Gift of the Gibb – Part II

The joy of the Kimberley is wilderness. That is why people go. Our little troop, loud on port and gin often disturbed the peace and quiet so I didn’t get my bird-geek on, but trees and flowers are not frightened of general carousing. Boabs were a wonderful discovery. I’ve seen images of these, often in paintings, or they are described in poems and stories where someone is sat in their shade, but despite their hype as the truly iconic Proper Australian Tree, they are …pretty ugly. Or so I thought. They are wide and squat in the trunk and often depicted with dead looking branches bare of leaves spread like a crucifix under a punishing sun on the dry, dry, endless red earth. Give me the moist green of a jarrah, or the whimsical fronds of yellow box gums. Not this blasted, bleak thing.

I have been converted. We arrived in Broome at the very start of our trip on a warm night, fragrant with frangipani blossoms (which I thought only existed in Marquez novels), overjoyed to be released from the grip of a Canberra winter into the purple open palm of the Indian ocean and its scented breezes. The first boab I saw was thickset of trunk, curved like an old woman – like an apple, and abundant with leaf. Like a green plume, ornamented with huge, creamy white blossoms frothing with a thousand long stamens. It was beautiful. I have never seen such a friendly looking tree; and friendly they are, being filled with water in the desert. At El Questro, someone has helpfully installed a tap in the trunk of one such tree and the water was pure and clear, and a lot tastier than what came out the tank of our bus. I want you to imagine Terry Pratchett’s Nanny Ogg-made-tree, opening her arms out to hug her children because that is what their wide, wizened, warm and friendly trunks remind me of. The boab nuts which endure long after the leaves (and apparently should NOT be eaten before some serious preparation) hang like Christmas baubles and gifts, reachable between the cleared branches.

As well as the landscape of pink wildflowers, yellow cotton flower and embracing boabs, there is a universe of stars. One of my favourite bits of the trip was going to bed. We have, at last, joined the ranks of Aussies who rave about ‘swags.’ This word is so ingrained in the Australian dialect that they don’t even think to modify it to people like me who think they’re talking about an elaborate curtain arrangement. I have been initiated into the mystery: it is a heavy-duty canvas sleeping bag, for your sleeping bag. There ya go, that’s it. You unroll it, it has a sort of sewn-in foam mattress layer which is comfier than any amount of money spent on blow up/pack down camp mats, you put your sleeping bag inside it, then fight your way through two sets of zips to get in. Exciting for early morning wee urges, useless against mosquitos, hardly lightweight portable, but, you know, if you want to get romantic about it, we could call it a star mat. Because that’s what it’s best for, snuggling in comfortably and watching the universe. On our first night the sky was lit an unreal purple, with the clouds and studs of the milky way tangled up between the branches of a boab glowing silver by the sky. One night after returning from the loo, I watched stars shoot in slow motion; one for up to 8 continuous seconds. What a beautiful way to fall asleep. Another night, I heard dingoes howling. This is less comfortable. I remind you that I am just lying on the ground, face exposed to the nocturnal exploits of wildlife with no walls to divert attraction. What if a dingo nibbles my toes? What if a snake slithers over me? Sleeping on the ground in swags was another thing we would not have done if we had not been with Daddy Damo, and of course, snakes try to avoid big, vibrating things like us.

All this came to a head one night when I saw a croc in the campsite.

Our little camp spot on the well-ordered, well amenitied, boozed up El Questro campsite was right by the river. This is the Pentecost River that Definitely Has Crocs, and after some very scientific finger measuring on the map, the campsite’s location on the river is far less than that all important 100km away from the sea. We unrolled our swags beneath a tree a mere five Yates-Paces (YPs) from the bank itself. I’m sure it’s fine, I said, if they had a pitch where people kept disappearing, we’d know about it. There was a swimming part of the river, with a sort of wall built into it with rocks to protect children from crocs. I refer you above to the bit about crocs crawling up waterfalls and you sure as hell wouldn’t have got me in there. But they’re ambush predators. They don’t sneak out of the water to drag campers off. I’m sure it’s fine. Sure. I slept with memories of brolgas flying into the sunset, the starlight. Then I came back from me midnight wee.

Two little red dots were staring at me from the middle of our camp stool circle.

We’d had a tour of a crocodile sanctuary in Broome and the chap had told us; if you’re camping and you get up for a piss and see little red dots glowing in the dark, those’re freshies. Don’t panic too much, it means the river’s good, you’ll have good fishing, but if they all disappear one night and are replaced by two yellow dots, then get the hell out. Still. Two little red dots more than I wanted to see. Perfect, glowing red dots, and nothing between me and them. I woke up the Gentleman. Dude, get ready to run. We stared in horror together and he stood up for a better look. Three, glowing red dots.

Our campfire was a metal barrel with regular holes drilled in the side along the bottom for air. It was still glowing. Panic over.

Purnululu sounds like a song, doesn’t it? What a lovely word. This was our most remote spot, the campsite was a shed toilet and a tap, defo snakes everywhere I’m sure of it, and the home of unique, layered sandstone beehive shaped rocks. Those that have been to Kata Tjuta’s many heads – it was much like that, you walked through a city of rocks cutting their blades on the blue sky, but they were red and black striped. I wonder if you could learn every rock, every tower, every shape. It was beautiful. These skyscrapers of stone bubble up from the plain in a group, surrounded by smooth, flat land filled with termite mounds and melaleuca. We did some beautiful hikes across the empty Picaninny creek to the look out, then through a maze of flowers to Cathedral gorge and Echidna chasm. Cathedral gorge is the end of a creek where during the wet season a waterfall spills over the top to join the creek and has cut out this huge open cave with pretty amazing acoustics. Greg sang Meatloaf. I sang The Cruel Mother. I don’t know why I chose a sad song. Aren’t the rocks sad? They have watched for so long. Echidna chasm is a thin gap between two walls of red stone, cool and shady, with that same Uluru red AF and blue AF contrasts and finches flitting between the cracks and trees. I write lots of reports commending people who have ‘strategic overview’ who can ‘see the bigger picture.’ We got an expensive 18-minute helicopter ride to see the ‘bigger picture,’ but the lasting joy comes from the close-up details; tufts of tiny white and maroon dry flowers, the stamens of blue petals, the different shades of crimson.

Lake Argyle was the last main stop. Science: this a man-made lake. Insert other info here, about failed agricultural intentions or whatever. For us, this was yet another stretch of water we got in, then out of and then saw crocodiles. Fuck sake. We jumped in the water, we saw freshies up real close; little, short-eared rock wallabies with their joeys on the stones above us and we lazed in the water as the sun went down. Aussies have a cute thing where they chuck a ladder over the side of a boat and lazily announce, pool’s open! I like that. But I really liked being on a boat full of adults shouting, ‘Yeeesss, that one spat at me!!’ There were little archer fish in the water which have great eyesight and will spot crumbs of bread if you hold them out. They use this superpower to spot flies hovering above the water’s meniscus and spit water at them like a missile to bring them down for eating. They’ll do this to bread holding humans, too.

Our final day was in Katherine Gorge, Nitmiluk park’s thousands of bats and Edith falls for one last gorge dunk. This was every bit as lovely as any other gorge, but it was now melancholy with the thought of leaving, of saying goodbye to new friends and sadly recognising that you will not laugh at another of Graham’s puns, or hear another of Greg’s songs, or see another unique pair of boardies from Ben’s inexhaustible wardrobe.

The wonder of travel sometimes, is when it’s over. I’m not sure I really believe this, but I do believe that the important part is reflection and that needs time and sometimes, distance. What images distilled in your mind? What now will be the thing that will pierce you with the briars of nostalgia? It’s the bird geek in me talking, but every day we were chased by the fluted hammer-on call of a bird which now holds in its round notes the heat and smells and yellow flowers of the Kimberley. I was overjoyed when I finally tracked it down in Darwin’s beautiful botanic gardens; a blissful twenty minutes of standing still, listening, looking, moving slowly, and spotting it at last up in the fork of an unromantically spikey tree. I could see its little throat move so I knew that was definitely that ball of feathers making that sound and I could see enough to identify it as ‘something like a pigeon’ so I could start googling doves of the NT and finally call it by its blue-eyed name: peaceful dove. This is why travel is important. You learn about people and things you didn’t even know existed. Another fact I learned that I can’t seem to shake was from our boat guide telling us that Lake Argyle should rise by about 6m every year during the wet season. But repeated drought over the past 8 or so years have replenished it by a mere 30cm a year. Can you imagine that? SIX metres down to 30 centimetres for 8 years. Even this incredible wet season’s efforts of raising the water by an impressive 9m has not brought it back to pre-drought levels. Guide Damo told us that in his 7 years driving people up and down the Gibb River Road, he has never had to swim across Tunnel Creek, and he has no idea what all the wildflowers are called because he’s never seen them before. I hope he sees them again next year and our joy at them wasn’t luck. But increasing drought, and it is caused by increased burning of fossil fuels raising temperatures by over a degree (look, that’s the science, and confirmed by a real geo-paleo…super scientist we had on the tour with us), means those wildflowers might be luck, and those changes are stripping a lot of beauty and colour from the world. And going back to my little peaceful dove, what if they disappear too? This is another reason why travel is important. When you find something new and beautiful, like that blue-eyed, fluting bird, you want to protect it. You’re connected to it, you named it, or held it or touched it, left a bit of yourself with it.

