Igapat- I've Got A Poem About That

Igapat- I've Got A Poem About That Poems and politics

02/03/2026

Here are The four poems painted on the balloons in my painting, “The Envirogedden scream”, which depicts the terrifying moment when we collectively emerge from our irrational mental hibernation where we deny the oncoming climate chaos that could terminate life on earth.


1. 5 Mile Island, and the love affair that had to end
Bangalow, 1980

Your arm has become a shadow, X rayed across me.
The multi coloured cloud of insidious gloom
Is drifting across continents, and ghost voices worm from the radio.
So it all ends, with a sigh.
Outside is the fata! howling of trucks,
And vast conglomerations of vehicles, crushed,
With prams pinned beneath their bloody chests.
And the kewpie doll babies are peering up, startled,
Their crying mechanisms suffocated in the pool of oil.
And you, my love, are drifting,
Silent in clouds of sleep.

2. I'm Weeping For My Mother
Nimbin, September 1988

I'm weeping for my mother. For her sweet tears, falling as acid rain.
For her delicate and perfumed breath,
That sighs over continents in a foul and dusty wind, loaded with death.
Oh mother, please forgive us, please don't die.
You seemed so vast and powerful;
We didn’t know we could hurt you,
Or that your fragile beauty could crack, and crumble away
We tore the flesh from the bones of our mother,
We ripped away her forest hair, that covered her like a misty cloud,
And violently smothered her shimmering seas.
If you don't love your mother, you don't love yourself.
When you mutilate your mother, you mutilate yourself.
Without our mother, we will be nothing.
We will wither and blow away, like dry leaves and dust.
If you can't cry for your mother, who can you cry for?
I'm weeping, for my mother.

3. Rebecca Dancing
Mountaintop, February 1989

As graceful as a blown leaf,
The dancing child sculpts the music with her body.
She is innocent and new, as the dew on the grass.
Oh how I love you, daughter of mine.
Your cool little feet move quietly on the honey coloured floor,
While you carefully hold out your vision
Of an iridescent, swirling skirt, that is your flannelette nightie.
Your face is a tranquil reflection of the remote, enchanted garden
That you flew to, as a fairy,
Listening intently to magic, mysterious sounds,
On the cloudy paths of your dreams.
And you danced off to bed, drawn on by the secret music of sleep,
In the far off land of your mind.
And I said: Rebecca, dance always for your self,
And marvelled, while you slept,
At the perfection of your dream.

4. The Black King in My Bed.
Nimbin 12/6/96

This is the black king in my bed,
Showing once again that words aren't enough.
This is the war of words between two cultures.
The white invader words had practised well,
Obliterating the language of women and the earth.
The language of here told of its ancient ways and needs,
The net of moonlight, the flowing shadows of the leaves,
The message the creek gave me in its liquid voice.
And here is the black king in my bed,
My language not even knowing the word for love,
Love as she lives in the velvet forest darkness,
Love springing in the ancient water places,
So that no words can tell it,
Only the speaking of the leaves.

01/03/2026

This is the poetic part of my PhD dissertation. These days you're allowed to use extraneous references like poems and art and other relevant documents to support your argument! Shock! Horror! What's the world coming to?

Three poems relevant to my Thesis topic. *The first poem is included here because it refers to the imposition of State Border lines over the top of the ancient Tribal territories. It calls on the privileged information given to me by a senior Aboriginal Elder (now deceased) of the Widjabul-Wyabal Tribe of the Bundjalung Nation. (See the illustration of this rights extinguishing Border strategy: the Map on page 29.)
The second poem reveals my astonished reaction to the blatant racism of the New South Wales and Northern Territory Governments as revealed in the Hansard Reports of those two Australian jurisdictions, and my resolve to continue on with my legal-historical research.
The third poem describes my amazement at the beauty and terror of Katherine, its awful history of massacres interwoven within, and buried beneath the mundanity of everyday life of those who now live there.
These three poems have been included in this treatise on racist legislation as a relevant part of my methodological analysis because they are part of my personal Poemography and explanation of what motivates my research into this ferociously grim topic which is so horrifying that people shy away from it, deny it, and just don’t want to know.

As a poet and legal historian, I am quoting from my own Abstract in a 1998 SCU Law Journal article on the topic of Queen Victoria’s Ordinance on the British Subject rights of New South Wales Aboriginal people, as this almost unknown Ordinance, (and the McCorquodale J. [1987] Digest of Australian laws referring to Aboriginal people), is at the heart of, and the impetus for all of my subsequent legal historical research.
My inclusions of my art, poems, photographs and personal commentary, in this exegetical CDU HDR Law PhD dissertation, also demonstrates that I can observe this complex research topic creatively, imaginatively, and in a multi-faceted way. And I must surely be one of the only poets and legal historians to ever have poems academically refereed, and published in a University Law journal?

