
of heaven, for the next
never-ending picture show
coming live as we go,

* * *

P.S.

Watching the deep
road, walking over
the graves of the past
to find the back story of here
where we might find how
it all came to this, how
the end might be, or could be
as what might have been, but
was not, can be seen again to
inspire with the example of
the congregation of saints
and then caution of the sinners
we travel over in time...

All the time wondering if
we do in eternity.



- written on the Mataranka Road, after heading north off the Stuart Highway. With thanks to my younger son who wrote this down as I dictated from the driver's seat. For a song lyric

Tin Badge Of Health

TIN BADGE OF HEALTH *


No crown but
a thing put around the neck
only not so much like say pearls
of royalty, or diamonds on a silver chain
or even of gold,
neither in a gold or silver
clasp but more like that other
more unspeakable neck-worn thing
only made of tin

on an iron chain
else on a knotted rope-string
by 1885 and afterwards this badge
of health was what kept
them the tin badge-makers
branded 'niggers' from being
unhealthy on sight if they
so much as dared to cross that,
tin-decreed dividing river.

Tin like them new rooves of Elsey
for thunder heavy rains of the Never Never
in rifled south-eastern Arnhem Land,
on the tropic gun-range grasslands of the River Roper
was the rule at Elsey Station, same as Hodgson Downs,
as it was elsewhere then, a conquerer's rule
come in at Florida station up north Arnhem Land
in cross-cultural communication the natives were
gun-commanded into understanding
the reloaded orders about how
not to cross the river

for the good of their health,
the same, although on the Roper,
the good whitefellas made exceptions,
and so gave presents of tinplate badges,
on a chain or a string, as a necessary,
like passports back into a conquered martial land,
real badges of health like government policy
to be worn if one came across that
styx, that river and wanted
to remain alive

the river of a tin-made border
that sprung out of the barrels of guns
that bubbled out with the stream of life
chosen as the whiteman's cattle were
only without their own long-faithed
white husbandry-music in ancient cowbells,
animals with no tethers,
without yokes
or chains

or fences,
watched by health-conscious
animal riders
the cattle went about
like game
into blackfella's river crossing places
where the tinplate
badge wearers went, or else came
like banded lepers.

* * *

Image: Elsey Station, c.1908


* 1. Florida Station on the Goyder River 1885: "The niggers of this part of the coast had a particularly bad name. At the station, Florida by name, twenty miles up the river, the aborigines were never allowed on the same side of the river as the settlement. It was a case of shooting at sight if they did venture across." - [pp.185 - A. Searcy "In The Australian Tropics" -George Robertson & Co, London & Melbourne, 1907]

2. West of Roper Bar 1885: "I was informed that [the Aborigines] were not allowed across without permission, and when given this, had to wear a tin plate slung around the neck. It was bad for the health of one crossing without a badge." -[ pp.113 - A. Searcy "In The Australian Tropics" -George Robertson & Co, London & Melbourne, 1907]

Mataranka

MATARANKA


Swim-water after
the dry desert dust
was such a joy, and is.
Mataranka quenches with
graced relief,

a pandanus-lined
palm frond shaded
stream of blue water
running like a spa
of fresh-cleansing

And yet the comfort
of the beautiful oasis
rankles when you learn
of how the lukewarm
water once ran red

with the saveless life-
water let of native veins,
cut gracelessly and stifled
of their country's springs,
their hearts.

Mirlinbarrwarr : Refuge On the Roper

MIRLINBARRWARR: REFUGE ON THE ROPER

Below Mataranka
seventy miles from the Gulf
in lands ridden to the bone
with spilt blood
by the years of the white rider
of the shareholder dreaming,
of the meat freezer dreaming
where human meanness lifts
its truth from beneath its masks
with dreams of wealth and power
whatever else the dastardry
from big-houses of Melbourne
ordered, its fields to fire,
with frontages to be added,
with appearances to meet,
with reputations to forge
to be seen as if they were
better men...

as if into the maelstrom
three down-south whitemen
came as Christ's missionaries
from another Melbourne, one
of heart and risk in longing
for those black yet verily made
like them in their Father's image
as if for those most put upon,
those most ravaged by their own,
those called savage to be hunted
like vermin by the veiled savages
among their very own

into the blood never-never
they came like quiet birds
to a song for the ever-ever
with three native missionaries
from Yarrabah by the lugger
'Francis Pitt' west into the
Gulf of Carpentaria and another,
and were well met by Gajiyuma
of the Mara, and guided up the
Roper river to Mirlinbarrwarr
in 1908 to work together
in the breach, the breach

needing bridging, the gulf
which the freezer riders
had ensured was emptied,
putting hands to plough
for the greater pastoral,
providing a haven where
the hunted and despised
of God's outcasts could
sit down alive of ear
and be heard of him.

White Riders of The Crocodile

WHITE RIDERS OF THE CROCODILE

She wanted
no more white riders
of the crocodile
and she saw
that her granddaughters
at the CMS Mission School
would hopefully never know
the fearful times as she'd had
in times of the white riders
at the Roper River,

she a small girl
when a man on a horse
was the monster,
a thing animal of a man,
fused as if misbegotten
from a womb of earth
come to the Roper then
where life was
falling down to the water
like meat
taken for far worse
and she'd been hid
like a shame under the leafy vines
from any sight
of the white riders

for a first sight that
would be the last
of the white riders
saved from going
after her older sister and brothers
whose little lives ran out
chased by white riders
in a big crocodile of horses
till their young brains
had been knocked out
against the rocks

and their victim
bodies taken
to the pandanas-edged
billabong where
the crocodiles were
crocodiles she heard
had ever since
thought of as callers of
aiders and abbetters
of the terror
disposers of the bodies
left them
by the white riders

Old Gajiyuma knew
of one little boy
grandson of his brother-in-law.
who had been similarly sunk
in hungry waters as
a victim body
after he had been flogged
to death for running
away from the angry hooves,
the unintelligible shouting mouths
of the white riders of the crocodiles.

The White Riders who
came as tall mounted servants
of the older deeper crocodiles
so fearfilled
that they rode out
armed to the teeth
in the gun-toting heat
with their sharp sun-heated knives
wielding them.

White Riders who came
on a Sunday,
like a ceremony,
or on other day the crocodiles
were hungry

White Riders
like crocodiles running
with watching eyes and snorting
snouts of anger
as if they might just
be going to shoot
everyone down dead

to kill them all
like fish in dried up water
kill and take them
take the bodies down
to where they sunk under
what could be seen
where the the White Riders
took them to the crocodiles
so they all swam away
into the white
of the crocodile's eye
whence White Riders come.

The Hungers of The Sky

THE HUNGERS OF THE SKY


Out toward
the wide white pans
Where salt lakes
spread like mirrors
of the thirst,
the hungers of the sky.

Hallowed Name

HALLOWED NAME


Translating is the ask
for that which is held in another
speech, something not yet said,

or understood which needs to be
the yet to-be said which hangs like
a wound waiting for the healing word

a meaning yet which might often be
refreshed as a new tongue discovers
the most hallowed sense, like that elusive

for the very same word in the Lord's Prayer
which had stuttered missionary Len Harris into silent
pause, after war time, on Groote Eylandt

till his Nunggubuyu language aid,
Grace Yimambu, who'd just given birth
to a baby boy, brought him to the mission

to be baptised, and she asked Len Harris
to annoint her child with the name
Winston. Surprised, he asked her why.

