... favourite Dylan songs? Tardy I know but how hard is it to choose? Like excerpting from the soundtrack of our unconscious, we of a certain age. Earlier (much earlier I recall nominating Blind Willie McTell as perhaps his greatest song. But favourite ... ? I've played Time out of Mind so many times the sprockets have all fallen out of the inside of the CD case. Other favourite albums ... World Gone Wrong, Oh Mercy, Blood on the Tracks, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, John Wesley Harding, Highway 61 Revisited. Like a Rolling Stone is the greatest whatever of all time I read the other day. Maybe it is a song off that record, maybe It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, not just for the title, for the groove. And the words ... well, perhaps not. Boots of Spanish Leather? Visions of Joanna? Shelter from the Storm? How's about ... hell, I don't know. So many of his songs recall other songs, so many of his lines are actually from other songs, that's probably why we feel like they're common property.

Anyway, tonight, when I'm feeling melancholy and it's VE day, my parents' wedding anniversary, and the Salvation Army Band is playing down at the Summer Hill shops, it's this I remember:

He hears the ticking of the clocks
Walks along with a parrot that talks
Hunts her down by the waterfront docks
Where the sailors all come in
Maybe she'll pick him out again
How long must he wait
Once more for a simple twist of fate ...

prosa on verso/verso on prosa

So what is the connection between prosody and prose? In terms of etymology, apparently none at all. Prose comes from Latin prosa (straightforward), usually coupled with oratio (discourse); an earlier form of the word is prorus (direct). So, plain speaking. Prosody is from Latin prosodia (accent), derived from Greek pros(oidia), in other words, towards an ode. No real convergence of meaning there. If you look up poetry and fiction, however, you do find a common thread. Fiction is from fictio, to fashion, while poetry, as everyone knows, has its root in a Greek word for maker. Fictio survives in another word, fictile, meaning made of earth or clay by a potter. Could non-fiction then be taken to mean not made?

Meanwhile I've been searching the Complete Posthumous Poems of César Vallejo for a line I remembered last night ... it comes from a poem he wrote foretelling his own death, the great Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca, which is worth quoting in full:

Me moriré en Paris con aguacero,
un día del cual tengo ya el recuerdo.
Me moriré en Paris—y no me corro—
tal vez un jueves, como es hoy, de otoño.

Jueves será, porque hoy, jueves, que proso
estos versos, los húmeros me he puesto
a la mala y, jamás como hoy me he vuelto
con todo mi camino, a verme solo.

César Vallejo ha muerto, le pegaban
todos sin que él les haga nada;
le daban duro con un palo y duro

también con una soga; son testigos
los días jueves y los huesos húmeros,
la soledad, la lluvia, los caminos ...


This is a much translated poem but the only version in which the line I remembered appears is that by Clayton Eshleman and José Rubia Barcia:


Black Stone On a White Stone

I will die in Paris with a sudden shower
on a day I can already remember.
I will die in Paris—and I don't budge—
maybe a Thursday, like today is, in autumn.

Thursday it will be, because today, Thursday, when I prose
these poems, the humeri I have put on
by force and, never like today, have I turned,
with all my road, to see myself alone.

César Vallejo has died, they beat him
everyone, without him doing anything to them;
they gave it to him hard with a stick and hard

also with a rope; witnesses are
the Thursdays days and the humerus bones,
the loneliness, the rain, the roads . . .


He wrote this in 1929 I think; and died on April 15th, 1938, in Paris, just as the Fascist army swept down the Ebro valley to the Mediterranean, cutting Loyalist Spain in half. His last words, spoken in delirium, were I am going to Spain! I want to go to Spain! Although he had fallen into unconsciousness the day before, the 14th, a Thursday, the 15th was in fact Good Friday: not autumn in that latitude, but spring. And I do not know if it was raining. Not that it matters particularly.