Allowing its death is to permit the death of a bit of you.

Gift of the Gibb – Pt 1

‘So this is it, guys! Jump in.’

In, he said. Well, I didn’t quite know what ‘in’ was. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, and I was cold and needed a wee. I was aware that there was water of an uncertain depth ahead and while I’d like to use the old metaphor of ‘inky black;’ maybe chuck in a ‘gurgling’ to describe it, I’d be lying because I couldn’t see a bloody thing. The light of my feeble headtorch patchily revealed that the valiant Damo – our guide, had stripped down to his shorts and boots and was rubbing his hands together between hunched shoulders. Then that image was gone pretty quick, lost to the gulping blackness. Apart from the wobbling, unenthusiastic glow of his headtorch ebbing away, I could see nothing else.

I stood on the sand, with the Gentleman nudging me; go on, Chris. But why the fuck, I thought, am I in a pitch-dark cave at 6am about to swim in a flood-swollen, frozen creek infested with goddamn crocodiles?

Well, I didn’t want to be left in the dark on me own for a croc to find, so in you go, – and I did that thing I do when getting in water (only recently discovered, as entering the inclement waters of the Irish, Atlantic and North Seas is not something in which sensible Brits indulge), which, it turns out, is hyperventilate the words ‘shit! fuck! fuck! Ok, I’m in, I’m in, shit! fuck’ and there you are, aloft, kick, swim! Hope your boots don’t weight you down, don’t think about the crocs and get to the other side.

This was the first major spot on our tour of the Kimberley; heading from Broome to Darwin: Tunnel Creek. Despite arriving at the stretching crags of a 350million-year-old coral reef at dawn, swimming that cold creek wasn’t even the first impressive thing I’d done that day. No. That was to meaningfully pick up the shovel and disappear off into the bush. But I’d been keen on getting to Tunnel Creek – I’d been lent a book by my shanty man Bruce about the Bunuba people’s resistance to encroaching and violent pastoralists in the 1880s, led by the heroic Jandamara who evaded capture for years by hiding in these caves. I dunno if he had to deal with crocs. And they were certainly there; as we followed the creek’s strips and pools, careful not to stumble and reach out for the wrong half naked person in the dark; little red eyes at the edges of the caves where they cringed, spread like butter against the walls. Bloody hell. And then walk towards the light, and relief dripped off me, along with the water, as daylight emerged at the other end of the tunnel, festooned with trees, littered with heron and loud with peace. Until Damo pointed out the long, deep imprint of an enormous reptilian tail in the sand, heading from whence we’d come.

‘Right guys, back through the creek again, then!’

FUCK’s sake.

On our way back, we encountered three noisy lads on giant, unicorn inflatables with tinnies.  Now we’ve read a lot about crocs, or ‘croncs’ as the Gentleman has affected to call them. Salties can live in fresh or salt water and have a gland that removes the salt. They can come up to 100km upriver. They like to eat small calves, or wallabies, or wallaby sized humans like children and Chrissies. They can lean back on their tail as if it was a fifth leg, just like kangaroos, so pealing you off the roof of your ute isn’t much of an issue. They can even, apparently, climb up waterfalls. Jesus. We have agreed that, along with its weather, you don’t fuck with Australian wildlife. The hippy mantra ‘they’re more scared of you than you are of them,’ rather underestimates the boofhead courage of your average 5 metre fucking salty. But here’s an observation from The Brit Abroad, West Australians and Northern Territorians certainly have an impressive risk tolerance. Or commendable courage. Or they’re just fucken nuts. I pondered the gleeful shouts of those floating blokes the next day while drinking a cup of tea by the bank of the incomparable Manning Creek at 7am, breath caught by the misty golden beauty of the morning. Little fish swam right up to the edge where I sat, then spun round to rub their backs on the sand and flash their silver bellies to the sky. I sipped me tea and watched a white egret on the rock in the middle of the river, patient and still, next to an equally motionless penguin. …   …    …   Why the hell is there a penguin in the Kimberley. I shaded my eyes from the sun, and it shifted, revealing the long neck of a white bellied cormorant. Righto. Animals are secretive and deceitful in this country. Remember that, Chris. What else do you need to remember? Shit. Eyes widening, I hastily interrogated the sand. I couldn’t see any croc tracks, but I took the opportune moment to get the hell away from the river’s edge.

More on crocs later.

We stayed at Manning Gorge two nights. The first day began with an hour’s walk down to the waterfall to go for a swim in the gorge. Damo was pretty convincing about toughening up – you start the walk by swimming across the creek, he said, you’ll be right, he said – there’s little blue barrels to dump your gear in, then you can just hang onto them and kick if you can’t swim. It’s hot, you’ll dry out in no time. Far out. But having done the same thing the day before in the pitch freakin’ dark and much colder water, this was, er, too easy, as they say, so in I got. It was a beautiful river, surrounded by trees, rocks to laze on, birds and the blue, blue sky, I was actually pretty energised getting in. Refreshed, we hiked over the hills through pink wildflowers and cotton flower trees that bear pretty yellow blossoms (right on the end of the branch, with no leaves; imagine a magician’s wand when it spurts a bouquet out the end) and eventually got down to the waterfalls and swimming pools of Manning Gorge. It was glorious. Red, red rocks curved their arms around us, and slabs floated in the water, sprouting shady young, green eucalypts. Vivid scarlet dragon flies landed anywhere you threw your eyes. Fishes swum up to the rocks and gawped at us and rainbows capered in the waterfall’s spray. Like, ya know those screen saves on your computer of magic places you don’t really think exist? It was just like that.

The whole adventure was very much walk to a gorge, get in the gorge, walk to another gorge, get in that one too. Which was great, because if the Gentleman and I had been driving the road alone, I don’t know we’d have committed in quite the same way. Despite the children running around with pool noodles stuffed into their rucksacks and really making a go of it. After dutifully getting in Tunnel Creek, Bell’s Gorge, Manning Gorge and the waterlilies of Galvan’s Gorge we headed off to El Questro Station across the Pentecost River.

El Questro had been talked up a fair old bit by old Greg, camp guitarist, singer, American accent talker and teller of tall tales. After five nights of sleeping in the bush, this camp site had a bar, he said. Steady on, I insisted, after all, we have campsites with bars in them even in Grimsby. (For those that don’t know, this is a thoroughly uninspiring north-east corner of the UK.) And we were packing a hell of a lot of juice – the Gentleman and I had not expected it to be quite the booze cruise it turned out, but Damo is there to be our guide and make sure we have a good holiday, and when it’s dark and the activities are done, what else is there to do but sit round the fire, drink beers and sing? A bar would at least ease the pressure on the icebox, furtively betraying us beneath our seats in the giant 4-wheel drive van by piercing our unopened cans with the combo of sharp ice and rough roads. The bar delivered (until we drank it dry), and as El Questro is an enormous cattle station, occasionally you’d see a cow wander around. These must be some of the most lean, free range organic beef cattle in the world, but who knows how many there are because there are no fences, and you have to get an external company in with helicopters and special gear to hunt down and round them up for selling. But here we were at the feet of the Cockburn Ranges (Australia pronounces all the letters, to my glee), the Pentecost River flowing by and the tall rocks heated up creeks to keep the Zebedee springs at a beautiful 38 degrees all morning. We were in them at 7am, lolling around in hot water between pandanus and ferns like a luxury tropical bathhouse. Apparently, they chuck all the proles out at midday and then the hot springs are the exclusive reserve of the posh lodges where celebrities are helicoptered in. They can keep it – who wants to be in hot water after midday? They’ve missed the best bit! True to that, we left Zebedee springs to hike to Emma Gorge; the coldest waterfall of the tour. Striding up the rocks we passed a limpid blue, sunlit and sparkling pool. Can’t we stop here, Damo? No. Get in the cold one. So we did and it was the true sublime; my breath was taken away by water kept in the shade all day by the enormous cliff surrounding it, the water was deep and murky, I swam towards the yawning black wall that was so tall as to block the great fiery sun and my soul expanded in the terror.

Right after I got out, someone shouted that they’d found a hot spring by the other wall. Bastard.

An Inheritance of Trees

I want to tell you about making friends. I have made some good ones in the past few weeks and knowing them has enriched life immeasurably. I implore you to meet them too.

On a charmingly sunny Saturday – bring out your favourite autumnal adjectives; it was crisp, it was clear, the sky was like a glass chalice – I dressed in green and brown (on purpose) and took myself up to City Hill. There were a few of us; some of us strangers, others profound friends, and we all braved the ankle twisting rabbit holes to assemble under the flagpole to meet our lead dryad of the trees; Sarah St Vincent Welch. She was to spend the next two and a half hours leading us through these trunks and branches for a poetry workshop as part of the Poetic City festival in Canberra.

Well let’s start with the setting. The workshop’s whimsical title was the same as this very review. Glorious! However, I wasn’t sure City Hill, garrotted by Vernon Circle from the rest of the city was what I had in mind when presented with such a dreamy nomination. Can’t we go to Haig Park? What about some grand old eucalypt on Ainslie, spreading limbs out like dancers to get the old similes going? No? That funny, oversized roundabout it is, then.