'Because you told about in the war'
Grace said, "What Winston Churchill
said, that made people strong. So,

I want to name my baby after
an important man." When Harris asked
'If you wanted someone important.'

'Why didn't you call him Jesus?'
Grace was astonished. So much she declared:
"That name belong Jesus all by himself."

"Ah," said Harris, in glowing relief
"Now how do you say 'that'
in Nunggubuyu?"


* * *

- based on as an anecdote by Len Harris and shared and recorded in May 1978 by his son to John Harris who relates it in his great history: "One Blood: 200 years of Aboriginal Encounters with Christianity, A Story of Hope' (1990) Albatross Books -[pp.816 - a book I bought in Alice Springs in July 1995 and which I begun to read on our travels and which I am still re-reading.

The Eastern and African Cold Storage Company of London Go Hunting at Roper River

a work in progress



The Eastern and African Cold Storage Company of London and Melbourne goes hunting at Roper River


The Roper River watershed produced
a rich sustenence for a large populace,
so eight tribes lived as neighbours
speaking eight distinct languages...

There was Nunggunbuyu and Mara,
the Warndarang and Rembarringa;
the Ngalakan and the Ngandi,
the Mangarayi and the Alawa.

At Roper Bar by 1988 there was not one speaker
of Warndarang or of Ngandi, there were hardly any
left to speak Mara, or Ngalakan, nor in Alawa,
thanks to the Eastern and African Cold Storage Company

for those closer Roper River people's countries
were the hunting grounds for the great Company's
gangs, those hunting parties sent to shoot-clear
the lands for cattle, the cows and bulls and steers

of the all-important Eastern & African Cold Storage Company
while the more distant Rembarringa, the Ngalakan country,
and the Mangarayi retreated to rocky hills of Arnhem land
to hide quiet-quiet by day, stayed away from blooded sand.

There was Nunggunbuyu and Mara,
the Warndarang and Rembarringa;
the Ngalakan and the Ngandi,
the Mangarayi and the Alawa.
.

Volatile Spearwood

VOLATILE SPEARWOOD


A weapon vine?
a bendy spring
of a thing
that trails
across red rock's stone rooves
with viney roots below
crevasse and rock cavern
growing up and up with passive
long and bending yet woody
lithe laterals of
creeper canes

as if just
an isolated
another species
of the Wonga Vine
like that which flowers
in the southern spring
as does the Tecoma
back home

but this
is the true desert form,
"Pandorea doratoxylon"
and there's a secret weapon
in the name, a secret
which comes out
as from Pandora's box
with its surprise
in volatile weaponry

for such
vine-long
woody canes
will dry
strong and hard
and springy
and can be
straightened
well before
they set
so long
so hard
so dry

straightened
over the heat
of fires
of desert-wood
hot coals

straighten
like a long
vertibrae
a backbone
ready for
its flight

its deadly
flight, with
the hard-won
much-practised
skill of a
good hunter
who brings
home a kill

manufacture-
added with
a woomera's
dimple-notch
at launch-end

fitted with
the spearhead:
a hard sharp end
with a needle point,
and barbs,

whether shovel-nosed
or knife-ended

a hunting spear
strong enough
to kill
light enough
to fly far
and straight
enough to
bullseye in
on a vital place..

A spear is
a man's long arm
his longer arm

Spearwood
becomes his
lethal reach;
his volatile arm
of unbent
purpose.

*

In Yundum
As Darby called
Yuendumu, I found
such a spear...

a long held
warrior-made weapon,
which they said was
not to be sold

but Darby insisted
like a desert lord
and the spear
came off the shelf
and I paid.

*

I carried it through
Yuendumu like
a scud missile

a little embarrassed
to be caught
holding such nuclear-manufactured treasure
such a volatile warrior-piece

feeling it came
to me from legends
where the vine grew
in canny wisdom
and faith to the hunt
in living courage.

Since a boy
I have been
a hunter with
traps and guns

But us boys
often played
at being
Aborigines with
spears, as
if respecting
the call for
eye contact
with a quarry
or an enemy
which a spear
respects
and never
over-reaches.

So I have
it still.
Although I no
longer hunt,
but I have it
like I have a gun:
for the true regard.

For ownership
of a spear
calls up a
hunting eye,
a wary watch,
knowledge of grim
necessities
of the blood,
it upkeeps
a man's ear
for hunger's larger cure
and the weaponed man
understands why it
is God worked
up the grandeur
of carnivores
of keener ears
of sharper sight
of tooth and claw
that will defend
their own against
small regard
against petty
lives.

And yet I feel
a bit of a fraud
for my lack
of spearwood skill,

for a blossoming kill
is the spearwood's
volatile skill

the provision
that capped a man
as bringer of meat
to a cooking fire.

Resurrection Fern

RESURRECTION FERN

Found after the new wine of rains
Woolly fern will be a healing flush
A whitish-green fronded message
In a flourish below rocks of pulpit hills
A soft-seeming leaf of green balm
Which blunts the edges of savagery
Like a fruitful oasis trill in a desert
Waving fronds as if Hosanna palms.

But stoke it with hard-spirited thirst
Mock it with elemental mean rejection
Scourge it with many canes of the sun
And the whips of red-hot angry winds
Condemn it to your parched rejection
Expose it to the want of human mobs
Nail it with annihilation and crucify it
Under the crack of thorns, and it dies.

Or seems so very completely to die.
Withering into hollow tombs of stone
Its limpness shrivels to a rigor mortis,
Curling up its toes its fingers its fronds
And rolling over on its back like a bird
Of dried up feather, a crackling corpse
Of what it was, a dried-up skeleton
A thing inconsequential to quick life.

And then a night of wet season rains
Soaking rains, continuous dampening
Rains. A dead bird begins a slouching,
Roll over, and the furled-up tendrils
Unfurl slowly, unfurl again like growth,
A growth already grown and then lost.
The dead woolly fern comes up green again
A Resurrection Fern returned to life.

Driving The Spoon

DRIVING THE SPOON


On the track
that goes off-road
where the smooth-graded

shifting sand
of the travel surface
has long since become

corrugated and coruscating,
corrugation-ridged by hard-driven,
far-riven, impatient, skim-tall speed-tyres,

so much that your slow-travel there
immediately becomes a torrid endurance test
you fail - as long yet as you don't break

until you or something will do, in a slow
but continuous corrugation-fed earth tremor
of shuddering undoing

*

your conventional
even and small-tyred on-road
vehicle (at odds with it)

even where your proud wheels
rest softly on half-inflated
light truck tyres, can and will

find a far smoother path if
you have the audacity of humility,
a quixotic braw beyond any afraid-to-be-seen conceit,

to the wisdom of foolery,
to get off that proudly-wrinkled corrugated crown
and so to drive down along

and keep on in the sided track-wide
and nearly eternally sidelong
spoons of well-graded drain.