Four Native Title Poems and a Colonial Document
“A poetic discourse belongs to an oral tradition, as poems are designed to be spoken. That's why poems are shorter than novels. Poems have to be able to be memorised. Poems by their nature do not take to footnoting, which for its own reasons distracts and displaces the powerful flow of images piled up on top of each other. The legal discourse by comparison demands footnoting so that the propositions presented within it can be placed within the map of precedent and provide a sense of certainty and predictability. That is what the law likes. But poetry, even when it is grappling with substantive legal issues, is allowed to push at the boundaries of thought and to be eccentric and idiosyncratic. It possesses its own different and equally valid map of reality.”

Travellin’ Alone Poem
Mingerriba, 24 July 2001

Kangaroos and wallabies leap light and lithe,
And poise like statues in my headlights,
So you don't know where they'll jump to next,
In the gathering dusk 60 kms from the wild and flaring sunset over St George.
I spend the night in the Australia Hotel, another great old country pub,
And in the morning wake up to the cheerful shrieks of galahs;
Pink and grey feathery clowns
Doing acrobatics on the guy wires across the road.
Morning in St George, where the Balonne River flows,
That used to glitter with life, now poisonous with blue green algae,
Choked by cotton farming, trampled to death by cattle.
St George, Goondiwindi, Boggabilla, Texas, Legume;
Woodenbong, Kyogle, Cawongla and home to Nimbin!
I'm a tiny speck moving across a vast map of Queensland,
Where the sides of the road are festooned with snow drifts of cotton
And the splattered bodies of kangaroos by the roadside
Are patrolled by crows dressed neatly in funeral director black.
Listening to the good old country music that I taped off old records,
Looking at the speedo and finding I'm going 130 without knowing it,
And someone passes me as if I'm going slow.
And the names on the map have become real places,
Shadow names remembering the ancient languages of the Tribes;
Moree, Muckadilla, Maranoa, Tarewinnebar, Goodooga,
Nindigully, Minimi, Warra, Collarenebri, and Toobeah.
St George to Nimbin; eight hours flying along the country roads,
Across the Darling Downs stretching flat as a board to the vast horizon,
Purring past the road trains that waggle their tails along the white line,
Halfway between St George and Goondiwindi,
Where there's more kangaroos and cows than cars.
And 20 k's out of Goondiwindi
Where I drifted slowly through a beautiful herd of 300 identical Herefords,
And their tall drover lady on her tall horse,
The great red and white beasts breathing on me with their clover breath,
Walking the long paddock until the rains come.
Then rolling down through fat, rich Goondiwindi, back into NSW:
Boggabilla where the shops are graffitti'd and boarded up,
I don't stop to buy a post card, 'cause it doesn't look like Boggabilla has one,
Only 13 k's from Goondiwindi, and another reality.
Then up through Texas, back into Queensland I go,
Now I'm looking for the Great Dividing Range that says I'm heading for home,
The great blue mountains thrusting up into the pale blue afternoon sky,
Marking the Queensland-NSW border,
That cuts like a cruel knife through the ancient tribal territories;
And snaking along the dusty white gravel roads that follow the ancient trails,
That the trusting Aboriginal people showed the explorers back then.
And here's me looking at everything with pleasure and amazement,
Stanthorpe, Lower Acacia Creek, Legume where the veggie people live,
Back across the border into NSW,
The evening shadows falling softly in the ancient forest,
The mist wreathing the skirts of sacred Mount Neville,
The pumpkins glowing by the road in the last light,
The mysterious dark road between Woodenbong and Kyogle,
Stars winking in the velvet sky over Nimbin,
And driving at last up the shadowy road, in the valley that I call home.

Poem about having a glass or two of Chardonnay on the Wharf at Darwin
Darwin, 25/08/2005