And thus arose the first in a long line of what seemed to me to be incongruous details that were in fact so meticulously and thoughtfully planned. To give an overview, every discussion, every shared piece of information, every picture was just so positioned so as to illuminate a unique perspective of our city that few people ever cross the spluttering traffic on Vernon Circle to actually see. It was a slow awakening, a dawning. Let me show you: our dryad poet begins, naturally, with introductions. It’s nice to create a safe space, make some connections. We all had to share a tree memory – very apt, and there were some crackers, from the poignant to the raucous. We also had to say something about our names. This left me a little dazed – I couldn’t work out how that was pertinent to trees. But hey-ho, it’s making connections, isn’t it? and, goodness, we have two and a half hours to fill, so that’ll do! Then Sarah began her gentle lecture which was more of a dream of story-telling; about Cypress, beloved of Apollo who killed a graceful deer and so bitter was his grief that he wept and begged to weep his regret forever until Apollo turned him into one of these; a Roman Cypress. They weep sap. Then through the metamorphosis of classical mythology, more names insinuated in through the mists of tellings; Monterey Pines, and I am lost in Kerouac’s Big Sur driving up and down the coast to Monterey, Pinus Radiata offers its image of children spinning in floating skirts with arms flung wide. The black locust tree. Do with that what you will.

So that was names. Into the poetry samovar they went and bubbled away in our unconscious. Then came the history, who planted them, and why, good ol’ Walter and Marion’s visions. We were led up and around the hill and shown how the trees (and unbelievably, I never actually knew this) are planted in six crossing avenues. Through the centre of that hill – that roundabout – cross every geometric line drawn out on the Griffin-Mahoney plan. One view draws you along Commonwealth Avenue all the way to Parliament with the blue hills floating beyond, another revealed diminishing Northbourne, another; Constitution Avenue, lost in trees, next Mount Ainslie’s reassuring hump. Huh! Who knew? I had always thought City Hill was clustered randomly with these bizarre, pointed trees; odd, constrained growths. In fact, those trees form corridors like a Hellenic temple, their green Doric columns guiding the eye to visual revelations.

Into the pot that went. Along with warnings to not stick your face in a pine or a possum might have it off, with cockatoos eating Monterey pine seeds, associations of ceremony, memories of the red and yellow boxgums that would have stood there and the tension between native and European, a dry, hardy Mediterranean that flourished with Roman myths, long graveyard shadows, the desperate crying of ravens and stillness ruffled by flitting wagtails.

And then we were sent off. Off, off with you all, you have fifty minutes, here is a sheet of prompts, now go and stand in front of a tree, or sit on a bench in the sunshine, swivel in the centre like a compass between the views and write. And we did. I wrote a heap of nonsense, poet-t(r)ea (can I get away with that?) takes a while to brew, but we had a warm and beautiful final hour sharing touching thoughts and memories and words which the ravens had no respect for and wailed over. Magpie larks came to see what the fuss was about, and seeing that it was Anzac biscuits, hung around for a bit. With many COVID-safe hugs, we reluctantly skidded down the hill slopes, in six different directions, to our cars, our homes…the nearest public convenience.

But the strangest and most wonderful part of this workshop was the effect, the afterwards. For the next fortnight as I made my way through town, those pines peeped over the Sydney building, leaned round the courthouse and I am left with a strange and distinct feeling we are trying to catch sight of each other. And now a new part of the city is alive to me, is magical, somehow, is known, is recognised. It raises its green arms over the bridge, and waves – I lean over my balcony wall and wave back. It is a lovely, affectionate feeling that comes from quiet, from listening with patience, from watching and engaging all your thoughts to strive for the exact metaphor to describe this thing. I now regularly tramp across its green and brown slopes (research completed so you don’t have to: it’s less fun in the rain) and I have that same physical feeling of enrapturement that I feel when I behold huge mountains, or the sea. I am poetic in tendency, so these extremes must be forgiven. But I carry these pines now in me as I walk through town, and in the corner of my eyes, and feel the strange power of those ley lines. They have created in me since many more poems that I actually like, quite a lot. And I feel as if I have been given a marvellous gift, wrapped up in everlasting green and lit with Roman candles that nothing can ever take away.

Manson Muck-Up

Like a lot of 90s kids who got in to got into Nirvana a bit late then had to practically go through the death of Cobain twice and have by now donated the most intensively Goth section of our wardrobes to the next generation as we’ve stopped going to metal clubs and in betrayal to our younger selves, no longer see ‘Wednesday’ as sufficient reason to just wear a corset… I’ve been feeling pretty let down by these recent allegations about Marilyn Manson. And I need to talk about it. I need to reach out to people who were/are fans and try and work out where we are now and where we can go from this.

I think I’m most upset because I didn’t see it coming, but I when I heard, I felt I really should have. This is conflicting. I’ve read his autobiography, I’ve listened to all his early albums cross legged on my bed, following along with the sleeve lyrics (old school be cool), I read interviews in Kerrang! and other music magazines. I knew all about what he thought, how he treated people, his weird sexual deviances influenced by his very creepy sounding (probably in need of help?) grandfather and his attitude to rebellion. And I lapped it up. All that stuff I’m wincing at now, I thought was amazing at the time. Was I totally taken in?

My saving grace is a vague sense that as a teenager (despite being appalled after my mum read his book and handed it back with a glazed smile saying ‘prick’), I’m sure I had the sense that, like, ‘hur hur, he’s amazing and crazy, but I wouldn’t wanna go out with him!!’ I used to fantasise about being Reznor’s girlfriend, and, yes, saving him, -_- but I don’t think I fancied Manson in the same way. I hope. And after all, a crazy rock star turning out to be a bit of a knob to go out with is nothing staggeringly unexpected. But he was appealing; dangerous, sexy, articulate, and intelligent. As a goth being different from the mainstream, to all of us that didn’t want to follow the bubblegum blandness of boy bands and unstimulating manufactured muzak, he was a saviour. For those of us that wanted to look different from the massive, hooped earrings, too much makeup and tracksuits girls, he showed us we could be brave enough. For our generation (and ours is not special, every generation looks to rebel against something in the one before), he showed us the emptiness of consumerism, the folly of shallow celebrity created by an obsessive media and the hypocrisies and lies in authorities that want us to shut up, be the same and not question. He showed us an intensity of feeling that 5ive just couldn’t match, he had a message, he was anti the church, and as a Catholic schoolgirl asking why my teachers stopped talking when we asked certain questions, I was all over that. Now in Australia, I can sit at a table of eight peers and seven of them who went to religious schools (and they seem to be The Thing in Australia) will have heard at least one rumour about all the typical Catholic shit going down in their own school. And Manson called that out. He was a Fuck You and a deeper thinker and a snappy dresser. Of course we adored him.

And part of that, I stand by. I’ve been pissed off hearing comments like ‘I always knew,’ or ‘I never trusted him,’ or ‘yeah, he looked like a weirdo,’ because unless they were fans, they have no right. I don’t wanna go all ‘Nam, but ‘you don’t know, man, you weren’t there.’ Yeah, the dude looked weird, no denying it, but that was the whole point; he challenged convention and was against judging by appearance, which is all those comments reveal, and is an insult to the adult generation of mourning Manson fans. Because not all assholes helpfully give you prior warning by looking crazy. Grame Tame’s abuser just looked like the secondary teacher he was. (Northern Hemisphere-ers, have a quick google of this Australian of the Year.)

So how many other old Manson fans my age are looking at this crap, remembering the interviews, the book, the lyrics, the drama, and are thinking…shoulda seen this coming? Because, looking back, while I personally found some songs a bit stupid (never a huge fan of Dope Show), many were great, but I am forced to admit that while he challenged society, he wasn’t offering a solid alternative. I can’t say he was some peace preaching hippy calling for power redistribution and the protection of minority groups; that was never the jam. And though I found ‘Last Day On Earth’ romantic and beautiful, Manson didn’t always write beautiful things. For all the charm and articulate arguments that follow like insidious intent, there was always a huge lack of empathy in how he treated fans. The people he didn’t need anything from. That was all there in front of us, in his interviews and books and we accepted it. And that’s scary. My first thoughts were shame; what the hell else would I accept and permit from someone that I admired; that stood for something I believed in? Reading about his fantasies of violence against women, his actual attack on his own mother and a whole bunch of stuff that was clearly consensually dubious, why did I overlook it or accept it? Why did I permit it, or even sometimes think, ‘well, we know what Manson’s like, don’t get drunk with him!’ All for a person who is charming, articulate, powerful and exciting – am I describing a textbook psychopath now?

So how do we get taken in? Where’s the line between being a psychopath and just being a bit of a dick to go out with? Are we more permissive when we’re young? Is that natural or inexcusable? When I was in my early twenties, I had a deep and intense relationship with a guy that I thought was the most important thing in the world. He’d been making his case for two years and I’d never felt so necessary and wonderful. Maybe we need to go through shit like that before we can really understand that it’s not healthy. Then when I moved to abroad for six months, as discussed and planned for the whole previous year (while living with him, I moved in to save up for the trip), the chap was pretty horrible. Every phone call was about how selfish and cruel I was, how naïve and ignorant to let these people exploit me, how I needed to give up on what I was doing (learning a language for a fixed period of time which was important to me and had been my plan for years before I knew him) and come home and be with him. Now look, I’ve never thought I was in an abusive relationship or experiencing coercive control. I think the guy was just a bit of a selfish dick at the time. He needed to do some growing and learning about how to love just as much as I did. And I’m sure he has grown and moved on from that sort of thing. But the line there is thin. I was resilient enough to feel that he couldn’t be right, but when he made his arguments, they were logical, and I did agree although my heart didn’t. Young people want to feel loved and important and intensity and drama in relationships at that age, with your Manson soundtracks crooning ‘I’m so empty here without you, I crack my xerox hands’ seem so deep and profound. But we all look back and realise it’s not. Because, hey kids, if you’re in it to ‘save him’ it’s never gonna work.