*

Though, keep
a driven watch out

for bent star-pickets
hid in the sand.


* * *
- 1995 - after the Tanami Track

Euro Jumps and Dry Waterholes

EURO JUMPS AND DRY WATERHOLES

I, The Aboriginal

* * *

I, THE ABORIGINAL



Ghost written, without a too obvious
Admission. Ghost whispered, ghost ridden?
Maybe! The narrative take which renowned
Journalist Douglas Lockwood gives voice
To, is that of a two-way Roper River man,
A mission-educated, worthy, independent
Mechanic, a bright most-employable paramedic
Who tells his blackfella story in dignity
And pride even if that unnerving ghost was
A sympathetic whitefella in the foreground
For his blackfella surely was and is a man
Worth looking at, one worth listening to, who
Spoke his piece in a channeled disguise, well
Before an age that likes to hate and deride
Sovereign works of understanding like this
Is, an age featuring Indigenous writers who
Write often yet with whitefellas hid behind

in the background.

* * *

I, THE ABORIGINAL
- by Douglas Lockwood
Pub. Rigby Ltd, 1962, Adelaide, SA e


My name is Waipuldanya or Wadjiri-Wadjiri. (If these twist your tongue too much, call me Philip Roberts: that's my white-feller name. ) I am a full-blood aboriginal of the Alawa tribe in the Northern Territory'

The autobiography of Waipuldanya, a full-blood Aboriginal of the Alawa tribe at Roper River in Australia's Northern Territory, as told to Douglas Lockwood.

In his youth, Waipuldanya was taught to track and hunt wild animals, to live off the land, to provide for his family with the aide only of his spears and woomeras. This is the gripping story of his boyhood and youth, and how he trained as a skilled medical assistant, to become a citizen of both the Aboriginal and whitefella worlds.


* * *


A REVIEW, 1963 - from "AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST" [VOL 65, 1963]

I, the Aboriginal. Douglas LOCKWOOD.
Adelaide, Australia: Rigby limited, 1962. 240

Reviewed by ARNOLD R. PILLING, Wayne State University, (USA)

I have never before encountered a book which has caused me to write an unsolicited review. However, I found after reading 'I, the Aboriginal' that I wanted to call the attention of my colleagues to this volume produced for the popular audience in Australia, and, therefore, not very likely to gain review in anthropological journals in the United States and Europe.

Douglas Lockwood, the author, has been a resident of Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia for over 15 years. During the past decade, I have read nearly every major news dispatch originating from that vicinity, and have often been struck by the outstanding anthropological orientation of both Lockwood and his local competitor, Lionel Hogg. The exposure of both these men to Aborigines has been extensive, causing me to see their journalistic writings as parallel to those of such an early reporter of the American Southwest as Charles F. Lummis, journalist and founder of the Southwest Museum.

'I, The Aboriginal' is, however, not outstanding solely because of its author’s knowledge of his topic; it is also noteworthy because of its topic. The book is the autobiography of a Roper River native, named Phillip Roberts, edited and re-written somewhat, by Lockwood. Phillip, a member of the Alawa tribelet, just south of Arnhem Land, describes his life-in the first person -from birth in the bush, through childhood, mission elementary school, initiation into age-grade after age-grade, instruction in bushcraft, the skill of horsebreaking and life as a stockman, instruction as a mechanic at the Roper River Mission, to his introduction into the skills of a medical technician and medical aide among the Aborigines. In 1960, Phillip, with his wife and children, were granted Australian citizenship, although he still has not relinquished his major post in the Khnapipi ceremony on the Roper River.

The reader will find in citizen Roberts’ autobiography extensive discussion of Alawa economic patterns, kinship practices, religious beliefs, sorcery, and curing. Roberts’ attitudes about his role as an Aborigine living as a white man are also made explicit, as well as his unresolved confusion concerning the relationship between Christianity and traditional Alawa values and beliefs.

In one respect I cannot view 'I, the Aboriginal' objectively. In 1953, it was Phillip Roberts who, though not of the Tiwi group, first exposed me to the fallacy of seeing ‘Tiwi, or any Aboriginal kinship system, primarily in genealogical terms. It was through his suggestions mouthed by his mentor Dr. “Spike” Langsford that I began to realize that the genealogical method did not explain Australian kinship practices as soundly as the linguistic framework in which one asked how each kinship term is defined by its usage in the speech community.

I believe that even in this autobiography Roberts gets over to Lockwood’s reader the distinction between the limited number of genealogically related kin and the great class of individuals whom an Aboriginal such as Phillip Roberts addresses by one or another kinship term.

I would place 'I, the Aboriginal' in that small group of books which, like Roy Barton’s 'The Half-Way Sun' and Theodora Kroeber’s 'Ishi', any anthropologist may recommend to a non-anthropologist acquaintance who wishes a painless and fascinating introduction to our field. However, as is the case with most other books from the popular press, the professional anthropologist will find himself frustrated by the lack of an index, or even meaningful titles for chapters.



* **

Thoughts of Anna Creek

THOUGHTS OF ANNA CREEK


In days when the biggest landholding
in the world: Anna Creek Cattle station
is up for sale and Nicole Kidman pictured again
In some play acted role of image in fantasyland

My thoughts go to dry cuttings of Anna Creek banks
Which was for a week playing place for our children
below the famous run and homestead where Sir Sidney Kidman
centred his outback South Australian hopes and plans.

But is she, was that ephemeral king in his grass castles
any more or less rich for the outworking of their dreams;
than our kids were in their production of Anna Creek sand castles
In set-built roads and towns, imagining lives on terraced walls?

* * *
-July 2015 after June 1995, and our camp a mile of so from the Anna Creek Station Homestead, below the Anna Creek Crossing on the Coober Pedy Track, near William Creek, SA

The Murranji

THE MURRANJI


The Murranji Stock Route disappears
through bullwaddy and lancewood, strung on
mythic Murranji waterholes mapped in legends
of yesteryears tales as if lost off padways
or mirage routes where the very absence
of signposts telling the way was the way.

Google Maps don't show it, not on Earth
yet it went from old Newcastle Waters
or Daly Waters, west into scrub-choked
rangelands, toward big Cattle Stations
in wilderness lands, like Top Springs,
or right on to Victoria River Downs.

For drovers and cattlemen came through
here taking north-west starred paths
through the vast and featureless plains
all-covered in tall mulga with dense scrub
of eremophila & dead-finish so that a vista
was not, and still is hardly to be found.

So they went like the Magi and navigated
by the sun or by too-bright night-time stars
staring down final hope beyond the dust
off the wilted ears of a horse and across
loud horns of slakeless cattle as if it was by
way of a daily mulga-bushed miseternity

unless your ways went to make wonders
of the vegetated earth in colours
entering the carols of the birds.


* * *

Images: paintings by Carol McCormack, Qld

1. (above) The Murranji Track - by Carol McCormack, Qld

Painter's note: 'Like the Yellow Brick Road, the Murranji Track appears to go on forever. I drive in comfort, thinking of the drovers who used to push their herds through this almost impenetrable Bullwaddy and Lancewood scrub.'