A day spent squinting at microfiche in the Parliamentary Library at Darwin;
The story of NSW Parliamentary Debate about Aborigines, 1856-1876,
The bald racism blandly stated on the pages of the SMH,
Massacres, Select Committee reports about the Native Police tantalizingly referred to,
But only to be found in some Sydney Library, far from here.
“Estimates, Blankets for Aborigines”, “Murders by Aborigines”, “Outrages by Aborigines”,
“Sentence on Aboriginals”, “Electoral Rights of Aboriginal Natives”, (1859);
(Don’t worry, Honorable Members, they didn’t have any).
“Aborigines, camping with”, “Messrs Turner and Wood,
Imprisoned as vagrants for camping with Blacks”, (1861),
“Imprisonment for living with a black woman” (1876).
There you go, that’s the Vagrancy Act (1836) swinging in action.
And now for light relief, dipping into another horror story
1948-1958 in the NT,
The self satisfied politicians, talking about the Aboriginal people,
The dispossessed land owners become fringe dwellers at the point of a gun.
“Wards”, “boys”, “reserves”, “Albert Namatjira”
Blatantly racist Tiger Brennan, now immortalised as the name of a road in Darwin
Complaining about Professor Elkin visiting the Aboriginal reserves with his tape recorder;
That’s nearly in my time, Anthropology at Sydney University,1963,
When there wasn’t even a course about Aborigines in Anthropology:
If only I’d known, wasted my years being a schoolteacher,
I could have been useful, an anthropologist, a lawyer, if only I’d known.
So now, a couple of beakers of wine on the Wharf, a warm walk down the hill
From the glittering white wedding cake Parliament
Where now there are even 7 Aboriginal MPs. How different is that?
The usual seagulls swoop across the blue foreground,
A big snapper idly chases the little fish rising to the floating chips and scraps,
A dorsal fin emerges, rolls and disappears, back into its life beneath the world of air
Where we fat white folks scoff our battered barramundi
And stare at the bay fading to pale, crinkled blue silk
A 90 million dollar yacht all gleaming like a bleached white plastic bone,
Rests against the Wharf as a reminder of who owns what.
Now I’m living the past and the present.
Here I am gulping wine and thinking about here and now,
Visiting the Kamu people on the Daly, patting their pet emus,
Helping chase funding for their brave and ambitious future;
And simultaneously, I’m trying to unravel an evil murder story,
Chasing clues up hill and down dale, evidence in the dusty pages,
Government documents, Adjournments, Questions never answered,
Speeches showing their hypocrisy, ignorance, cruelty, uncaring stupidity;
We know who did what and to whom, but to be criminological, why?
The words of the MPs tell the story about their greed for land,
The policies designed to separate the Aborigines from kin and country.
From the past come the flat, damaged voices, dusty whispers crying for justice,
From the black people of the bitter past, tales of blood chilling horror,
An unexpiated murder story lying uneasily in an unquiet grave;
A crime where the perpetrators, who own the rule-book, get away free.

Blood Heat
Katherine NT, Monday, 7 May 2007

When I first go swimming here, in Katherine,
Top End town, Northern Territory,
In the chlorinated pool that’s as blue as a shallow tropic sea
The girl working there says “ooh it’s cold!
It gave me goosebumps.”
So here I am sliding in just the same.
When did I get to be an old woman?
My knees won’t let me leap in any more
I slide in nice and cautious
Find my way down the silky smooth subterranean tile stairs
It’s blood heat. Divine.
The clear, soft water that cushions me so gently is blood heat.
When I finish my luxurious, slowly breaststroking along, 20 laps,
The tamarind trees have become dark blobs against a technicolour sky.
The sound effects provided are the deafening, mad and joyful shrieks
Of the jewel green parakeets; thousands of screaming jewels
Making their way home to their tree dormitories for the night
The tropic sky is slashed with orange and red, and bands of lemon green.
I swim through hot, moist air
While the end of wet season cumulus clouds
Roil like a time lapse film across the horizon hu**ed with stunted trees
Everything is going somewhere.
I go home to my boring, stuffy, redbrick flat.
And as I drive along, I see that along the edge of every byway
Move dark, shadowy people
Their legs and arms as thin and wiry as pipecleaners
They weave and sway like grass in the wind, the old men and women
Maybe going to their long grass beds on the river bank
Unlike me, they are at home in this blood heat air
Their red blood has soaked this ochre red ground
This town is built on the top of their ancient culture and being.
Now, dressed in bright coloured, flowery ragged skirts and shirts
They sit in circles talking, shouting and singing, waving their arms
Like tossing flower beds on all the road verges and parks.

A strange place, this.
“Jesus loves Nachos” painted on the rusty old rail bridge
Amazing, beautiful waterfalls and gorges of creamy yellow stone
Wild floods and rebellious, cheerful school kids. Preying mantises.
I take pictures of it all, to email home
To possibly interested daughters and friends.

Now the Dry has really started.
It’s almost, but not quite cold at night.
I go camping out along Florina road, enfolded in the generosity of new friends.
Music. Food. Friendly talk.
The people gossip about the jolly pack of dogs
As if they’re family members.
I watch the passionate, intent faces of women playing Irish jigs
In light and shadow, they evoke a tragic, joyful and turbulent past
Of people right here who made this place their own, for good or ill,
With passion and guns. “The only mistake we made” says one young visitor
From a not so far away Tanami desert cattle station
“Was to stop shooting them” I am dumbfounded.
The positive, striking banjo notes thread their tapestry of sound
Across the evocative, sweet sadness, the breathing voice of the harmonium.