So it’s scary that I lapped up Manson’s crap and it’s borderline scary I accepted a relationship that for six months made me feel like shit, but perhaps we can be forgiven for some of those things. Because I was young, I had stuff to learn, and I learned it. It’s all not as scary as the permissiveness in the culture. How years ago, we learned Twiggy Ramirez abused and raped his girlfriend Jessika Addams of Jack Off Jill, that James Maynard Keenan would enjoy his teenage fans and even Trent Reznor is implicated. I can’t quite let go of him, but even though he insists he did nothing abusive, being off your tits on coke while horrible shit’s going down next to you doesn’t exactly leave you blameless. Why did no one challenge these things? Why did journalists giggle along instead of call the police? Why did none of the maaaaaaany people my ex spent many a night convincing I was Europe’s biggest bitch not delicately suggest he should take a deep breath, stop giving me hell and maybe taking a little trip abroad to visit me might make us both feel better?

I know the ultra-liberals, like the academics before will tell me to appreciate the music and condemn the man; separate the art from the artist. I have never been able to suck this up. Can we afford to? Can we say of racist Conrad that his book is just ‘of its time’ as if that condones it? And we are back to permitting. I suppose I need to have a word with myself about Shelley, then. Full blown nutter – turned up at sixteen-year-old (don’t forget that, everyone, sixteen) Mary’s house in the middle of the night with a gun, saying he would shoot himself unless she ran away with him then and there. Carried on with her stepsister for a couple of years, told them both they were in a loving relationship of three. Bullshit was a seventeen-year-old down with that; she was impressed by the mad and intense attentions of a handsome, intelligent, and passionate poet and got talked into it. Groomed. But Shelley’s work really was beautiful. And there was empathy and there were calls for social justice, not just rebellion for its own sake. Madness yes, perhaps not psychopathy.

Ultimately, after the guilt and the disappointment, I feel betrayed. Because, Manson, you sang out against shallow society, against hypocritical power structures, against shallow media frenzies and you stood for the outsider. Us misfits who tried to think, not just consume, and you gave us something to think about. I never thought you were God, or the Answer, but you were a way to think differently, and take the bits you agreed with. Then you let us all down by being the one after all who was a hypocrite, a sleaze. In your ‘rape rooms,’ your after parties and your relationships, you made outsiders and you did all the things we screamed against. You betrayed what you stood for in favour of mad power, and you betrayed us. Fuck you, man.

So for me, it’s time to give Mechanical Animals one last hurrah, hen sadly shake my head and turn away. I’m gonna stick to Rage Against the Machine. Clearer message, better empathy. And more catchy.

Medusa’s Daughter by Jane R LaForge

Jane Rosenberg LaForge’s most recent poetry collection Medusa’s Daughter really got me thinking. Like any conscientious reader, before settling down to gorge myself monstrously on a three-day poetry frenzy, I went through my classics. Checked the original. Then had a wider look about on account of the H.A. Guerber collection presenting a particularly sanitised version of the myth.

What unveiled itself ultimately is that this collection not only draws on the Medusa myth to interpret and make sense of self; identity and a relationship; it also threw light on the Medusa myth itself. When we meet Medusa in the Perseus myth; she is a hideous, serpent-haired Gorgon so ugly that her gaze turns you to stone. She is finally vanquished and turned to stone herself when exposed to her own reflection in Perseus’ Goddess gifted shield. Not so with LaForge’s Medusa, whose impact is never extinguished or rendered harmless. Instead, she is made real, explained, even forgiven, and she forces the reader to confront not only Medusa’s origins; her rape by Poseidon and senseless punishment by an offended Athena, but also that all monsters have origins; have loss, potential, beauty and virtues; and all people have monsters.

The voice of the poems is the daughter of a Medusa mother. Initially confronting, the relationship is not warm: no insipid admiration could create such an enduring and powerful illustration. LaForge introduces her key motif of stone, early. Seizing the Medusa myth’s curse of petrifying others, she identifies her Medusa with this image. She speaks of ‘hard black anthracite’ in the opening poem ‘Medusa’s Resources,’ and alludes to this frequently, drawing in other minerals, ‘granite’ and bricks. In ‘Medusa’s Speech’ the image is developed. Stone connotes both strength and resilience, but also rigidity and coldness. Both are apt metaphors for LaForge’s Medusa and her trauma. The reader is told ‘You’d have to split stone … shave granite/ Or pyrite to reach the history/ That cannot speak for itself./ She would have buried it in concrete.’ Stone is associated with the collection’s recurring theme of repression; burying painful memories that the speaker attempts to mine to better understand the woman who is gradually revealed as a German Jewish refugee. LaForge portrays her as sealed in habits and character; in the poem ‘Animus’ she is ‘rigid to the point/ of breaking like flint, on the edge/ of self-immolation.’ The image is negative, this Medusa mother was ‘Cold of heart, blood, chilled in respiration.’ ‘Medusa in Suburbia II’ ends with the devastating lines, well emphasised with enjambment and stanza spacing; ‘Ask her if she still loves, and whom./ Her children are waiting.’ The damage done by a stone mother is the enduring Medusa curse.

Curses thread through the collection. Medusa’s metaphorical curse hovers over the physical curse of War, the trauma of ‘blackening of names/ through long knives.’ References to the ‘Third Reich,’ Japan and ‘abuse of the smallest molecules’ evoke the Hiroshima bombings and the lasting effects of post-traumatic stress and harmful radiation. Disease and madness blight the lives of the poet’s subjects, the ‘mean reds,’ the ‘manias, blackened like maps’ eating up and wasting time, botching abortions, and failing suicides reducing the Medusa to Ruins, ‘her hands rheumatic/ and her womb cancerous.’ The imagery of tumours is shown to corrupt the body of Medusa and also her children, with the premature death of one and the failing kidneys of the other. But coldness is also a curse; Medusa’s victims were turned to stone. The poet explores this while she struggles with how to provide a warmer childhood for her own daughter in the three ‘Nursing’ poems, struggling with guilt and anxiety about being enough for the third generation.

The poem ‘Pygmalion’ further manipulates the classical myth, subverting the story of a beautiful statue becoming human. For LaForge it is the statue; the mother, that corrodes and weathers. LaForge does not romanticise; she presents this mother as hideous. The poem ‘When Medusa Was Beautiful’ describes her hair ‘greyed/ into snakes,’ her lips ‘thinned into a pursed expression;’ an obese woman with no ‘teeth and eyelashes.’ But the Pygmalion reference alludes to Transformation, and further sculpture imagery, references to sand and glass, and how Medusa creates in ‘Medusa the Mason’ and ‘Medusa’s Men,’ show her potential and power. The poem ‘Stones’ alludes to the ore that later becomes gems, the poem ‘Animus’ talks of ‘smelting fire.’ The speaker knows this Medusa can pressurize stone into something beautiful, could be something incredible.

Because ultimately, LaForge’s Medusa is impressive. Despite her trauma, the oppressions of society and the patriarchy, Medusa won’t conform. Her very monstrous ugliness is a rebellion, ‘Gray among the bottled/ blondes, numbers seven through eleven.’ She is real among the robotic superficiality and cruelty of suburban bullies. In the poem ‘Jungle Red,’ LaForge celebrates her mother’s violent red lipstick, her challenge ‘for speaking when your presence/ should have been of a single/ dimension,’ while also lamenting the things her mother could have been if born in another time or place. ‘Medusa the Mason’ considers ‘what might have blossomed if she were/ given protractors and slide rules,’ and ‘an enterprise/ to run like the one she ran for our father.’ It is clear to the speaker that her mother was clever and was not fulfilled in a world that treats women as gift horses, as suggested in ‘Horses.’ The poet finally attains resolution in ‘A Year’s Time,’ the poems having worked through memories of trauma, sadness and neglect to the ultimate admission of acceptance: ‘I’m not ready/ to let you go./ Not yet.’

It would have been a poignant place to end the collection. But LaForge defies convention and chooses to finish with ‘Medusa’s Grandbaby,’ a poem about her own child and the imagery of ‘vessels,’ ‘blood,’ ‘molecules,’ even ‘hospital’ shows the continuation. This child can take the myth and make of it something different, perhaps take something that is not cold stone, but its manipulator, the Pygmalion Mason and make something new out of those same materials. In poems like ‘Medusa in the Mirror,’ LaForge takes the curse, the stone in her, and chisels at it, forces herself to look and understand, and then create the new thing her mother could not. She sees herself in the ‘feldspar,’ the ‘lithium,’ and with the smelting imagery, has potential to change. Like Garbati’s statue of Medusa, here is the woman behind the monster, interrogating her curses, and making them new for them to be worked on and resolved, by the next generation.