* * *
2. (below) Murranji - Flight - by Carol McCormack, Qld

Painter's note: 'As we drive the long track, parrots and lorikeets flash past, too swift to identify,
their brilliant colours both blend and contrast with the surrounding scrub.'

* * *
BOOKS - by cover

* * *

* * *

Elsey & Mrs Aeneas 'Jennie' Gunn

ELSEY & JENNIE GUNN

Spear and Stockwhip: A Tale of The Territory

SPEAR AND STOCKWHIP: A TALE OF THE TERRITORY

Ah, Daly Waters, what adventure, to be following in the tracks of those legendary Queensland boys; Snowy Jansen, Darkie Johnson & Tom Brinsley after boss drover Chikker Jackson suddenly up and died, riding Tiger, all their named horses, in trust of young saddles and quick-learnt knack with reins, to drove two thousand Herefords right out across Queensland, to camping out and hunting, to living under the sun and sleeping under the stars, in responsible trust and sense to lead and win, for the goal of the Laurance Estate way up north of the Roper River on that wild Territory side, in an outback journey of more than a thousand miles, in a mythic tale that should've been a young Australian classic.

A great trek led by young lads on horseback right across the Barkly by Anthony's Lagoon. The author, an unknown Richard H Graves thrilled my younger soul with his action book, telling a tale set back in the times between the wars, with a villain like a Hitler in Scarface Gillespie, with cattle thieves, shootings, a stampede, making a friend of a bush Aborigine, in a story of hard-won success found after trials, having gone (like hobbits) all the way there and back again in a grand mettle-building tale.


***
'SPEAR AND STOCKWHIP: A TALE OF THE TERRITORY
by Richard H Groves was published in 1950
by Dymocks Book Arcade Ltd, Sydney & London

I still have my original hardback copy.

Smoking Ceremony Leaf

SMOKING CEREMONY LEAF


I heard that she'd
been out hours to find
that most special leaf

so when the smoking
vessel came before me
I sniffed it hard

even bowed my head
over its protrusions
of burning green

with a finger pinch
that fell into my hands
like raw smoke before the fire

and immediately recognised
its known aromatic face by the nose
as a type of common dogwood

scrub, or Cassinia, a bland-enough
craggy old tree-daisy that regenerates
on any abused or disturbed lands

and does not live long, such
as is most usually despised back home
for its neglect, or lucklessness,

like a settler's failure, or grief;
and yet the smoke curled around
our heads as if it was

some great frankincense
and a gift of previously-unmet mysterious Magi
from even further east.


* * *
- Santa Teresa, Northern Territory

Poverty Bush

POVERTY BUSH

A classic Aussie
An Outback battler
Of a rough family
Like yours or mine.

Eremophila alternifolia
An Emu Bush, Native
Fuchsier of scrophulus family,
Scrophulariaceae.

Another Eremite
Eremo for desert
Phila for loving
A mad Desert-lover.

Alternifolia for
Its see-saw marginal doors
Of blanking alternate leaves
For saving water space.

It grows like anonymous,
A scrub
In margins of
Poetic consciousness

Where human attention
Shifts to
Flowers of a more
Iconogenic rub

Yet and yet, saving it
As Tarrtjan
Aborigines used it
Well against

Inflammation, and carried it
For any case, if this
Is not boring enough,
As a soporific.


* * *

From Little Thefts Big Thefts Grow *

FROM LITTLE THEFTS BIG THEFTS GROW *


Like it was in 1975
By the Giles Creek
At Kalkarung in Guringi
Where Gough Whitlam poured
Lifted Wave Hill sand
Into Vincent Lingiari's hand
For the full measure
Of its repeat ideographic legal copy
And high drama,
Just as calculating economist Herbert Cole 'Nugget' Coombs
Had remembered that it was done, and so
Instructed Prime Minister Whitlam to do
As if it was a big new thing to do, as if
A brave, certainly an imaged-crowd pleasing, an applause-raising, if not a
Novel act as
An avowal in amity

So it was in 1835
Up the Merri Creek
At Duttigalla in Bihrurang
When John Batman grasped
Dug up Yarra Valley soils
From the hand of Billebellary
And his Jaika Jaika kin and fellows
As skin brothers by then by mutual consent
After a smoke-signaled beckoning in hither
In a new corroboree learnt
Of the more-than antiquarian Law of Cession
Just as classically-visionary attorney Joseph Tice Gellbrand
Had instructed field-agent Batman to do
As if it was an ancient, obviously rendered,
Large, and well-understood act
Of avowal in amity.

*

So why? What? Why did Paul Kelly
Call something or other little?
And how does the security of home
Come to feel so belittled, so violated?

* * *

Note: for those catching up with Australian history, the title alludes to the lyric of the song by Paul Kelly on this subject 'From Little Things Big Things Grow'

Coniston

CONISTON


The Lander River has
many tributaries of red
gumtree lined soakage sand;
Star Creek, Warburton Creek,
Tower Creek, Crown Creek,
Spring Creek, Brookes Creek;
even one red thin branch
called Blackfellow Creek.

Lending your women, a welcome,
like a wooden spearthrower,
and then, soon, expecting
them back, even if it
was culturally-enshrined, but
long since abused, just what
were they, just what was
wild Bullfrog thinking?

Borrowing one of
their woman and then
expecting to hold her,
not give her back
when any trespass of
their law meant death
in the old custom. What
was Brookes thinking?

As if human desire,
and human emotions,
were only plusses
to be gratified
that did not have
their negative pole,
that magnetic terminal
impelling to the kill.

The Lander River has
many tributaries of red
gumtree lined soakage sand;
Star Creek, Warburton Creek,
Tower Creek, Crown Creek,
Spring Creek, Brookes Creek;
even one red thin branch
called Blackfellow Creek.

An Overland Telegraph Depot

AN OVERLAND TELEGRAPH DEPOT


Carefully selected-stone
Walls still stand sentinel
Like tombstones without a text
Outside of dry Barrow Creek

In 1874 an isolated group of buildings
in the middle of vast nowhere. The sand
of Barrow creek bed, crumbling dry hills,
mopped up human voices like a padded world.

As it was when the attack came just eight
days after the wires began their singing.
It came from the Katish, with whom less
Care had been taken. They speared linesman

John Franks and then Stationmaster
James L Stapleton, but they did not show
Any less hand for mercy to the domesticated
Black Boy. They speared him three times.

But retreated into pause. From the black and white
Binary dot and dash of that Morses Code, the sent
Telegraph read like an action script:
'This station has been attacked

by natives, Stapleton has been
mortally wounded, one of the men,
John Franks has died from wounds.
Civilised Native Boy has had three

spear wounds. Mr Flint, assistant
operator, one spear wound in leg,
not serious. Full details in morning."
Imagine that remote machine going quiet.

Too quiet. Quiet like its was before
the noise. Later Mounted Constable
Samuel Gason led a large police hunt, but
Took no prisoners who might Telegraph.


* * *

Dead silence, for death likely came
Out there just of mere geography,
like in 1883, November, when Mounted
Constable John Shirley, stationed

at Barrow Creek, led a party of 5 men
and 18 horses out in search of missing
pastoralist Readford and all perished
from thirst near Brunette Downs.