I camp that night in a mosquito dome,
An insubstantial, gauzy barrier
Against anything that might creep or crawl in the night.
But it is no barricade against the moon.
The moon inches across the glowing indigo sky.
Above me, the spiderweb tracery of delicate branches
Clutches a spangle of stars.
The dewy leaves scattered across the dark green, velvet lawn
Glitter in the moonlight like shards of glass.
Punctuated by wakefulness,
My dreams are like a string of pearls along a skein of silver light.
As the moon slowly drags its silver cloak across my face,
I wake again and again, to see its brightness edging across the sky.
Who needs sleep, when all night the eye of the moon
Brilliantly illuminates my dreams?
You can sleep anytime.
A faint, warm wind shakes the seedy grassheads,
A lemony perfume curls from the acacia blooms.
The dogs start up and bellow
At a kangaroo crashing through crackly undergrowth
And in between the dreams,
Somewhere across the dewy paddock, in the whispering dark
Comes the silver, melancholy, looping thread of sound
The stone curlew’s cry
As it stalks the boundaries of its territory
With its mad saucer eye and knobbly knees
Collecting lost souls in its dilly bag woven of starlight.
The moon, and the curlew’s mysterious voice
Drift towards the western edge of sleep.
On the eastern horizon, a faint line of lemon yellow
Marks the imminent leaping up of the ferocious sun
The moon still floats in the paling sky
And the birds take their turns to shout out the coming of the day
Black-paper crow, meditative dove, its call so evocative of the North;
Butcher bird reminding me of home with its liquid call,
A w***y wagtail chattering about everyone’s business,
And the poignant call of the black cockatoo
Trails across a sky of powder blue.

I get up to read the messages in the dust of the track.
A lizard story, its tail marking a definitive line.
Wallaby messages, the vigorous, scuffling marks of paws and tail.
Bird scrabbles. Ant highways.
And again the air creeps towards blood heat
As the savage bars of yellow light
Strike like swords across the red earth of the track
And over in the western sky,
The pale moon floats within a faint penumbra of bushfire smoke.

Blood heat. Mad colour. Wild, passionate, untamed beauty.
And always, running beneath it, the substratum of tragedy,
Of one people who killed another off, lusting for the possession of this land
When it can’t belong to anyone, existing independent, frosted with moonlight,
A reality savagely painted with hot bars of golden light,
Free, escaping out of our grasp no matter how we clutch at it
As we pass, our lives as insubstantial as the music and the moonlight
That last night, threaded their way through my dreams.

02/02/2026

I'm Weeping For My Mother
Tuncester, September 1988

I'm weeping for my mother. For her sweet tears, falling as acid rain.
For her delicate and perfumed breath,
That sighs over continents in a foul and dusty wind,
Loaded with death.
Oh mother, please forgive us, please don't die.
You seemed so vast and powerful;
We didn’t know we could hurt you,
Or that your fragile beauty could crack, and crumble away.

We tore the flesh from the bones of our mother,
We ripped away her forest hair, that covered her like a misty cloud,
And violently smothered her shimmering seas.

If you don't love your mother, you don't love yourself.
When you mutilate your mother, you mutilate yourself.
Without our mother, we will be nothing.
We will wither and blow away, like dry leaves and dust.
If you can't cry for your mother, who can you cry for?
I'm weeping, for my mother.

The Painting
Nimbin 1988

The madrigal is as cool and dear, on the radio, as this frosty morning.
In the cold living room, Coco's canvas looms. Last night,
She crouched before it in her blue and yellow harlequin clown suit,
And carefully sketched; the slide projector's glare illuminated her,
Her sharp edged shadow danced across the vast expanse of canvas.
Coco sketched Coco. So now, her canvas tells, in pale pencil marks,
Of vast sweeps of opalescent sky: of Pan pipe playing visionaries;
Of a mist-blue, undulating mountain backdrop; of me, her mother,
Looking not at the camera,
But instead carefully scrutinising this inspired group of child pilgrims: Cataloguing, sorting,
Storing the future poem to be written about this moment on top of the world.
And now, I've overcooked the boiled eggs.

Rebecca is crossly and hoarsely shouting from the bathroom.
Toast is popping up.
7.30. Poetry will have to wait. No matter. It sits,
As neatly as a pearl in an oyster, waiting for next time;
And Rebecca says, "Eat your dinner, or it will go frosty."

To My Dear Rebecca
Nimbin, 23/10/1988

Today, you are 5. Tomorrow, you'll be 6!
Another step on the way. How I love you,
And admire this warm little seeker after truth,
With a mind that sparkles,
And a serious wit that looks out as clear, and full of light as a crystal.
Your honey brown, Mediterranean eyes look at everything,
Observing, remembering, so that your drawings
Are full of joy and humour: pictures of the ones you love:
Mummy, Coco and Robert,
Your friends at school, dogs, ducks, cats and fish,
All floating in a glorious rainbow universe of colour, energy, and play.
So, my darling little one,
Here's my thanks and gratitude to you.
Since you were born, I've been trudging,
And sometimes running full tilt, urged remorselessly on
By love, and duty, and a mind that turns and spins,
Never allowing escape. In my quest,
I've walked and I've stumbled up breathless mountains,
Through strange valleys alive with mystery,
In search of my true self, whatever that may be.
And always, since the day of your birth,
You've kept me company. In your limitless love and humour,
Which is all babies' gift to those around them,
You sustained me, made every effort worth while.
My body and my life paid a high price for you,
As was your due. But no price could be too high.
You, a little soft girl with curling hair, slim, brown body,
Kind, gentle hands, give me back a thousand-fold
Everything I give to you. You are a powerful reflection
Of everything I long for,
A short time ago, a mere six years ago,
And you were a tiny, newborn thing,
Looking with wonder at the lights of the hospital corridor
While your daddy carried you about; as he stared, amazed,
Into your tiny rosebud of a face. And now!
A strong minded, beautiful and thoughtful girl.
So to you, my darling daughter,
Every blessing that I am capable of,
And may these gifts of mine sustain you through your life ahead;
While you remain always conscious,
Somewhere in your deep self,
Of how I love you.
Morning in Yamba
Yamba 1988

