by Les Murray
For Stickney there will now accrue a wait
heavy as blacksoil around buried wheels.
Shanks’ pony? Not I. Not through snaky bush.
He watches a swamp pheasant’s sailing flight,
and on the creekbank, in a place where cattle,
and white man’s firesticks, can’t come
he finds a child’s small bowerbird farm:
scraped roads, wharf, little twig cattleyards,
clay beasts. A new world, already immemorial.
He will tighten his coat against evening chill
long before Cornwell reappears with helpers.
That night the yellow store will burn
in a jammed eye-parching abolishment of proof
and the car, strangely spotless, will not be harmed.
Tomorrow the innocent owner will collect it.
The steamer hoots. Cornwell, now that you’re
safely ruined: where did you go yesterday?
– I had to dodge certain bandicoot farms
where the little ones bolt up under the house
at the sight of a stranger. I’ve never cared
to be a stranger who threatens children.
They part, across water, with the ghost of a salute.
Certain surnames will now survive in the district.
As the town declines through the mulberry years
Cornwell will receive odd grateful sovereigns.
The rebuilt store will be kept by a Hogan.
EASTER 1984
When we saw human dignity
healing humans in the middle of the day
we moved in on him slowly
under the incalculable gravity
of old freedom, of our own freedom,
under atmospheres of consequence, of justice
under which no one needs to thank anyone.
If this was God, we would get even.
And in the end we nailed him,
lashed, spittled, stretched him limb from limb.
We would settle with dignity
for the anguish it had caused us,
we’d send it to be abstract again,
we would set it free.
o
But we had raised up evolution.
It would not stop being human.
Ever afterwards, the accumulation
of freedom would end in this man
whipped, bloodied, getting the treatment.
It would look like man himself getting it.
He was freeing us, painfully, from freedom,
justice, dignity – he was discharging them
of their deadly ambiguous deposit,
remaking out of them the primal day
in which he was free not to have borne it
and we were free not to have done it,
free never to torture man again,
free to believe him risen.
PHYSIOGNOMY ON THE SAVAGE MANNING RIVER
Walking on that early shore, in our bodies,
the autumn ocean has become wasp-waisted:
a scraped timber mansion hung in showering
ropework is crabbing on the tide’s flood,
swarming, sway, and shouting,
entering the rivermouth over the speedy bar.
As it calms into the river, the Tahitian
helmsman, a pipe-smoking archer,
draws and tightens the wheel. The spruce captain
meanwhile celebrates the bohème of revolutions
with a paper cigarette, and the carpenter,
deepwater man, combs his sulky boy’s hair.
Seo abhainn mar loch – the polished river is indeed
like a loch, without flow, clear to the rainforest islands
and the Highland immigrants on deck, remarking it,
keep a hand, or a foot, on their bundles and nail-kegs.
No equipment is replaceable: there’s only one of anything,
experience they will hand down.
Beyond the river brush extends the deserted
Aboriginal hunting park. There is far less blue
out in the grassland khaki than in our lifetime
though the hills are darkening, sprinkling outward,
closing on crusted lagoons. Nowhere a direct line;
no willows yet, nor any houses.
Those are in the low hills upriver.
Beyond are the ranges, edge over edge, like jumbled sabres.
Crocodile chutes slant out of the riverbank forest
where great logs have been launched.
It is the feared long-unburnable
dense forest of the dooligarl. The cannibal solitary
humanoid of no tribe. Here, as worldwide, he and she
are hairy, nightmare-agile, with atavisms of the feet.
Horror can be ascribed and strange commissions given
to the fireless dooligarl. Killer, here, of gingery bat-hunters.
Tiptoeing after its slung leadline, the ship moves forward
for hours into the day. Raising the first dogleg paddocks,
the first houses, the primal blowflies.
Soup and clothing
boil in a fire-hut, in cauldrons slung on steel saws
there where next century’s pelicans will haunt the Fish Cooperative.
The gossip on the river is all Miss Isabella Kelly:
triumphing home with her libel case now won
and, for her months in jail, a thousand pounds compensation;
she has found her stations devastated:
yards smashed, homestead burnt, cattle lifted
(irrecoverable nods are winked here).
Now she has sailed to England in her habitual
infuriated self esteem.
She will have Charles Dickens write her story.
Voices, calling God to forgive them, wish her drownded.
Isabella Mary Kelly. The shadowy first landholder.