Stuart's Way

STUART'S WAY

Going where
no whitefella had
gone before his
way seemed humble
even hesitant,
embracing retreats
and re-tries, trial
and error for
eliminating
mind-forged patterns
to find the country's own steps,
its paths.

A path known
as the most dangerous,
it was dry-armoured
in desert, well-armed
with missile and shot,
with sharp sun-fire
sniping starvation,
or cannons of thirst.

To step out
and off the map
into emptinessness
he had to try and fill
into otherness
he had to try to tell,
to routes not just lost,
but unheard of,
to ways harder
than where you thought to go;
for this was
all unknown
by his own
until he came.


But less so
with every step
Stuart took:
for he soaked
up field knowledge
of Aboriginal paths
and distance-goals
in Aboriginal legs;
or their edible plants
and sources of food
knowledge of soaks
and watersources -

Like Stuart
was sand
that soaked up
every drop
so Stuart learnt
till he knew
the soakage step by step
that was
the only way
through
the only way
to survive
out here.

Advancing
or retreating
so Stuarts way was
like the setting up
the careful bases for
the well-organisation of risks
in an Antarctic expedition
or, like the late earthquake-ruins
of a spoilt Mount Everest climb
which he then went back
and back to finish.

Or, more like
taking slow stages
in a Sun Tzu battle plan;
or the loss on loss of the clandestine
seven-year siege-plan that comes
out of the gradualised blue
to its win;
in fact, like the way
the Aborigines had discovered
to long survive
and thrive.

Stuart made
several ventures
across the inland
each one went
a little further
and he and his
men came back
from every one.

A most
remarkable feat
out here
and on foot!

Each successful trek
was one of retracing
each failure
one of retreating,
but always returning
to the pilgrim quest,
then going further on
till that pass
came to pass
in the passage

set out for
as if indomitable
or cosmically-backboned
in fortitude and courage
in rectitude without pride
in close rappore with
his men, who loved him
and followed him

so he could go
so he continued
and so discovered
the way, by following
his way
he eventually found
Stuart's way.

But returning
to bottled civilisation
with its inappreciations
and misundertandings
he'd hit the bottle
and drown in its bile
as if his steps went truer
far out of its maw,
as if he'd become more
like an Aboriginal;
and so for the toll
and the preciousness it cost
with the darkness
that fell his way.

Now (roughly)
The Stuart Highway
which the thousands
trek daily
many unwittingly
as teenagers to
the supports of home
or else unknowingly
as aliens in
a foreign land

like greenhorn,
glib followers
of a master
they take for granted
or despise,

though a few,
some do recognise
the great art
of the master
in alcoholic Stuart
of the desert
where his great thirst
was quenched
at least while he
was there.

Stuart was
pre-eminent!
A past master
in going the way.

I'd raise him
a glass
of desert-soak
sourced water.

Attack Creek

ATTACK CREEK

Attack Creek
Historical Reserve
A memorial to the explorer
John McDouall Stuart.
The creek
is the point
from which Stuart
turned back
from his 1860 expedition
to cross the continent,
after an encounter with
hostile Warumungu Aboriginal people.

A memorial to
the last time Stuart
turned back,
and the last time
Stuart failed
to reach his goal
as he had
failed so many
times before
in the way
of winning.

At attack Creek
Came hiatus, a pause
Like over-weary sleep
After the trials that
happened there

In Land Like Flynn

IN LAND LIKE FLYNN

The Flynn Memorial
Now at Three Ways
Was like a butterfly
formerly in caterpillar
country west of Alice Springs

In like Flynn

Three Ways

THREE WAYS



Known for its three
Cardinal Points of the whole
Compass of the Continent
The Junction of the north-south
Stuart Highway at a T-junct
At the western end of a Queensland
led east-going Barkly Highway,
Three Ways is also the place
Of the celebrated Memorial*
To the Reverend John Flynn
Who found the fourth way.

And all the ways between
In such wide open,
And all-encompassing
Good sense to meeting
Of real needs with wings.
On wings of wider passage
The Flying Doctor* was born
Sprung from Flynn’s own
Answering of a call of One
He stood true to as Three:
Father, Son and Holy Ghost.


* * *


*1. Three Ways is just the public roadhouse that offers restaurant meals, take away food, refreshments and fuel. It has a landscaped caravan park with barbecues, a swimming pool, and air-conditioned motel units and cabins. But the only listed local point of interest in Three ways is the Flynn Memorial. Reverend John Flynn pioneered the Royal Australian Flying Doctors Service. The memorial originally sat at the exact meeting spot of the Barkly and Stuart Highways, but the point has now been moved 250 metres south.

*2. The Royal Australian Flying Doctors Service

The Devil's Lost Marble

THE DEVIL'S LOST MARBLES

Standard Gauge Water Pump

STANDARD GAUGE WATER PUMP

Made Tennant Creek
Of hot bitumen-ed distance
In heat grief with a water blow.

Thank God for a standard gauge
Holden engine and a remote
Store franchised to Repco.

God's Marble or the Devils Marbles

GOD'S MARBLE OR THE DEVIL'S MARBLES

What Lassiter Lost

WHAT LASSITER LOST

What Lassiter lost was
what he thought, grief
for what he thought found,
what he thought gold, a reef.

What Lassiter lost was
timidity, insanity, call a reef
what you will, the dry desert
is its own sea of shipwreck.

What Lassiter lost in death
was lust, the gold-madness
that grows on a mammon
breast, suckling-coined.

What Lassiter lost was
life, drawn in to death
by the slakeless surface
of mineral hard hope.

What Lassiter lost was
love, the sweet maiden call
of virgin-cleft hills clad
in blue veils of old longing.

What Lassiter lost was
company, the fellowship
of those who go out to
join the chorus of song.

What Lassiter lost was
the grail of holy cause,
the call,the purpose to embark
under the ship of faith's sails.

What Lassiter lost was
equanimity, that peace
which comes in ruthful
redemption of desire.

Namatjira's Name

NAMATJIRA'S NAME

Strehlow's Song

STREHLOW'S SONG

In Early Time

IN EARLY TIME

( the Southern Tanami, Central Australia, 20th Century)


We went north-west - through mulga
scrub, in the red centre’s sturdy ironwoods,
to camp on a grey Umberla plain.

Next morning, as we boiled billy
in early time, we became entranced
looking about Central Mt Wedge,

as - in cold frosty air - a mirage came
onto the horizon so that distant blue
mountains rose into air,

magnified, came so near us, we
could plainly discern rocks, ravines
and trees. Rationalising this

strange phenomenon, we were
scoffed at, by the practical desert
tribesman who was with us, for he

in learned patience, explained those
things were works of Ngunta fairy folk
who lived in those mountains.

-obviously, by dancing in cold dawn,
these beings - with their magic songs
- lifted these hills into the sky,

and, as sun rose closer to heaven,
they lowered them back once more
on to the tribal lands.

*

And we, entering into
this geography, woke
a little to a listening

that filled another day
with vistas of likely
epiphanies all about us...

While realising that,
in early time the scoffing
was at rationalism.