As ever, apologies to the poet if I’ve totally missed the mark with my interpretations and that was ‘not it, not it, at all.’ But I loved this collection.

Into the Red Centre

I have recently read the most fascinating book called Songlines: The Promise and the Power. It’s by Margo Neale and Lynn Kelly and was published by the National Museum of Australia as part of a series of books about first nation knowledge. The main point of its discussions about archives and Western vs Indigenous knowledge is the stuff that many teachers; mainly primary, have also said for years. To whit: you can remember all kinds of shit if you tie it to a landscape, or if you make up a story about it, or you associate it with a character or you draw a symbol or picture or do a dance or song. This is how Australia’s Indigenous people have recorded knowledge about everything in their country and everything that has happened for 65,000 years. It’s just mind boggling. It made me feel like I wanted to jump straight back in the classroom to try it out.

Don’t worry, it passed.

But linking these things is so powerful. And before reading that book, the effect of it became clear when we drove to Uluru with Nick Cave. The music was all wrong. We had hooked the words of those songs and the emotional feelings about them onto the rust reds of Gunderbooka, the sparkling Brewarrina fish traps, the flower laden spaces of Mungo and the dreamy greys of Grenfell as we chased Spring east and met it for a glass of wine in an Orange vineyard. So, although we shouted Do you love me?? on the long red drive from Alice Springs to Uluru, we felt misplaced, shifted over left. Huh. Something felt missing and the memory of the Red Centre is somehow less….red, than red right handed Gunderbooka. That’s the importance of getting the right music for your road trip; to help you with memory.

Anyway, we flew up to Alice Springs. Hired a car, drove into town between two large mountain ridges which had a lovely dreaming story about caterpillar ancestors crossing the river, and on to exploring.

Even in November (think early May, northern hemisphere), Alice was Hot as Shit. Over 40 degrees but I’ve got all the new-place-excitement going on, so I marched us around until we were both miserable. We visited the Botanic Gardens. They were red earthed with little paths around low eucalypts, desert oaks and wattle with other trees and bushes that probably flower spectacularly… some other time and tried to retain some of the things we learned. There are honey grevilleas and desert roses. Couldn’t point one out if I fell over one. The whole set of gardens was set up by a woman at the start of the 20thC. Couldn’t tell you her name or where she was from. It was very hot, you see, and the black and white photograph of this woman stood in front of the tent she was living in on what would one day become the botanic gardens, wearing far too many layers was beginning to distress me, so we headed back to the hotel to find something to eat.

And here’s my take home about Alice – I had to confront my own unconscious bias as it hopped merrily out of my unconscious and sauntered casually in a flat cap and tweed jacket into my full consciousness. I have never seen so many obviously Aboriginal people. And I didn’t know what to do. They were sitting around, like, on a patch of grass under a tree, on a patch of grass in the town centre (pointedly not on a bench) sometimes on street corners like they were waiting for something (those chaps were – a bus came). While this is all relaxed and what-the-hell-is-your-problem-then, despite all my woke reading about First Nation Knowledge and Pascoe and Maddock, my English brain was just seeing people sat on the floor and wondering if they needed anything, like money or food; are they down on their luck. So for god’s sake don’t be dark skinned and plonk down on the ground, or I’ll clearly think you must be homeless. -_- So I had to confront that in me. I need to do a little work on myself. The next day it continued – we found a positively Canberran café for breakfast; hessian mat rugs, bright cushions, old wooden crates for tables, Bowie on the radio, flat whites and noble food with unknown ingredients served with eggs. And everyone in it was white, and everyone walking past it wasn’t. There seemed to be an unspoken exclusion. Maybe it’s the other way around, maybe Aboriginal people don’t dig flat whites or hipster cafes, and maybe sweeping generalisations about the preferences of the entire Aboriginal community is totally unhelpful. I felt uncomfortable about being implicitly separate and didn’t know how to bridge the gap without other-ising; like I’m touristing black people just heading out to buy the paper by engaging them in unwanted conversation. I wrote some poems about this sensation, if I can find somewhere to publish them, I’ll share them. But like all processes of art, it helped me to craft exactly how I felt and be honest what my goddam problem was. And if anyone has anything to offer on helping me work this one out; that’d be awesome, please jump in and leave a comment.

That was Alice. Conflicting. We drove the five hours to Uluru-Kata Tjuta national park on the land of the Anangu people. The week before, as a Brit, I had no idea what Kata-Tjuta was, beyond a word I kept not quite catching that other people said when they told me about their trip. Right, so prepare to be educated: just across from the Big Fucken Rock that is Uluru, there is a whole other bunch of Big Fucken Rocks called Kata-Tjuta. And they are awesome. I believe the two are physically connected under all that earth or something which is amazing because they are both two different kinds of rock. I’ll let you google geology in your own time. We approached Uluru over an open, clear plain so wide it curved, with Uluru itself a hovering rose petal pink in the distance. It was beautiful. We detoured and went to the many headed Kata Tjuta and admired this, then drove up to Uluru itself and looped it in the car. We got out for the Mala walk and learned about the ancestral Mala people who did ceremony there but did not listen to warnings about another group coming to attack them and some of the men are still trapped in the cave. It was more complicated than that. Then we headed to the sunset viewing area to watch Uluru turn red and gold over the dusk, while Kata Tjuta’s many heads floated like grey clouds behind the desert oaks on the opposite horizon. It clicked a memory in my brain from Norse mythology about Odin making the clouds by spreading out the brains of the frost giant Ymir in the sky. This linking of brains, clouds and ‘many heads’ compounded into the wisdom and timeless knowledge of Country and was all very profound and beautiful in my head. Wrote a poem about it. Turns out it didn’t make sense to anyone that wasn’t me.

So look, to break it down. The next morning, we went to Kata Tjuta to see the sun rise beside a silhouette of Uluru and slowly blush the many headed rocks pink and red and gold. We watched the black line of night on the ground stride towards us and retreat as shade under desert oaks, then did the Valley of the Winds walk. This is mind blowing. It’s a 7km loop that actually goes between all the rocks and through different landscapes and forest and my favourite bit was when we arrived at the top of a rock where the valley spilled down before us like a green tongue, the morning sun (it was about 7.15 and already pushing 30 degrees) had beautifully lined up right in the middle of a frame of sharp, rust red walls of other rocks. And flowing out of those beautiful plum pudding stones (red AF) was life, life, life. Spinifex, grasses, soft spires of pink mulla mulla, spikey leaved yellow flowered mulga, deep pink Sturt’s desert rose, waves of zebra finches, yellow throated minor birds and wagtails, cool shade and moisture, dripping and cascading down the sides of the rock. Glorious.

Uluru was the next day. We hired bikes at about 7.30 in the morning from a cheerful bloke into birding from Darwin and cycled 15km. This is a great thing to do in hot weather. You’re going quickly, you get a breeze and because you go fast it’s genuinely child-like fun. We buzzed on past some very, very red shouldered chaps trudging by on the 10km base walk. They looked pretty miserable. Bet they were Brits. So, yeah, nah, biking is the way to go. And it is GREAT! Let’s start with the rock. So it’s big and red, yeah. But you have to go right up to it and look up, take in that sharp, sharp line that seems to slice up your retina and just watch that deep red against bluer than blue. The line seems to glow. And if the sun is behind the rock, this is glorious, the whole sky is golden, and the rock is dark and cool. Then look down. Look at how it just hits the ground and stops – bam, like a high-rise building. Not like the gradual sloping foothills of home where whole towns are part of the lower mountain. Walking among the curves and ridges, it felt like a beautiful big red city sometimes. The colour is beautiful. We arrived and cycled in the shade for a long while and you can really take your time learning the shapes – the bit the Gentleman and I called the wale mouth, the gorge, the bit that looks like lungs, the bit that looks like teeth. Every bit has an indigenous story that teaches about its shape and role and also about social behaviour and morality. Like, don’t steal someone else’s emu or they’ll smoke your ass out and kill you. Fun fact – there are bits of Uluru you can’t photograph or even get within a kilometre of because they are for sacred initiations and ceremonies of the Anangu people. So the bike ride detours a fair bit in places.

Near the end of our ride, we stopped at the Kantju gorge again to prostrate ourselves on a bench and rest. This is a sacred place where there is always water. The rock above is stained silver where streams pour off the top in storms and there is a small pool below, surrounded by trees and breezes. Apparently, emu would come and drink from this pool and the Mala people would wait quietly and kill the last emu as they were leaving. This stopped the rest of the emu becoming afraid of the place so there was always emu to take what you needed. Silly emu. ‘Ohh, you seen Dave-o?’ ‘yeah, nah, mate.’ ‘What a dickhead, he’s always getting lost. Let’s go for a drink; Steve, bring up the rear. … Hey, where’s Steve?’ There is a special feeling in that place. The sun doesn’t burn there, you are protected by the shady red wall, the trees whisper and birth birds. The whole rock just seems to be teeming with life. If anyone has ever told you ‘yeah, it’s all so empty and dead out there that these funny fellas saw this rock and were like, wow, a thing! Let’s worship it,’ that’s bullshit. There’s plenty to worship because life is there, like an oasis, sheltering in the arms and shoulders of stone.