Sleep on, little darling, sleep on. Coco has gone,
Brushing her long shining hair on the street corner.
I watched her go from the window of "Now and Then",
And looked at you, curled cosy and asleep in my bed.
You appeared in my bed in the moonlight,
While dry lightning crackled silent on the dark horizon.
The sea was whispering on the pebbly beach,
I seemed to be awake, I caught my melancholy mind
Turning things over, like the sea sorting its smooth stones.
The fingers of foam in my mind turned over pebbles in the dark,
Sorting out fears and pain, polishing, sorting and smoothing.
You got into bed with me and said "I needed you, mummy,"
And put your cool little legs and feet against my back,
Patting and stroking, so that when I woke this morning,
My fears had gone with the moonlight,
The perfume of frangipani curled in the window,
And our mother, the shimmering sea,
Sang her ancient song on the rocks below.

02/02/2026

Call this poem, whatever obsession is yours.
Nimbin 1988

At some point, illusion and reality collide,
Then you test your fantasies to see if they’ve survived.
Does the light shine through the moth holes of your dream?
Does reality pass (or fail) the same test?
It’s the light that filters through those insubstantial states
That we dimly search for,
Our selves like daisy flowers, blindly following the sun.

How are illusions and obsessions linked?
Our obsessions grow in the bleak and fearsome landscape of unrequited love,
Turned back in anguish at the closed gate,
While we wring our hands and try to work out where we’ll go to next.
So you sort out the things of your life, winnowing your experiences.
I’ll keep this one and discard that that:
Letting it drift off into the cluttered garbage tip of the subconscious.
Sometimes you have to rummage there,
As if you’ve seen something threatening out of the corner of your eye.
You thought it was a rat, but it was a horror face.

I'm trying to track my obsession to its source.
I know its face with a mingled love and hate.
No, not hate, but fear. Not love, but a yearning desire.
And obsession is filed close by, I mean, filed near fear.

Obsession feeds on fear. They are tangled life lines
Into which we knit our fingers, hoping that somehow, they will lead us out of the maze.
But they are blind guides who, like heat seeking missiles,
Long only for the target.

Obsessions, one place removed from instinct,
Keep us blind ones feeling our way through the lost, dim spaces:
Closely akin, in our powerful longing,
To moths, trapped by the light of the lamp.

If you don't let yourself grieve for things when they die,
They wait for you anyway, weeping in the dark,
Until you've got the time and energy to deal with them:
To give them a dignified status, and a compassionate, gentle passing.

My illusions and dreams deserve that too,
Longing for that rite of passage:
So that at last, I must look, astounded,
Into the exquisite, open eyes
Of my mysterious, beloved, and secret self.

A Message To My Self
Nimbin, Queen's Birthday, 1988

This self writes poetry.
It's like a seductive message, written in soap on the bathroom mirror,
To someone you love, your other self,
That you share a house with and only rarely meet,
But have to get a message to,
I am far from you in the same way.
We gaze into each other's eyes.
In your eyes, I see far landscapes,
Like the other side of the moon for me, and for you too.
We send messages to each other like little capsules through space,
Bottles with letters in.
And these star-burst messages
Burn in their intensity, spiralling outwards,
Written in crazy Catherine wheels of fire.
Then all that remains, in the crystalline, starry sky,
Is the squiggly writing of fireworks smoke,
Fading, in the cold, sweet Nimbin air.

Clay Sculpture
Nimbin, July 1988

In my hands, the clay is flesh.
Cool flesh, that flows and forms into sensuous shapes.
I could do it blind. My hands own the memories
Of smooth back muscles, of eyelids and of lips.
All these years, I've passed my hands over skin.
Warm babies, smooth and silken.
My daughters, as soft and fragrant as a velvet peach
And lovers, whose bodies I mapped
Until their territories were as familiar as my own.
In all these years of loving touch,
My fingers explored the outer territory of the soul,
So that now, though the babies have grown, and the lovers have gone,
My fingers still tell me the contours of flesh,
And the ones that I loved, re-emerge in the clay.