* * *
- 4 May 2001 © Wayne David Knoll

Based on a true account by W.B. (Bill) Harney in "Life Among The Aborigines" - 1957 [Robert Hale Ltd] pp 207

Images: -1. Central Mount Wedge -by Albert Namatjira

- 2. Central Mount Stuart

Baby Powder

BABY POWDER


Like a bottled sifter
this desert earth is full
of white talc gone to powder
or bleed-powdered talcs of some off-red hue or cry
that desert-road users otherwise call bull
dust, the unpolished pits will explode on being hit in soft white dry-mist
as if powder monkeyed with small restraint
that's used in a talcing bottle-end's fist,
like earth-set random explosive devices whose clouds
fly out so far from being blessed rain;
those pan-plain towelling spreads on change tables with unlidded
sprinkles that sift out to the perfumeried appearance of most fine
matters, so subtle and so soft that every modern post modern kid
is tioleted in products of this outback of desert mines
and sold into the same coughing plastic-bottled whiteness
that would bog down and undo travellors in the powdered dry-ice
of its talc-ground bulldust ambience covering ruts and wallows
for the supermarket-shelved bottles of a commonly bought nicety
of deserts that no consumer would admit to want to swallow.


* * *
- Dingo Hills, Simpson Desert, Towards Old Andado, Northern Territory

Kinship by Skin Name

KINSHIP BY SKIN NAME


I'm 'Jupurrula' now!
his kin brother-in-law.
Until Darby Jampijimpa
gave us skin-names we
were nobody there.

Before which we
had all gathered round
bemused but culturally
adrift, lost as sheep yet
to be shepherd-named.

And since I've often read
tell of how the blackfellas
mobbed around their first
amicably-contacted whitefellas
clamouring to be named

Whom the whitfellas found
endearing, as if blackfellas
were children, and so called
them Jacky, Billy, Jim Crow
anything to get them to go.

So I find a very great respect
for (one man) who, seeing this fail,
in head pats, wanted no such
token-name, but reciprocity, a part
in a shared future, and so, hand-signed,

(It was 1837) to leader Gellibrand,
indicating, pointing: "No! I want your name."
And yes, 'Black Gellibrand' he became.
But, in conquered Yuendumu, in 1995, I
wanted but did not know how to be clever as he.

The Peace Outside of Time

THE PEACE OUTSIDE OF TIME


- for Kumanji, the late Darby Jampijimpi Ross


Ghostgums are aeon-dancers
In circles in curving lines
Among the now upended cars
Soak-swallows use as caves;

As out on the salt-pans
Wildflower mats are reeling
As hot wind will blow a big
Windmill to spinning turns.

*

There's a step by step
Taking this long dusk of being
There's a deep soakage well
The well-watered world
Doesn't know its longing for.

There's a hunger for the dryness
A yearning to sift the sand
Which satisfies the trickle
Of each moment, and a thirst for
The peace outside of time.

*

Barren hills are broken
Well weary, fallen down.
And bare rock dares to jig
Naked edges of the sky.

Gouged ridges are shaking
To empty on blankets of plains
Till the Wokapi (Rock Holes) of
Pure heart well up again.


August 1995, dictated to my daughter while driving out on the 300 klicks-long Tanami Track

Ruby Dock

RUBY DOCK

Introduced!
we used
to say as if in hateful accusation,
with the presumed verdict of damnation.

Ruby Dock came outback in the straw
use in camel's saddle and bridle stuffing, a visitor
in equipage which rock-ripped in falls, in straw torn apart, to blow
at large, to germinate and grow.

Till as far as it knows, its scaly red florets
are native as any of the desert's wildflower scarlets;
as indigenous and normal as everlastings and pussytails,
among which it raises its hundred red-scalloped sails.

Ghost Gums

GHOST GUMS


A National Symbol and Secular Icon
So long-grown it jubilees off Namatjira's pallette;
So that the McDonnell Ranges' real ghost gums
One finds hardly rate.

As if the artist's gift made a too-populist icon
Has set up such a brush-struck imagined perfect;
That the actual trees you set eyes on
Light up in their defect.

Blown Dust

BLOWN DUST

The place is
Like meat the flies
Have blown

Ridden by maggots of
Wind-wrinkling moving dust
Hard blown as chill fog

Of mourning that isn't
As it might be found
In a greener land's morning.

Meat is plagued off the bones
By pestiferous smallfired shot; as this earth flies
In marginal inclemencies of air.

All loose things scatter in dust
To the wind's hideouts, and this mob,
Like people too-used to suffering's motes

In their eyes, move through all this
As if the plastic bags hooked on trees are
Not, as if a white-goods and car-wreck cemetery

Stills them in the eternally-moving throw-away
Rubbish like it was not there, as if it was
Just skins off an eaten meal, as if it

Is a tucker that sustains them, as if it
Was shells of the nuts that fulfill them;
The fire-ash that keeps them here.

Sorry-Business Camp

SORRY-BUSINESS CAMP


Makeshift humpies
Unfixed slap-up shelters
But one with a colour television
Openly visible on the inside.

Blankets bleeding into dust
Jeans and jumpers buffetting the dirt.
A mangy dog sits on its shadow, a dog
Looking across to the hidden dogs

Thin standing posts wobble as if for
A goalless sorry football game, offering nothing
In support as bull-nosed WW2 Nissen-hut roof-sheets are
Sheeted away, lent up on a point of something.

For somebody who 'passed away', the cliche is apt
As the goal is for somebody died as cannot be told, a Kumanji,
Whose former name cannot be spoken as a sorry-business camp
Speaks the grief which comes in mourning to make a home.

In the skillion caves of iron and canvas
doors with hessian windows, and a mulga
Wood fire at the front door as if to live
Eternally before a hearth of ashes.

Yuendumu Wake God Up Song

YUENDUMU: WAKE GOD UP SONG

- (for the children, in Yuendumu)


O God shake them eyelids
Crack those ears wide open
Morning's hear. Wake up!

Morning's come and to hear
We are being here for you
Waiting for you

Can you hear this morning?
Can you hear our voices?
Lift your head and listen!

Will you open your eyes
Will you cup your ear?
Hear, here we are!

Sun rises up and where are you?
Light puts out the darkness
Wake up like the sun.

O God, come on, shake up
Rattle your hear in us, fire
Your mind as new life in us.


* * *

- Sunday, July 1995 Yuendumu, written camped around cooking fires in inter-gated open backyards of Matthew (later Liam) Campbell, recreation-wallah, Colin & Merryn Smith,m with Ben, Talitha and Cailan, teacher-wallahs, and Darryl ? and Andrew Cowan, teacher-wallahs, where we found rest, welcome, and a sense of fellow-travelling as we got to be with desert blackfellows for a change, and lots of easily-spent time with the Yuendumu children who mobbed us.

Tanami

TANAMI


Wedgetailed eagles circle slowly
over spiralling-wide horizons
as the compass of distances
spin to untrammel your eyes;
never-citied walls of clawed rock
crumble off older pathways of matters
mattering less and more as they
dissolve under the source of fire.