We got back to our hotel room at about 10 in the morning with headaches and napped for the rest of the day because it was Hot as Shit. There are good things about visiting Uluru-Kata Tjuta in the off-season; summer. There are very few people. Apparently, it’s really hard to cycle the base most of the time because you can barely move for thousands and thousands of people. That staggered me. What I want from nature and beautiful geological monoliths is peace and reflection, not running commentaries. And the reason that you get such blessed peace in the summer is because it’s too hot to do anything after 9am and the flies are shocking. But it is cheaper, so suck it up. Get up at 4.30, watch the sunrise, do your activity for the day, go back to sleep, eat lunch and sit in the pool, have another nap and go watch the sunset. Pretty restful. Then have dinner and once again notice that everyone on the resort is white and everyone working there is not and go back to feeling uncomfortable.

One thing that also seemed totally out of place was rocking up for the sunset and my eye being caught by two girls in dresses so ill-advisedly white they seemed to verily attract the red dust. I went back to gazing at the rock as we looked for a parking spot and heard the Gentleman wince. Apparently the two girls in beautiful white dresses had strung up some fairy lights round a honey grevillea and were posing for Insta pics. I’m glad I didn’t see it. I’d have hollered something rude out the window. I really hate vain posing at the best of times, it’s so shallow and false and today’s culture of turning yourself into a marketable brand is just fucken weird, but using a place of spirituality and power as a painted backdrop for it is just disrespectful.

But Uluru is amazing. See it and respect it.

Part III – Lightning Ridge. Feeling Sorry in the Thirsty Dawg

Mining country. Blinding sunshine bouncing off piles of rubble heaped up every few metres next to holes carved out of the ground like the butchery of a madman ripping the internal organs out of a giant and scattering them like baptisms. We drove in singing ‘I’m sorry I’m always pissed and I’m sorry I exist.’

Honestly; it was hard coming from Aboriginal fish traps to mining. I don’t know what to tell you – as a socialist greenie, I’m not a fan of mining. But before you click away, I’m about to go through some kinda character journey here, so bear with me. You could just skip the next paragraph.

While the fish traps talked about respecting land; mining by definition exploits it. Drag what you want out of the ground, then move on. Let’s be honest, often it’s pretty destructive; even if you’re not mining fossil fuels which accelerate climate change. It uses an incredible amount of water, in an incredibly dry state, ostensibly to wash dirt, in this case. Large companies dig holes the size of small villages in the ground and leave the scar, obliterating biodiversity and heritage – often choosing to cop the fine for cultural heritage destruction as profits far outweigh it. Just look at Rio Tinto (Britishers – look this up, it was a Fucking Scandal.) How can I connect with people that make a living out of this, even if, you know, it’s the only job in the area and all that?

Thanks for sticking with me, we’re moving on. The point is: Lightning Ridge kinda aint like that.

Mining in this crazy place is for opals. Lightning Ridge has the largest deposits of black opal in the world. They’re not black, btw, they’re just way more blue and colour-intense than the milky iridescent ones you’ll have seen, something to do with black potch behind the stone…or something… look, I’m no chemist; google it yourselves. And I arrived thinking, ‘oh, this will be historical, they used to do mining here.’

Nope. Still doing it. Which, growing up in a country where mining is not (anymore) an industry, I find bizarre. So, arriving and doing a tour round an underground mine was confronting. Lovely lady in the shop was desperate to sell us an opal, and talk about opals; she’s got props and trays and display pieces all for explaining how the opal gets so damn blue and got ‘em all out to show me. We looked around. Had furtive and intense whispered conversations. The Gentleman wants an opal. Splendid, I say, get an opal. Why do I have to be involved with this? I don’t want a shiny symbol of earth’s destruction. Why do you hate me? he asks; I don’t, I say, just buy a freakin’ opal if you want one, but I’m not wearing it. He buys an opal. The lady asks if it’ll be for a ring or a necklace. The Gentleman mumbles his way out of this one while I saunter my way out the shop.

We went to the IGA then aimed at our air BnB; a cute old wooden schoolhouse set down an unsealed road surrounded by trees and … holes in the ground with heaps of crap next to them. I glumly wonder what the fuck we’re going to do here for two days and whose bloody fault is this; oh that’s right – I remember, my boss recommended it. -_-

But the point is; the point IS… it’s kind of awesome. I genuinely left thinking, ‘fuck, do I want to get an opal mine?’ for fleeting seconds. There are no enormous mines in Lightning Ridge, they are all tiny individual claims owned by madmen or couples, with glazed, glittering opals for eyes, all excited, optimistic, creative and desperate. It’s the real pioneering spirit of Australia – exploration, discovery, hope and tea. Something, and I mean a kind of madness, has got in to the people there.

What is wonderful about all these people who are on a lifelong quest to discover eye-watering hoards of beautiful, useless little things is that they don’t seem to be consumerist or greedy in any other way. While looking for enough opals to cover a house, many live in caravans, with crazy car seats ripped out of some abandoned vehicle and lassoed with bungies to the back of the gas bottle as their veranda. Art abounds; John Murray lives up there and has a gallery (look him up!), people’s gardens are demarcated by empty oil barrels and decorated splendidly with handmade…I dunno, scarecrows and things; wind chimes, plants, coloured stones and quirky little signs saying ‘where the bloody hell are we.’ Everyone has a mine in their back garden. Even the place we stayed! And the owner was an artist and her mother was a writer and the house had a wee book about how the building came to be in their family and …well. That on its own was gripping narrative. Everyone is hoping to find their fortune; just one more foot! but only just about find enough opals to live on. Everyone is an artist, a poet, a scientist, a jewellery maker – and there’s a sort of fever and excitement to the place.

One chap, an Italian from Treviso, came out to mine in his late twenties. He never found a damn thing, then in the afternoons, taught himself to build and constructed a stone castle. True story. Built scaffolding from planks of wood balanced on oil drums and carried all the stone up himself. Kinda like that Ricetti guy from Griffith, but maybe madder and vehemently still alive. Lives in a caravan next to the castle with hoards of … stuff; old saucepans and general ironware piled up. Another chap built a house entirely out of glass bottles, with a little doghouse, too. There is a pub ‘in the scrub,’ we had to drive 40km to get to, over a lot of unsealed roads that were hella bumpy and it was quirky and beautiful and amazing and I had a chat for about an hour with the most irrepressibly energetic and wonderful woman about her band’s incarnations from Dry Heat to Just Us. She’s gigged everywhere from Bourke to Mallacoota. She and her husband also mined, she said, and she looked suspiciously over her shoulder every time she mentioned her claim and whispered ‘where we think there are Some’ through gritted teeth. She was an inspiring and warm human being. We went to the Artesian Bore Baths which was the whole reason we’d come, thanks to my boss. These are glorious hot baths drawing water from the Artesian basin which is the size of bloody Queensland. As we slid into the 42 degree water and watched a splendid sunset, surrounded by silver hoards relaxing in the water (which gave the place a sort of refined and family tone), talking in Polish and Italian, and reflected on the madness and wonder of the place, I forgave Rachel. Then we had dinner at a restaurant I… shall not name, where the plates were dusty, the waitress got everything hilariously wrong (she brought the starters, which we fell ravenously upon; she cleared the plates and said conspiratorially, ‘how about some dessert?’ How about the mains? we suggested. How about a whole bottle between us, instead of just a glass, how about the Bolognese instead of the puttanesca, and how bout, please please, cooking my pork all the way through without dallying with medium rare or other caprices?) and we drank a pleasing bottle of Penfolds and had a jolly good laugh.

I guess the point of travelling is to learn. To meet people. To understand things with more nuance. I know this intellectually, that’s why I do it. But to be presented with a bunch of people who do something I think is wrong for the world, and then really really like them, forces you to look at a person holistically. Obvs. It removes prejudice, which comes only from ignorance. Because that’s what making a judgement about all miners before you know any, is. Travel, and meeting and learning about people forces you to not see in black and white but to look at all the other bits of people, and focus on the things you can agree on, and enjoy together, not the things that divide you. Try remembering that the next time you argue about Brexit. Well, we loved the place and were pretty gutted to leave the acres of sky and the surprise emus, rivers, red kangaroos and red earth and mad, warm, and wonderful people.

We drove to Orange. Got pissed at the wineries. Bought some books.

Me, Steve, and the Bad Seeds – Part II

Mounts Grenfell and Gunderbooka, then Bourke to Brewarrina. Moving through me even now.

Now, the next day’s drive was an Adventure; a real Adventure, which is what you tell the Gentleman when it seems you fucked up the Google map he emailed you by poking it and moving the checkpoints and now you’ve driven 2 hours out of your way into – not the bush – but a bush; but he took it all in his stride famously.