Magical Mystery Tour(Nimbin-New England, 1987)Well, I am on a strange and magical Mystery Tour (a Beatles song, remember...
02/02/2026

Magical Mystery Tour
(Nimbin-New England, 1987)

Well, I am on a strange and magical Mystery Tour (a Beatles song, remember?)
It was a long time ago that I first heard that song: the Beatles, the 60's and all that.
It surprises me, that these 14, 15, 16 year old kids
Still sing Beatles songs, like I did, 25 years ago.
Magic, yes, mystery, yes: though at this moment,
It's still just a teacher and a parent taking 15 adolescents on a 9 day school excursion:
A hired mini-bus,
Jammed to the gunwales with provisions; guitars,
Fantales, tents, black billy-cans,
Towels, tapes, cameras, sketch-pads, walking boots, ideals, hopes and sunburn cream.
Just the usual camping trip paraphernalia.
We are going to places that are still just names, dots on a two-dimensional map:
Ebor. Thungutti. New England National Park.
Point Lookout. Lyrebird Walk. Cathedral Rock.
Lucifer's Thumb. Guy Fawkes River. Dalmorten.
Now we will see how the map swells and grows,
Becomes contours, folds, real places, with real bull ants, real firewood,
And real hailstorms to flood us out of our tents.
We are two dimensional to each other, too.
But as the days go by, my companions grow,
Becoming real people to me, shedding real tears,
Laughing, helping each other, speaking truths
About Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Imperceptibly, the picture comes into focus. There's Violet, amazingly Clara Bow. Pouting lip, a curl of cheeky blond hair to peer under.
Violet, ultra Violet.
She reminds me of my early morning childhood when enthralled, I watched a cicada emerge: Its brown, lacquered back split, and the delicate, gauzy creature within
Released itself, to quiver and fly strongly into the sun.
And Coco. With her private self. Smooth honey-brown plait,
Glossy as a bird's wing, curves down her smooth back.
My daughter, and my friend.
A cake-giver, a cup of tea maker,
And always with comfort, my sweet little woman.
Carissa Clarissa. Those bold, strong eyes and mouth. Freckles. I tell her that I've seen her elsewhere: a park in Florence, a rich Palazzo,
A great, voluptuous, swirling Titian.
She looks amused, a somewhat startled; and points to a catfish
That jumps suddenly in a still pool.
There's Tanya. Poised like a gazelle, her leg curled elegantly round the shovel,
Leaning and reading her exquisite verse about sacred rocks and waterfalls.
Her hair like pale snow grass. And I have to tell you about Cara: that special, crystal mind
Now focussing like a ray gun (look out! Everyone duck!)
Or scattering bright light, thinking deeply.
But this is enough of the credits. Now the movie.
Fragments. I borrow the word from Coco.
Across the strongly flowing river, bellbirds are singing from the hillside;
Bells so pure and clear, that I only sometimes hear them.
They are temple bells ringing,
Drawing down to us with their praise the strength and harmony that is ours if we need it,
In this temple valley dedicated to warm, sweet wind,
To gold speckles in river sand, to plovers calling,
To azure kingfishers dipping into the shimmering river skin;
To round, clashing basalt pebbles, that grumble and gnash at my sensible work boots
(How glad I am that I brought them).
And also in this valley is my warm, dear and much beloved friend.
There he is, sitting, writing, like me, on the edge of our wrinkled river,
Now mirroring the afternoon blue sky: glittering ripples now gliding over green.
Our river rages here. Its tumultuous and muscular flood hurls those hard stones,
Battering and clattering, honing and polishing,
Until the boulders are as smooth and sculptured as a Michaelangelo,
Like his unfinished statues, emerging from the stone,
And then, frozen in their sorrow and strength, they pause, half grown from marble.
So. Our grey rocks here, once spitting, boiling rock,
Are now Michaelangelos, carved over thousands of floods,
Shaped and smoothed, curved and weathered,
Mysterious faces peering out from stone.
Wood and stone. Cathedral Rock. Steve walked before.
Strong brown legs for me to follow.
His keen head turning, looking at flying buttresses of rock,
Great tumbled heaps of sugar lumps, giant's marbles emptied out.