Breadth awes your feet to an itch-
walk only to sit down in shaded sand,
like crossing over to a gut-led journey
that sinks humbly with each foot-fall;
the writ prints of feet defer control
here to whatever will be, that will be,
as you are free to seek an I Am
detached for any call.

A man might be lost in the compass
spins of ever-rolling largeness,
as the child is all too
easily lost in the man;
the step by step struggle to embrace
what you see in truth can be too much
for your early little-housed
mirror-soul to understand.

Tanami, Tanami, mulga Tanami!
Am I any longer who I was?
For the desert-telling truths
wring a greenland mind aside.
Out in the Tanami the bone
waits for a breach, the real
reels through to bleach a heavy
body of its false pride.

Walk off the graded track and
side tracks go ever out and on;
carry no water and your tongue
will un-language your throat away;
thorns and needle sunspears will
prick your well-fed bubble
of the soft guzzle of a wet body
you dally in and think you pray.


Tanami true,
Tanami true
Truly I pray..

* * *

-August 1995, Yuendumu, Northern Territory

Waterhole Tank Reflections

WATERHOLE TANK REFLECTIONS


Starglow beckons on the well skin
And earth is luminous, with the Southern
Cross in the above and the below.

Sheens of light tack under our feet.
East is a burnish before the light
As wind-vanes counterpoint blown sky.

Swallow bottlenests under upturned cars
Are hanging-mud drawn of edge-water
Finally abandoned to breed wings.

Waterholes: portholes of contemplation
Places where hearts are drawn out
Into grace that springs from space.

Eternity breaks eggs of the moment
And leaps out of gravity in time
Through such bottomless skies.


- Kunoth Well, Tanami Track, Northern Territory

- with appreciation of how rare surface water will be here, with the ripples of its exception stills, the beauty of rare surface water still alluring for the mind after taking stock of the experiences of The Bubbler, Blanche Cup, Coward Springs, Ellery Creek Bighole, Glen Helen, and The Alice Springs

Not nice, Gneiss

NOT NICE, GNEISS


No
Gentle
Little-picture.

Nor
Any soft
Option-land

Even easy
Country is
Hot Desert Sand

And the Mountains
Rise up in your face
With Ridge-knives

Adamants of standover bedrock
That are not nice;
But gneiss.

Gneiss: a stone
As hard as steel,
But not as bending.

Out of Name

OUT OF NAME - (or WITHOUT NAME)

- written to be free sung

* * *

We know
No names here
Desert needs
No name

We know
No name here
So who
Is here?


* * *

Space love
All surround
Tower of stone

We know
Nothing.

* * *

Castle grain
Failing, falling

Turret rocks
Taken, taken
No names

* * *

Cave and crevasse
Dry watercourse
Empty cascade.

We have
No names

* * *

Shake old tabletops
Blow atlas clean
Away.

We have
No names.

* * *

Pillars fall
Break away
Dissolve

Jump-Ups
Strip by piece
What was there

Break-Aways
Scatter out
Into space

We have
No word
Before name.

* * *

Ancient
Ancient Space
Ancient of Days
Waiting.

Ancient
Ancient of Moons
Ancient of Years
Waiting

Ancient of eons
Waiting waiting
No past here
Now alone.

* * *

What place
Names here?

We wait where
We will be

We wait who
We will be.

* * *

Windpushed sand
Rolls another grain.

Stone flakes off
Hot cliff face -dust.

We have no names here
We need no....

* * *

Apparent nothing
Apparent emptiness

Apparent absence
We wait apparent,

We wait
Nameless

We wait who
we will be.


***
- August 1995,
in the mesa hills, Barrow Creek district, Northern Territory



* * *


Compact Version



OUT OF NAME - (or WITHOUT NAME)

- written to be free sung

* * *

We know no names here
Desert needs no name

We know no name here
So who is here?

Space love, All surround. Tower of stone
We know, Nothing.

Castle grain. Falling, falling
Turret rocks. Taken, taken
No names

Cave and crevasse
Dry watercourse
Empty cascade.

We have no names

Shake old tabletops
Blow atlas clean away.
We have no names.

Pillars fall. Break away. Dissolve
Jump-Ups, Strip by piece What was there
=Break-Aways. Scatter out. Into space
We have no word before name.


Ancient, Ancient Space,
Ancient of Days, Waiting.
Ancient, Ancient of Moons
Ancient of Years, Waiting

Ancient of eons, Waiting waiting
No past here now alone.

What place names here?
We wait where we will be
We wait who we will be.

Windpushed sand rolls another grain.
Stone flakes off hot cliff face -dust.
We have no names here, we need no....

Apparent nothing, Apparent emptiness
Apparent absence, we wait apparent,

We wait Nameless
We wait who we will be.


***
- August 1995,
in the mesa hills, Barrow Creek district, Northern Territory

Desert Canyon, Desert Gorge

Desert Canyon, Desert Gorge

1.

The wedges of tight slopes
make barbaric window sills
out north and west across
the eremophilia and sitting
rocks, the mulga and spinifex
in a look into Ormiston Pound
where you find a single pink
bloom of Sturt's desert rose
against Namatjira blue ranges..


2.

You tongue-lip your way through
dry red walls of dry rock teeth
of the dry mouth of wild ranges like
a fool walking into the Jurassic;
with teeth regrowing up from below
in rocks like rail-shunted trains,
as in the eternally-pointed jaws
of long-watching land-crocodiles.


3.

Wild horses go a brumby-run
across thin-bladed plains before
the spinifex-needled hills that
necklace out towards Mount Sonder
and the Bedford-van mulga-spikes
a tyre in successful photographic
pursuit across ochre-bared pans.


4.

So rare a thing is standing water,
that treasure, water open to the sky,
that to find fish in a pool at all,
out on Larapinta drive, or Namatjira;
was it Simpson's Gap or Standley Chasm?
you are not surprised that they're dead;
little fish, speckled fish, not sardines
but fish with real fins so you wonder if
and how they ever could get any bigger.


5.

One lad creams the green algae
slime in stagnant side rockpools
south of the cliffside big-pool
at the Ellery Creek Bighole and
you call him out for any cuts
he might infect, while the older
fellas are already climbing walls
ready to jump from the cliffs
into water yet untested for depth
like candidates for Darwin awards
keen to erase a genetic imperative,
but finally the lads all swim as you
do and make the other side like
William Dampier arriving among flies.



1995 (and after), The West MacDonnell Ranges,

Sturt's Desert Rose

STURT'S DESERT ROSE


This ochred flower
on a desert cotton
blooms like a boon
after oasis making
rains. Pale crimson

petals keep spreading
into social embrace
as a stylised ensign;
the Northern Territory's
rustic coloured flag.

Shy bud of desert
gorges, it opens up
in gorgeous beauty
and a rose jewel of
the riven wilderness.

The Ochre Pits

THE OCHRE PITS


Richly hued
Prototype open-cut mines, as if
Templates for more frequent, larger
Venture pits to come.

Lyndhurst, Ellery Creek, the Ochre Pits
Are Indigenous mines of ancient use, taking ore
For use in the mettle of quick Social Matters
Of respected ceremonial colouration.