Our next night stay was at Cobar (follow the only road out of Mungo, turn left, then turn right, keep bloody going) with a stop at Mount Grenfell. This is another significant Aboriginal site with ancient rock art and there was also the option of a little 5km walk around the hill on which I was Dead Keen. We left Mungo reluctantly on a splendid golden morning and got back on the old red road. Drove nearly two hours through more of the Willandra lakes, waving at emus and red kangaroos (let them know we’re friendly) through a land unflinchingly green. We came to see the desert and were overwhelmed by flowers; yellow, white, purple, magenta, pink, and grass; real, soft, good sitting grass, spreading out like parkland. The sky was wide and blue enough to drown in giving a sense of vertigo, like being upside down or underwater. We saw a dust devil, about the size of a tall handsome man; it gathered up, whipped across the road ahead of us with its red right hand, and dispersed. We listened to hillbilly local radio where the interviewee actually said, ‘we look back very fondly at those moments of real humiliation in our childhood;’ and something about making a bikini out of a curtain, like some sort of shit 60s Scarlett O’Hara. Well now, weren’t things better in the old days! When the first anti-vaxxer called in, we cheered. Then here’s about where our little Adventure started when the map directed us off the unsealed red road through the trees onto what …. may have been a footpath?; dodging bushes and logs until we got to a locked gate. Grass up to your knees. Felt like going for a stroll in Leaden Rhoding. Or when Raffa lurches you off the main road in Capriglio to the veg garden in the woods. We made it back to the road. In silence.

This all meant that by the time we got to Mount Grenfell, there was no time for a walk. But it was sunny, and blood red with soft trees and breezes and we clambered the short walk to the site over wide soft grey rocks. Eucalyptus trees were in blossom, there was a hum of bees and cries of butcherbirds and just… a gentleness, after the overwhelming spaces of Mungo. The art was incredible. Alright, look, I’m into the Renaissance, so yeah, it’s pretty simplistic; it’s red, yellow and white ochre on a fucken rock, so gauge your expectations. But there were nifty little emus and kangaroos which were cool. And my favourite; stencils of hands. Apparently these are ceremonial. I don’t know what of, or what for, but that was amazing to see and think: a man stood here, right where I am, and put his hand there. And because it’s not a print, it’s a stencil, an absence of space, something prompts it to be filled, reaches out and invites you to put your hand there and reach across thousands of years and know with something deeper than just your mind, that a man stood there, like you, before.

Right, but don’t actually fucken touch them because they’re thousands of years old, ok, and if it’s ceremonial then ‘reaching out across aeons’ may well miss the point and there’s a barrier in front anyway. Whatever. It was beautiful there and I wanted to stay, and maybe if I wasn’t such a clumtard with the internet, we could have. And so we drove on, cooing over feral goats and kids (who knew?), and the Gentleman made profound comments about it being nice to actually see some of the stuff that just gets talked about a lot in Canberra. You have to stamp through the surface of Colonialism, he said. I liked that metaphor. It reminded me of my feelings when we first arrived about floating on top of Australia, on a veneer, unattached. We arrived in Cobar, ate a Country Thai (or if going by the colloquial ‘Choinese,’ this equivalated to a ‘Thoi’), read some Pratchett and went to bed.

The next stop was Bourke. The plan was to get there by midday so we could GET A RIDE ON THE BOAT!! which left at 14.30. On the way, we skidded round to Mount Gunderbooka for more rock art. Apparently this ‘mount’ is known as a bit of a mini Uluru; a big fucken rock in the middle of a wide open plain. I can assure you we checked our map very carefully this time. The drive was beautiful, the road was moist red, there were emus running around everywhere – one nearly right into the windscreen, stupid bloody thing – and I kept stopping to take pictures of flowers because I didn’t think anyone would believe me about them if I didn’t. While Grenfell was made of soft and dreamlike greys, Gunderbooka was red and brown; its rocks stacked high in columns and terraces. Great for playing and hiding. There were glorious views of blue hills, blue sky, and lots of shade from butcherbird-decorated trees and lovely fragrant wattle startlingly golden against the reds and blues. The Gentleman said this was his favourite. He could imagine people here, the camp. Here was the beautiful stream, for water, food, for children to play in; here was a soft flowered grassy terrace above it, shaded with trees where a fire could be made and food eaten, and the rocks like the wall of a hall sheltering them, ornamented by art. We drove back along the soft red road admiring birds and flowers, and turning back, we could see how marvellously the mountain stood out. Fucking awesome.

We arrived at Bourke and hopped on the paddleboat Jendra down the Darling. That was pretty great! We had a beer, took pictures of bridges, pelicans and trees and the captain gave a charming commentary which was full occa and worth every penny. Then…well. Bourke was a bit weird. It has a drive-through bottle-o (*English translation: off licence), who thought that was a good idea? a wooden wharf over the Darling and an English steam engine they turn on at midday. That was about it. We did the Bourke Tour of Historic Buildings. Took about ten minutes, and we got a lot of weird looks. Particularly from the guy lingering outside the Court while we tried to photograph it. There were 2 pubs and we had lunch in one and dinner in the other. The latter was a large tin room with a canteen sort of feel to it adjoining an older pub that also seemed to have a bit of an atmosphere vacuum. I suggested getting smashed and leaning in to it. The Gentleman declared firmly that we were leaving, so finish your bloody dinner.

We left Bourke somewhat thankfully the following morning, and to my emphatic delight, discovered our route on to Lightning Ridge would take us through Brewarrina and the ancient Aboriginal fish traps. Being a Woke Canberran, I’ve read all about these in Bruce Pascoe’s seminal The Dark Emu, which I recommend because it is a fascinating enlightenment about the world’s oldest continuing culture. Anyway, we arrived, and a local Elder gave us a tour which was both moving and enlightening. I now understand emotionally the things I’ve read in books. But one of the most beautiful things that Bradley elaborated on (beyond horrific local massacres, segregations, missions separating families and environmental destruction) was that his people belong to the river. They don’t own it. He had a nifty way of repeating himself that was either trying to remember where he was up to or deeply effective subliminal messaging. But belonging to the land, not owning it, just seems to me to encapsulate respect, equality, productivity, and love. Surely this is what Planet A should strive for. And maybe it was the atmosphere combined with the stories, and a lovely day, but the river seemed to be absolutely teeming; frothing; heaving, with life, with animals, and movement. I could understand how it is identity and blood for this group of people. So, Bradley doesn’t watch the telly. But he tells it like it is, hard to hear or otherwise. In one tour, after he’d talked about the ignorance of governments not knowing the historical law they themselves had implemented that gave Aboriginals exemption during WWII to move to the other side of the Barwon river for work, but did not let them cross back again to return to their families; his friend called him up and asked if he’d seen Twitter. No, he said. And there on Twitter, was a picture of Bradley stood next to ScoMo, after he’d told him all this. (English translation: the Prime Minister of Australia). And one of him with the NSW Premier, too. He had no idea who these people were, and if he did, I don’t think he would have held back.

Anywho, these fish traps are the oldest human construction on the planet and archaeologists are arguing between them being 50,000 to 70,000 years old. Right on, Australia. They were beautiful. They’re moving through me, even now.

We got on the road and cranked up Nick Cave.

Me, Steve, and the Bad Seeds

Things have been quiet. For everyone. Remember all that optimistic bullshit I pulled back in March about how we ought to appreciate ‘stillness?’ What a dickhead. Well, my fearless optimism dried up along with all the facebook photos I saw of idyllic family breakfasts after the weather turned and we all hunkered down for a sulky winter. The sunrises stopped being glorious and we watched plan after plan get cancelled until loneliness took hold deep in the gut.

I wrote. I wrote quite a lot, actually. I’ve even had more poems accepted and recently have been commended by the Rose Frankcombe award. It was in between a lot of the usual procrastination, facebook flicking and self-loathing that accompanies all that. Was that balanced by the writing? I suppose. And in it all, me and the Gentleman still had each other, a home, food and jobs and nothing to complain about. Beyond getting a bit ratty at each other from spending a looooooot of time together.

At last, Something Happened. After Queensland closed its borders and shat on our plans for dawn boat rides spotting marvellous birds on the Daintree, we thought ‘fuck it;’ hired a car, and drove Out Back. This is the story of those adventures.

Part I – Griffith to Mungo. Jingle Jangle

To get the title out of the way, Yates and I did not so much find God on our journey as Nick Cave, which might be nearer the Truth. I know he’s a genius and I am totally late to that party, but I’m glad I came. We’d been saying that Screaming Trees’ Dust totally became the album of Encharnted – having recently discovered it in 2015 thanks to Tom Shepherd and listening to it while driving to and from the boat when we first moved on. Remember when we were young, and music was so important, and albums became soundtracks to our adventures and hearts? The way Beck and I can’t listen to Smashing Pumpkins 1979 without remembering sitting at the castle looking down on Vilnius, or hear the Chili Peppers without thinking of Cornwall or driving to Freeman’s and trying to find cyclists to get stuck behind so we could sing along longer. For an epic road trip, we needed an anthem, so, being Australian, we downloaded Nick Cave’s Let Love In and dutifully learned all the words over 1000km.