The Giant has left her marbles and gone home.
Now what can I say about this ancient, secret, astounding place?
I followed behind you, Steve. Unerringly, silently, alertly,
Like your long line of boy ancestors, you climb this cool granite:
We see a faint and glittering track, pinkly worn on grey stone;
Corners smoothed by thousands of footsteps, over how many thousand years?
So under the dim rock tunnel we duck.
This way up.
I could stay here for hours in this dream landscape, this cool ravine dripping with moss;
Weathered, twisted ti-trees: fantasy landscape. Spirit world. We are hushed, thrilled.
And then, suddenly, some chains on smooth rock, to take us to the top.
Ah!
That curved, airy, voluptuous rock!
We are sentinels on the heads of ponderous monoliths:
Old people, ancient, thoughtful giants, grey as elephants,
Pink glittering, quietly and steadily peering out across an airy gap of valley,
Across to the folded, tumbled, monolithic thinkers on the other side.
These rocks speak to us, but their thoughts are so slow
That we quick little sparks of life cannot hear them. We can't hear the trees either, Though tree thoughts are to stone thoughts
Only a flash of green light.
Even the Nothofagus Moorei, Antarctic Beech,
Brooding and dreaming below the whispering cliffs of the Lyrebird Trail
Have thousands of years only of memory,
And the sentinels have been watching those powder blue skies,
Those wrinkled folds of dreaming peaks, for so long
That they seem to us to have always been there.
Those beeches! How they speak to me of long, slow, dripping ages:
We stand transfixed by the snoring, serious croaking of the sphagnum frog,
Pronouncing, in his deep and profound bass voice A few words only.
Meditatively croaking behind his lace curtain of water.
Oh those diamond drops. Rainbow falls.
With reverence, and also with thirst, we taste, delighted,
The pure and living water that filters down over striated and fissured rock,
Through sponges of vivid moss,
And whispers smooth as silk down steps and stairs of stone.
All is exquisite. Every vision is perfect. That weeping rock. That crimson leaf. That velvet moss.
That slow cascade of tree root, so long clasping and grasping hard granite,
That root and stone seem one, layered with moss and lichen.
Tree and moss slowly, slowly devour stone. And a bridge, more perfect than any Japanese garden,
Takes us across a pure creek (quick, another sip!)
And ferns, curled in love-heart fiddle heads, branching, delicate as a breath.
Coco and Kylie and I pause, walk, exclaim, stare, touch, smell,
And taste sweet water from moss sponge;
Amazed, dumbfounded at being in this eternal forest.
I look at the forest, and look at the girls looking at the forest.
We smile enchanted smiles, and wonder at alt this grace.
Even the path is a work of art.
It gracefully and harmoniously follows some sacred trail, ancient beyond thought.
Careful steps cut in fallen giants, stairs that are mossy tree trunks.
How can I describe it? Words by themselves can't capture that winding path
Poised between today and millennia ago,
Flying like an airy bridge between me,
And times long ago.
The plateau.
On this plateau, has to have been sacred of sacred places,
What thoughts we ail had, gazing into the azure wind and distance.
Stripy lizards flick in and out of their hot crevices.
Bonsai trees writhe in sinuous wooden arabesques,
Battered by the cool clear winds that flow over this glassy peak.
Everywhere ritual and singing and thought have blended with stone.
They still echo with ceremony.
And in the midst of magical walks, where we climb to places so beautiful
That they seem to belong to another age or time,
We walk also on voyages of exploration within ourselves.
All around us in these eternal, internal journeys
Are towering cliffs, mist veils drifting, primeval forests alive with mystery.
We find our way within ourselves,
Recognising with joy or fear, in some mossy, shadowed ravine
Our true self. And around camp fires, their faces glowing with flame and joy,
These children, or women and men
Make a circle, heal each other, and generally have a good time,
Giggling like fools, rolling around, shouting and chanting together,
So that their clear voices echo off the darkness of cliff across the swift and silken river.