In sunset tangerine, in quandong
orange, in dried blood reds,
and yellows of the manifold sunrise;
Thee coloured chalks of caution

Out of caution-warned skies
Rendered bodies into the painted robes,
The insignia of ancient office
Ordained with otherness.

The walls of the pits bleed in veins
In stone angular as the paint of many layers
Which makes portraits of a mass of magma
Underneath, a sedimentary deposition

Made for the legal inquest set by the judge
For the resolution of matters by way
Of appreciated matter and the ore that graced
Humans into Awe.

Song of the Two-toned Invisible Scrub-Bird

Song of the Two-toned Invisible Scrub-Bird

The distant scrub breaks out
with a loop of ever repeated
ventriloquil two-tone mournful song
presumably throated by some grief-stricken
grey bird permanently bound
to its camouflage of
faded widows weeds that match
the note-bending a-chordal down scale
that sets a soundtrack to the elusive
unsaid something that there is out there
in and about this much winged-over
inner life of desert Australia
of a bird you go looking for but never
do get to see, like some will-o-wisp
bird-angel carrying the country's elegiac messages
with an echo-amplified presence made more palpable
by this shyly-canny clandestine Scrub-bird's
rendering of its syllabic metre
into these slow-drawn out yet penetrating
aural whispers, soft bells that ring yet
in your mind for ever after like
some lost word of a forgotten password
to a place you don't yet
know how to enter.

Nardoo

NARDOO

Long-since legendary
Nardoo leaf is shaped like
A four-leafed clover it isn't;
A leaf that can float in water
Like the water lilies it isn't;
A plant that all but
Disappears into the dust
Till its flourish rush
Come the rains.

With starchy rhizome
Balls called sporocarps
Full of sustaining meal
A providence far from home.
Poor-man's flour of Nardoo
Dried might keep you alive
As it did for humble King when
Proud Burke and Wills expired
Where Aborigines thrived.

Image: Nardoo with sporocarps

Ant Lion

ANT LION



Inside vast desert-beached sealess Australian
beaches, underneath the redness of the red sand,
the lion insect drills, it excavates its pitfalls,
its sand snares, its traps for any unwary quarry
that comes legging it across hot sands.

Deep pitfalls, it digs ten times deeper than its own
Size, set to take ants, whether smaller
Or larger, in fact, any critters of the bush
And there it makes itself at home
in wait down the pit of the sands of ambush.

Hid underneath the very harmless-seeming sandy bottom
below the fulcrum of the sand-dug funnel
its egg-timed slow treachery follows an old pattern
of behaviour set to the slope-loosened scree of ancient sands,
with a characteristic violent geo-logic that an ant lion understands.

Tough little monsters: secretive too, ant lions can go
for ages without a feed; when they move they stay incognito
by dragging themselves backwards though cooler sand below.
You only get to see one if you act like Steve Irwin by interference
& blow thru' a drinking-straw to unfunnel a pitfall-bottom of its pincers.

(Make sure you never suck.)

Like a casino owner await for the luckless mug
It sets up steep sides, a wheel too difficult to escape the centering maw,
And like a loss-lender, it grabs the victim fallen to a sand-papered flood
With its enormous house-front end, quite the fashion in power jaws,
And vices it tenderly as it sucks out its blood.


* * *




* * *
The Ant Lion

Eremophila Latrobei

EREMOPHILA LATROBEI

Like answered prayers of the Eremites of old
These, as their name tells, are lovers of the deserts
Those that thrive where others quail.

Native fuchsias, or Crimson turkey bush
By any other name, yet scabrous and poor
by the common-garden chart in wet-reckoning.

For nurserymen say "Propagation by seed is unreliable,
Treatment methods tried include sowing the ripe fruits, but
no! 'E.latrobei proves difficult to strike from cuttings.'

And yet Eremophila's survival is not endangered, it thrives
on Stony red clay, loam or sandy soils over sandstone, granite, ironstone.
Gibber plains, rocky ridges & desert hillslopes, dry creeklines.

The everywhere shrubs of the no good rejected lands
That ever-flower with all-season's ready bells
Ringing that country with petal flames.

Good-For-Nothing Bells?
What! These Eremophilians are healing leaves
with balms out of the Pharmacopian ashes.


* * *

Which Way

WHICH WAY


Oodnadatta Track
or the Stuart Highway?
Ernest Giles Track
or back on Lassiter's Loop Way?
The easy road or the one
that calls?

Too many of us
are at the crossroad
simply wondering where
the answers lie.

Yet, of ancient time
tried and true field knowledge
begun a way.

Native Footpads became
Explorer Tracks,
as they followed,
to honour knowledge of
truly constraining geography
in respect for
the long-habituated steps of
well-trod human wisdom.

All superceded by central planning
And the mind-forged easy-way through,
out-landed from some drawn-artifice
come of desk-brained convenience,
some long-handled theoretic short-cut,
that make ruins
of the way.

Till pilgrim men went running,
just running,
scattered about,
like ants stomped
of grounded nests,
running every which way
without rest.

Old Prophet Jeremiah's
answer is pretty clear;
-especially with its aria
of counterpointed antithesis:

"This is what
the Lord says:
"Stand at the cross-roads
and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where
the good way is,
and walk in it,
and you will find
rest for your souls.

But you said, 'We
will not walk in it.'"

Ah, such a puncture
does slew one off from
the calling journey!

Sturt's Desert Peas

STURT'S DESERT PEAS


Over many trips
and wide outback
ventures we only ever saw
these beauties flowering
in the planted garden
by the Ranger's Hut
at King's Canyon
or in the circle garden
of the Big Roundabout on
the Stuart Highway in
downtown Alice.

It was as if
the highlighted
main feature of
the outback myth
was a myth.

* * *

Image: - Sturt's Desert Peas inside the Alice' Roundabout with my hat.

The Alice Springs

The Old Telegraph Station
Sits on a riverside of bouldered sand
Where the original Alice Springs
Soaks into the sand.

T.A.E.D.S

T.A.E.D.S

(Terra Australis Espiritu Del Santo)


The only beautiful thing I saw
the only significant item
that caught me at
Our Lady of the Sacred Heart
Catholic Church in The Alice
was this writ of invocation
and this pictured holy ideograph
in a tile floor mosiac
out front of the entrance doors
of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart

with a seven pointed red-ochre-hued star
representing the seven Australian States
encircled by the blue space of the heavens
in which the yellow-ochre four cardinal stars,
plus the outrider star,
of Crux - our Southern Cross,
with the head star spearing down like the true cross,
rise to their full prominence
to put all other stars
in the dark

and, inside a right-angle
pointed blue triangle whose
meaning (like much in truth) is a mystery,
and, trans-winged above
and overflown up front of all that
by a pale white-ochred symbolic form
in its streamlined travelling arcs
of a fast homing
heaven-commissioned
dove of peace and clandestine God the Holy Spirit
carrying a stylised white-ochred
olive branch like
sacred bread.

And this text
in Latin:
Terra Australis Espiritu Del Santo
for
The Southland of The Holy Spirit
signs off
on the import.

And those are
my son's and
my daughter's
then faithfully
beautiful feet.