The way to Griffith is paved with grain silos and railways. We chuckled at that. And Griffith is a funny little place. Of course, by the time we got to the end of the week it was a palatial metropolis by comparison and, I am certain, provides a life for its inhabitants that is rich and full. It is surrounded by vineyards and citrus orchards which is very beautiful, and boasts a radial design as the Burley Griffin trademark city plan so we went for a drive round it. S’got a forgotten few units and warehouses marking its splayed streets. Nothing too exciting. Then it all gets a bit Ainslie, as you drive up the hill and there is crumbly red earth and trees backing on to people’s houses. Above the city in the hill are the remains of a beautiful cave hermitage, furtively constructed by Valerio Ricetti over 20 or so years. He carried stone and built walls, decorated the cave walls with paintings of daisies, planted himself a little garden. Surprisingly, none of it has been obviously heritage maintained. During WW2, being Italian and all, he was arrested, taken away from his cave and never really returned. I think this is sad. I have little truck with the romance of the hermitage – animals and humans living in complex social groups have been proven to be more intelligent (Ackerman, 2020), or for the perceived ‘harmlessness’ of shunning society rather than contributing to it. But he called the hill ‘la mia sacra collina,’ sacred hill. Perhaps as a person who perceived the holiness and intrinsic beauty in the permanence of rocks and plants, and lived with them for their own and his sake, never having more than he needed, he had much in common with the first people who lived among those rocks and plains until only 200 years ago. Anyway, poetic whimsy aside, we cheered when we found a canal, cheered when we stayed in our poky little hotel for hitting the first ‘everyone looks at you when you walk in’ pub; we ate a damn good Italian and tried the local sticky wine at De Bertoli. Although Griffith’s streets did not display the pinnacle Australian Athletic Stereotype, on a sunny day it is open, beautiful, full of wine and good food, with hills to stroll around and enough to do. If Griffith asked: Do you love me? We’d say Not like I love you, but pretty well.

Then we drove to Lake Mungo. This is a marvellous place where you really love and understand place for the very sake of itself. And Space. I’ve read many novels about the Australian countryside that describe it as miles upon miles of barren nothing. I find this offensive; it shows a lack of respect to the land and not least a lack of imagination, a lack of vision. Admittedly, it was a bit edgy driving deeper and deeper into wide bush on unsealed roads watching the petrol tank click down. You realise remoteness matters if you encounter a problem. Then after more miles of more scrub bushes and a howling wind you start to feel lonely. What the hell are we going to do in this place for two days? We ate an elaborate picnic balanced on our knees in the car, watching a silver screen panoramic drama of storms throwing down around us. Spoiler alert – we got away with a whole 2 nights of not actually being rained on, which was awesome, but as we counted seven showers around us smearing the sharp line of the horizon, it seemed impossible to escape. That horizon was huge and far away. I realised from my love of mountains that I like to close myself in a bit, find corners and edges to understand; this thing here, is against that thing there, is different from this over here; I put my back against the wall of a hill as a way of breaking up the frighteningness of space. But eventually unbroken space peels open your eyes, cracks your skull and chest open so you can take it in. Maybe wide spaces widen the mind, widen the heart. We watched the spectacle of rain, whole tragedies of storms play out against the theatre of all that sky, and rainbow after rainbow poured its cascades of colour into the empty lakebed.

Mungo was a huuuuuge lake; horizon to horizon in every direction for a solid 20000 years 60000 years ago. Neat. It’s part of the Wallandra lake system filled up by overflows from the Lachlan river and bits of the Darling river. Remember that for your next pub quiz. It was a stable bounty of food, both fish and water birds among other things and supported thousands of permanently placed people. It dried out and refilled, got salty, dried out during the ice age, refilled; causing the permanent population to move about a bit more. It eventually dried out again 18000 years ago which is where we are now. The ground is clay and sand and 20000 year old footprints have been preserved there. It has these lunettes; clay ….sort of…totally out of my expertise here…hills that were gathered up at one end in a crescent shape from the wind, then sand covered them…because, wind and now they’re eroding. They are fascinating beautiful shapes in white and grey and red sand, and as they erode a whole bunch of stuff falls out, proving Aboriginal culture was thriving there 50000 years ago. Those interested in archaeology, Lake Mungo is the site of the oldest human remains found outside Africa.

Anyway, that’s why we drove five hours on unsealed red roads through rain to get there. We camped, it was fucken cold, we lit a fire and all the smoke blew in my face, so we got into the tent and read Pratchett. The next day we got up for sunrise which was impeded by clouds, so we heated some banana bread and I did a whole bunch of Joe Wicks exercises to warm the hell up. It worked. Think I might do my own travel tour where I camp around the world and film youtube vids of me working out called the ‘Thanks Joe Wicks’ tour. We went for a walk. We did a good 4 hours of marching about, seeing kestrels, kites, wedgetail eagles, other birds with mournful minor calls that broke your heart, we saw dozens of western grey kangaroos with little joeys poking out, and our first ever red kangaroos. We looked at the remains of the white man’s attempt to run sheep farms on the lakebed. We staggered back and ate lunch, then hopped in the car to drive the Mungo trail right up to the lunette – the Walls of China it’s called, which shimmered silver in the distance while the whole earth was shadowed by clouds. We watched more rain…probably falling over our camp chairs we’d foolishly left out. We were compelled and moved by the shapes of the lunette, with yellow flowers and shrubs between them. It felt… sacred. Shut up. It did. You weren’t there; if you go, you’ll feel it. You can’t look at it and say ‘wow, this place has been like this for thousands of years’ because thousands of years ago it used to be a lake. It is a symbol of change. But in the bowl you feel a sense of the eternal, of a permanence, that shifts and reforms but is still made of the same thing. Even if brolgas used to fly above or golden perch used to swim about where your ears are, or by this tree a giant wombat would have strode out, you feel permanence is there and it is something bigger than people. It’s not something you’ll get in a Lakeside carpark.

So while I got all emotional about this, the wind finally dropped and I lit a stonking good little fire. We cooked our lamb and broccoli on it, watched a glorious sunset while ring necked parrots, major Mitchell cockatoos and grey butcher birds flapped about, and drank a bloody good red wine under a treasure of stars while we talked and just enjoyed being together. An evening right up there with the best.

The Arrival of Rain – Adedayo Agarau

The Arrival of Rain is more than a title for Adedayo Agarau’s collection but an incantation. Once spoken, and the reader begins these poems, a monsoon of imagery is released to overwhelm and drown; disorientate in the flood; sinking with the weight of language and visions until the reader gives in and floats, then splashes about in its colours.

Heritage is a recurring theme in the collection that informs the present and the future and cannot be escaped. In ‘the raging sea,’ the poet is a ‘song of shackles / a bloodline of shadow and myth’ and the poem ‘untitled’ develops this theme of family and what is passed down to us. Through many poems an ambivalent relationship is revealed with the father, a person who is both absent, whose loss is mourned, but is also resented. The father’s voice ‘bites;’ a father ‘raised his voice instead of raising his boys,’ but this same father was also dragged ‘like taboo before blowing his head against the sitting room wall.’ These poems on this subject seek to make sense of this loss; relationship and man, and what it means to the self.

Heritage leads to the body. Agarau works through what his heritage has done to him, how he has emerged as a child, a boy, a son. The body is a place of turbulence, of dis-ease with it as the poet juxtaposes intense sensuality and love with feelings of ambiguous shame, imagery of cleansing from the sea, all informed by the perhaps complex relationship with God which is portrayed throughout. Love and God are combined with bitterness and discomfort in ‘mannequin unburnt,’ and religious imagery of sacrifice, water, swine and searching for God are contrasted against the fallibility of faith in poems like ‘baptism.’ Ultimately, Agarau has to forge his own way through spirituality to find a comfortable place to unite his soul with his body.

And the body leads to country. Agarau pulls no punches when he shows you the history of his homeland, where bodies are just ‘scores’ in ‘what it means to be freed by your country.’ Brutality is heaped upon itself horrifyingly as he paints the stark picture of a land overrun, in conflict, enslaved and trying to find itself through violence. The poems ‘a small dialogue about running,’ ‘there are no graves for the dead,’ ‘what it means to be freed for your country,’ and ‘a cathedral of birds’ try to find ways of remaining whole against the backdrop of cutlasses, guns and machetes, ‘nests of bullets,’ and against murdered children, cousins and fathers.

Yet through all this, Agaurau creates something beautiful. His imagery is extraordinary; he reveals a mastery over language, or perhaps even a liberation from its constraints. In images from ‘first portrait of me as adedayo’ like, ‘my fingers are not flowers…not morning dew sitting at the tip of a tongue,’ and ‘a little flower/praying for the sun pleading to be left alone in the wind alone/with the stars in a night sky alone with the grief trapped/ in the ship of its own sea,’ the subject is introduced, then blooms and develops, losing you in a flurry of metaphor that is heaped one on top of the other. The reader is breathless to keep up with the journey forward to find the truth. The effect is hypnotic.

Agarau defies conventions with his structure and metaphor. Standard punctuation is rejected in favour of a few commas and the enigmatic forward slash; no capital letters are used. Sentences become like thoughts and images themselves, they flicker into the reader’s attention, then are overtaken by empty space created to give pause before a new image rises. At times these spaces and forward slashes create caesura-like effects, isolating and fragmenting ideas that reflect the feelings of fragmentation Agarau often grapples with. Poems like ‘second portrait as adedayo’ use this form exquisitely; ‘means my name is a ferry on a lake / means the body is a dead thing to me / means I am entering a city blessed with fury / means the dogs bark at me…’ to tumble out and line up feelings cut off and opposed to each other. Agarau’s use of structure and beautiful imagery embodies the pieces of a broken world which he strives to put back together; to fix a body searching for unity and connection to itself. All against haunting scenes of bodies that ‘will give up ghosts,’ to create something beautiful and powerful and living.

As ever, I may be way off the mark with author intentions, but this is what these poems meant to me. The Arrival Of Rain is published by Vegetarian Alcoholic Press and is available on Amazon and Booktopia.