Dawn at Dalmorten.
I wash in the warm, clear river.
No one sees. They are all asleep.
A water hen speaks a syllable of the true name of things,
And mist veils the water.
Barry snores in his green tent. The children sleep. Their faces are peaceful, their sleeping bags damp.
Last night, the stars were their ceiling. There's Coco, her glasses propped carefully against her torch.
Kylie's nose, Shelley in her bag which is dearly still damp.
Kim, Carissa and Nick, wandering, adrift in the cloudy land of dreams.
I see that Steve guards them, asleep in his brown Superdown.
We seem charmed, blessed with protection,
In spite of the dangerous and precipitous land through which we've passed-
The thrilling crevasses, the edges of rock luring us to the edge of the cloudy world-
The hailstorm, dumping piles and drifts of wedding icing,
Freezing our feet, soaking our sleeping bags, our food, our games of Trivial Pursuit....

Wet, cold and misty morning at Thungutti,
Where our discomfort at wet socks, wet sweaters,
Wet blankets, and revoltingly wet, squishy sneakers,
Can be set against some true delights.
A kangaroo, graciously accepting bread from Kylie,
And even allowing us to scratch its warm and furry chest;
And endless cups of tea, made, oh joy of joys, with sweetened condensed milk:
Made in a wet tent, surrounded with sodden cardboard boxes.
A morning sitting in the bus, cheering myself by reading
Of r***d Cambodia, gutted Vietnam, despoiled Palestine:
Corruption, greed, viciousness, malice, vile stupidity,
Whose ragged, stinking cloak threatens with its filthy edges even this exquisite, misty clearing:
Threatens the sweet childhood of our precious children, since war is war on children. I'm glad I came, if only to read Pilger's "Heroes", in surrounding that belong to dreams.
So we sat on the damp bus. Barry, loaded down with care, and a wet jacket, drove us up on a trip which we couldn't see,
(The windows weeping with rain and steam),
Shelley, Coco, Violet and I cuddled together on the back seat,
Shared our dampness and warmth, and while we didn't dry,
At least shared comfort, and cups of tea.
It was a three girl morning, I cuddled all three, and thought how sweet small delights become
When all else is stripped away. When a warm bed, a meal with friends,
Regain their power to delight.
I guess we're all soft; the richest, healthiest children who have ever been.
We forget how rich we are, and how strong we are, when adversity challenges us.
And then we know again how only a few things really remain important.
A baby knows that, needing to know nothing else.
And that's how the healing process goes for you children
Who know love and pain no less than anyone, finding that strength and comfort and joy
Are all the sweeter for being shared;
Honing your skills against the dark need, the fearsome tests
That wait, monolithic and still,
Signposting your future life.
Into that vast and misty landscape of the future
We all peer, aloft on perilous mountains, gazing into uncharted gorges and trails, (National Parks and Wildlife not yet having had the time
To carve their neat signs to direct our timid feet.)
Some of you have already drawn your sketch maps of the future.
Shelley, for instance, who seems, like Theseus,
To be holding fast to that warm woollen thread,
That someone who loves her has helped to weave,
And has pressed into her hand to guide her.
She, like us all, has a Minotaur to face at the end of the Maze.
But she also has that thread held fast.
Emotional firestorms, ice storms and wet sleeping bags did not bow this quiet warrior.
She is fragile as a little bird. But still I see the strength of the girl-woman,
Who stoically bears physical pain, and anguish too,
And while packing all of that away in her inner self,
Still gives comfort to those around:
Like massage in the fire warmth of Tom's Bushwalkers' Hut,
While steaming blankets and clothes hung on clever lines made of boot laces
Festooned our warm refuge like Christmas decorations,
In celebration of fire light, a good meal, hot showers, and clean hair.
Now Jenny has joined me.
Serenely, she eats her muesli. Jenny and I walked the high peaks together.
She, overwhelmed with her first experience
Of vast and empty spaces, the forbidding cliffs,
The dangerous crevasses threatening unwary climbers; unfamiliar territory.
So we scrambled down together, and held hands for comfort, on the dangerous bits.
Then, we nature rambled, discovering shining quartz,
Twisted and interesting twigs, tiny orchids as pretty as jewels,
Jenny, a shy, quiet and beautiful girl,
Amazed and overwhelmed by love and friendship, stumbling, startled, into unknown territory,
And looking back over cloudy vistas, to see her life begin to make sense,
And to find useful items in her life's baggage, like quiet strength, that will be useful, later.
She doesn't say much; her few words, like those rare and secret orchids,
Surprise with their harmony and grace.
And who could forget Angie, our Angela, well named. I've seen her before, too. A naughty, smiling cherub, flicking its wings,
Playing pranks on some pompous fool,
Laughing down the centuries, from some frescoed wail.
Now I have it. The Laughing Warrior of Verona. I have a postcard to prove it.
And climbing those monstrous hills, screaming like a sulphur crested cockatoo, exuberant,
Ready to float off the cliffs like a winged seed;
And Luke, bounding from rock to rock in his guise of boy,
Though really, it's quite clear he should have cloven hooves.
Pan, Satyr or mountain goat, playing his Pan pipes on the navel of the world:
Half pure mad boy energy, half visionary, writing poetry in his head,
Pointing high tech cameras and videos at visions that belong to dreams.
As they floated over the rocks like helium balloons,
I nervously looked for a string to grab,
Thinking we would lose them entirely.
And this, for me, is pure self-indulgence. Clarissa's dimpled river swishes by, rushing clear as glass over pale stones.
There are no floors to sweep while camping,
No business to worry about, no phones, only bell birds ringing.

Sometimes you meet people who clearly come from somewhere and sometime else:
Maybe from Venus, maybe from millennia past or future.
Kylie's one like that, so beautiful, that it's enough for her just to stand about laughing
To justify her own existence, and give us pleasure just looking.
As the tapestry in my mind fades and dissolves,
I still see her; outrageously funny, shooting Steve with a slimy eel,
Then wrapping it round his neck. (We ate the eel later for breakfast. It was delicious.)
Kylie. Standing, poised as a model in Vogue, Her jungle green hat and raggedy blanket worn with naive and casual grace,
Then pirating off down the rapids on her air bed, claiming rock islands,
Inventing fantasies as huge and absurd as the cumulus clouds that loom over this valley.
And Rachael. You can look at her, try to capture her essence; but she's like a sandpiper,
Forever elusive, forever moving, always just out of reach.
Looking at this golden girl is like staring into sunlight reflected off wet rocks and sand,
Confusing you: which prism of light is reflection, and which is girl?

Now. When that pallid and inimical mirror (whose distorting images peer back at you,
From television, shop windows, glossy, screaming magazines),
Confusing you, with its ferocious and distorting message:
You can, if you choose, hold as a talisman the reflection of yourself
That you once saw in someone's eyes: the true picture of your true self,
Translucent, innocent, shimmering.
Then, we let our mask drop, or peered timidly round its edge.

For you children, that’s easier,
The mask you learn to make,
To protect yourself from harm
Becomes, when you’re older, a mask-face;
That out of habit or fear,
Falls only in anguish or ecstasy.

You beautiful, inspired, and inspiring children
Who, as you cross the threshold between childhood,
And growing up to be like us:
Discover that you already possess gifts,
Beyond naming or price,
That if acknowledged, retained and nurtured
Will allow us to survive.

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