Now she has given the district a larger name
to drop than her own. She, who rode beside
her walking convicts three days through the wilderness
to have them flogged half-insane in proper form
at Port Macquarie and Raymond Terrace
then walked them immediately back,
her crosshatched alleged harem,
she who told the man who dragged her from swift floodwater
‘You waste your gallantry. You are still due a lashing.
Walk on, croppy.’
Isabella Kelly, of the sidesaddle acerbities,
grazier and pistol shot
throned and footless in her hooped midcentury skirts,
for some years it has been she,
and perhaps it really was she, who had the deadly crystals
mixed into scones for the natives at Belbora,
Miss Kelly all alone. The colonies’ earlier Kelly.
Jilted in Dublin – or is that an acanthus leaf
of motivation, modelled over something barer?
Suddenly her time has passed.
Death in a single room in chilly Sydney
still lies ahead – and being confused with Kate Kelly –
but she has moved already into her useful legend.
Now up every side creek a youth in a cabbagetree hat
is rocking like a steersman, feinting like a boxer:
every stone of gravel must go a round or two
in a circling dish, and the pouring of waters be adjusted.
The same on every track round the heads of rivers:
men escaping the black mills
and families tired of a thousand years’ dim tenancy
are entering the valley beside their jolting stacks;
there is even the odd spanker,
reins in hand behind trotters, on a seat like a chocolate éclair,
though he is as yet rare;
more are riding through horse-high grass, and into timber
that thickens, like work, to m
eet their mighty need of it.
The ship is tied up meanwhile in a sort
of farmyard dockland:
pigs under the wharf, saddles, pumpkin patches, corn boats.
The men unloading her, who never doff their shirts,
are making whips of tin;
this one who has worn the white clay girdle of the Bora,
of sung rebirth, now plies a lading hook
to keep his Kentish wife.
At spell-oh time, they will share a pipe of tobacco
which she has shaved from the succulent twist with her case-knife.
Farther upriver, men are rolling out onto their wharf
big solid barrels of a mealy wetness
and others with axes are dismembering downed cattle
in jarring sight of yarded herds. They heave the pieces
into huge smoking trypots. It is the boiling-down,
a kind of inland sealing.
The boiled-out meat is pitched down a cloacal gully.
All that can be exported of the squatter’s cattle,
of the spinster Kelly’s cattle and the others’,
is their tallow, for candles.
Lights for the sickroom, lustre for pianoforte sconces.
Cattle distilled to a fluted wax, and sea creatures
sublimated to a liquor light the readers
of Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens.
On sleeping skins, snorting boys drip melted cattle.
Now the gently wrecking cornfields relax, and issue
parents and children. What do families offer us?
Some protection from history,
a tough school of forgiveness.
After the ship has twitched minutely out of
focus and back, as many times as there were barrels
and night has assumed the slab huts and sawn houses,
the faces drinking tea by their various lights
include some we had thought modern. The mask of unappeasable
rage is there, and those of scorn’s foundling aristocracy,
among the timeless sad and contented faces,
the vacant and remote faces. Only the relative
licensing of expressions is wholly different.
Blame is not yet privileged.
And, walking on that early shore in our bodies
(perhaps the only uncowardly way to do history)
if we asked leading questions, we might hear,
short of a ringing ear,
something like: We do what’s to be done
and some things because we can.
Don’t be taking talk out of me.
Such not only from the haughtily dreaming,
intelligent, remorseless, secretly amused still face
of Isabella Kelly.
As the Highlandman said
eating his first meal of fresh beef and cornmeal porridge
after landing today:
Thig lá choin duibh fhathast. The black dog will have his day yet.
Not every dog, as in English, but the black dog.
THE DREAM OF WEARING SHORTS FOREVER
To go home and wear shorts forever
in the enormous paddocks, in that warm climate,
adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass,
to camp out along the river bends
for good, wearing shorts, with a pocketknife,
a fishing line and matches,
or there where the hills are all down, below the plain,
to sit around in shorts at evening
on the plank verandah –
If the cardinal points of costume
are Robes, Tat, Rig and Scunge,
where are shorts in this compass?
They are never Robes
as other bareleg outfits have been:
the toga, the kilt, the lava-lava
the Mahatma’s cotton dhoti;
archbishops and field marshals
at their ceremonies never wear shorts.
The very word
means underpants in North America.
Shorts can be Tat,
Land-Rovering bush-environmental tat,
socio-political ripped-and-metal-stapled tat,
solidarity-with-the-Third-World tat tvam asi,
likewise track-and-field shorts worn to parties
and the further humid, modelling negligée
of the Kingdom of Flaunt,
that unchallenged aristocracy.
