Seventeen years ago a roar engulfed the singing pines - countless breaths exhaling the needle sting of smoke. They stood in shredded funeral garb flinging glowing ember flowers onto us below. They witnessed our syncopated falling and the operatic scream of twisting steel, the cymbal crash of exploding windows. We knelt prostrate before the fire … Continue reading The House at No. 3
#FOWC - Paradox Camping on the Nullabor - that great nothing - I draw a line from the toe of my sleeping bag to a pointer star. I sketch in some ladder rungs (aluminium looks like silver on that elusive darkness) and imagine the climb to get up there to the great beyond. The Halley's … Continue reading The Paradox
In one of the summer holidays when I was at University, my aunt and uncle got me a job at a peach orchard not far from their home and said I could stay with them. I started off down in the orchard - those long surprisingly dark aisles of burgeoning foliage. I always found them … Continue reading #FOWC Hail
I cannot forget your steely-white glare; the too-hot press of you against my skin. My body contracted until cracks appeared. Plants wilted, waterholes sucked in and my body fissured abandoned to exuberant wind and the angry roar of carbon-crazed dragons. The smoke rolled over us all like hell's too-slow envoy. Before it, a syndicate of … Continue reading Australia’s Summer
It’s 6:30 in the morning and my eyes are gluey. As I swing open the back screen door to go free the chickens and shut up the roosters, I hear a sound of tearing silk threads - that surprisingly audible rip - the one that says you have just walked through a spiders web. Curious, … Continue reading Deadly Decisions
This spring the green is wild, profuse and supreme, exotic and extant - the white cane chair left on the lawn seems to float in clovery billows. Over a mower's roar and the whispered conspiracy of the wind, the children's voices are cheerfully elemental like the clatter of rain. Painted shadows tangle, restless and involuntary; … Continue reading While Children Play on a Tyre Swing…
If you asked me my favourite colour some days I'd tell you blue and I'd take you to Beaumaris Beach. Include the sky, I'd tell you. Include that wave on the cusp of breaking and the furthest ripple that you can see. Note the dark patch beneath that seagull's wing and before you go home … Continue reading Favourite Colour
Some people become famous through being extraordinary. Some people become extraordinary through being famous. We ordinary folk are like the grass in the lawn sort of invisible because of the flowers and yet essential to the overall feel of the garden. We are maintained through mass techniques (eg lawnmowers & sprinklers) where as the flowers … Continue reading Purple Flowers are The Future
In the lush green foliage of the avocado tree a pair of gerygones are building a nest. Their cascading notes are light and clear as they busily flit and hover and pause their little yellow breasts like tiny flags of hope. ** I silently wish them every success against the very valid appetites of the … Continue reading A Planet in the Avocado Tree
(A thank you to V) We walk & talk until she stops beside a flower to smell or gently touch. Or to trace patterns & colourations in bark (have you seen the hieroglyphs on a scribbly gum?) ** Sometimes beneath a gnarly tree she stands & ponders reading stories of historic kinship with indigenous people … Continue reading When I get home, I am singing.