More plainly climatic, shorts
are farmers’ rig leathery with salt and bonemeal,
are sailors’ and branch bankers’ rig,
the crisp golfing style
of our youngest male National Costume.
Mostly loosely, they are Scunge,
ancient Bengal bloomers or moth-eaten hot pants
worn with a former shirt,
feet, beach sand, hair
and a paucity of signals.
Scunge, which is real negligée
housework in a swimsuit, pyjamas worn all day,
is holiday, is freedom from ambition.
Scunge makes you invisible
to the world and yourself.
The entropy of costume,
scunge can get you conquered by more vigorous cultures
and help you to notice it less.
Satisfied ambition, defeat, true unconcern,
the wish and the knack for self-forgetfulness
all fall within the scunge ambit
wearing board shorts or similar;
it is a kind of weightlessness.
Unlike public nakedness, which in Westerners
is deeply circumstantial, relaxed as exam time,
artless and equal as the corsetry of a hussar regiment,
shorts and their plain like
are an angelic nudity,
spirituality with pockets!
A double updraft as you drop from branch to pool!
Ideal for getting served last
in shops of the temperate zone
they are also ideal for going home, into space,
into time, to farm the mind’s Sabine acres
for product or subsistence.
Now that everyone who yearned to wear long pants
has essentially achieved them,
long pants, which have themselves been underwear
repeatedly, and underground more than once,
it is time perhaps to cherish the culture of shorts,
to moderate grim vigour
with the knobble of bare knees,
to cool bareknuckle feet in inland water,
slapping flies with a book on solar wind
or a patient bare hand, beneath the cadjiput trees,
to be walking meditatively
among green timber, through the grassy forest
towards a calm sea
and looking across to more of that great island
and the further topics.
AT THE AQUATIC CARNIVAL
Two racing boats seen from the harmonic railing
of this road bridge quit their wakes,
plane above their mirroring shield-forms
and bash the river, flat out, their hits batts of appliqué
violently spreading, their turnings eiderdown
abolishing translucency before the frieze of people,
and rolled-over water comes out to the footings of the carnival.
Even up drinking coffee-and-froth in the town
prodigious sound rams through arcades and alleyways
and burrs in our teeth, beneath the slow nacelle
of a midsummer ceiling fan.
No wonder pelicans vanish from their river at these times.
How, we wonder, does that sodden undersized one
who hangs around the Fish Co-op get by?
The pert wrymouth with the twisted upper beak.
It cannot pincer prey, or lid its lower scoop,
and so lives on guts, mucking
in with the others
who come and go. For it to leave would be death.
Its trouble looks like a birth defect, not an injury,
and raises questions.
There are poetics would require it to be pecked
to death by fellow pelicans, or kids to smash it with a stick,
preserving a hard cosmos.
In fact it came with fellow pelicans, parents maybe,
and has been around for years. Humans who feed it
are sentimental, perhaps – but what to say
of humans who refused to feed a lame bird?
Nature is not human-hearted. But it is one flesh
or we could not imagine it. And we could not eat.
Nature is not human-hearted. So the animals
come to man, at first in their extremity:
the wild scrub turkeys entering farms in drought-time,
the done fox suddenly underfoot among dog-urgers
(that frantic compliment, that prayer never granted by dogs)
or the shy birds perching on human shoulders and trucks
when the mountains are blotted out in fiery dismemberment.
THE SLEEPOUT
Childhood sleeps in a verandah room
in an iron bed close to the wall
where the winter over the railing
swelled the blind on its timber boom
and splinters picked lint off warm linen
and the stars were out over the hill;
then one wall of the room was forest
and all things in there were to come.
Breathings climbed up on the verandah
when dark cattle rubbed at a corner
and sometimes dim towering rain stood
for forest, and the dry cave hunched woollen.
Inside the forest was lamplit
along tracks to a starry creek bed
and beyond lay the never-fenced country,
its full billabongs all surrounded
by animals and birds, in loud crustings,
and something kept leaping up amongst them.
And out there, to kindle whenever
dark found it, hung the daylight moon.
TROPICAL WINDOW
Out through a long bright window
are three headlands ruched together
on an ivory drawstring of beach. Salad and jade
over freckled pancake rock, each
is washed at foot by noonday suds intermittently
and some yachts are pinned with tall spears to the bay.
This horizontal window
is lamp and sole brilliant picture
to a shadowy cane room
where people stir instant drinks. There is the man
with sunglasses at his throat like sleek electrodes