I also found these lines, which I like a lot, from Guitarra:

Vales más que mi número, hombre solo,
y valen más que todo el diccionario,
con su prosa en verso,
con su verso en prosa,
tu función águila,
tu mecanismo tigre, blando prójimo ...


which might be rendered:


You are worthier than my number, man alone,
and worthier than all the dictionary
with its prose in poetry
with its poetry in prose
your eagle function,
your tiger mechanism, bland fellow man ...

prosody

In another of a number of generous and encouraging pieces about my endeavours Mark Young has posted at Pelican Dreaming, he stumbles - and admits he stumbles - over how the kind of writing I do may be described. He uses creative prose then revises that to speculative prose, which I like better though it still doesn't sound quite right. I considered imaginative prose but that has too much of a mid-twentieth century English Department feel to it. So, what? I'm self-taught as a writer and the path of my learning leads from school and university essays through occasional art criticism, writing for the theatre, marginally more successful screenplay writing, to (speculative?) prose writing. But my real education came over about two and a half decades of almost totally unproductive (in terms of finished works) attempts to write poems. Though I abandoned this practice about ten years ago, it was, along with the reading of other's poetry, which I still do a lot of, the single most important influence upon how I work now. One of the questions that is never asked of poetry is its status in the fiction/non-fiction opposition that haunts prose writing. The most that might be ventured is the suggestion that such and such a poem may be autobiographical. Otherwise, poetry is left to be what it is or is not in a kind of fire free zone. This is not the case with prose. How many times have I said, in answer to a well-intentioned query, that I'm writing a book, only to see the person's eyes light up as they say: A novel? and then sadly dim when I shake my head and say: No, non-fiction.? Non-fiction is so ... non. It is a huge field, naturally, stretching all the way from technical manuals to, say, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and includes in its almost limitless bounds many literary forms: history, biography, criticism, essay, memoir and more. They are all defined, more or less, by their fidelity to fact, or at least to how real things (as opposed perhaps to imaginary things) may be represented in words. But my books do not fit within any of these literary forms, though they do tend to stray in and out of traditional subject matters and approaches to the subject matter of those forms. I feel increasingly impatient with the fiction/non-fiction divide. I wonder why it is acceptable for a novel to include autobiographical material when the inclusion of fictional elements is proscribed from extended prose works which are not presented as novels. I'm aware that it has to do with perceptions of truth-telling but, in a world of liars in public places, I have suspicions about the veracity of our idea of truth. I suppose what I'm saying is that while I don't necessarily want to write novels, I do want the freedom to make things up if I feel like it - and not be called a liar for doing so. I have a perhaps scandalous sympathy for literary fraudsters and art forgers, precisely because they call into question that allegedly absolute line drawn between the 'true' and the 'false', the fictional and factual. But much of this is already familiar ground and does not solve the problem of nomenclature. This, however, might. It is from an interview with Italo Calvino published in Paese sera on January 7, 1978, called The Situation in 1978. The interviewer was Daniele del Giudice and I quote both the last question and Calvino's answer in full:

Calvino, I will not ask you what you are writing. I'll ask you what you will not write any more.

If you mean will I never write again what I have already written, there is nothing that I reject in any of my writing. Of course, some roads do close. What I keep open is fiction, a storytelling that is lively and inventive, as well as the more reflective kind of writing in which narrative and essay become one.

you must remember this ...

A few weeks ago I joined the Ashfield Library. It is another surprisingly good suburban library, as good, in its way, as the Umina Library I used on the Central Coast. At Ashfield there are no poetry books apart from a few anthologies and no section devoted to literatures not written in English, as there are at Umina; but these lacks or omissions are more than compensated for by excellent selections of fiction and biography. Last week I read Saramago's 'All the Names'; this week Ismail Kadare's 'The Palace of Dreams' is on my bedside table. And, in the biographies, I found a collection of autobiographical writings by Italo Calvino, which is fascinating. I haven't read a lot of Calvino's fiction, though 'Invisible Cities' remains for me one of the great books of the later 20th century, an inspired re-telling of Marco Polo's adventures on the premise that in some sense that epochal journey took place entirely within the city of Venice; and I knew nothing about his life. I did not know he fought in the Resistance, nor that he spent five years after the War in daily contact with his mentor and friend, Cesare Pavese, nor that his engagement in practical politics and in publishing was life-long. He can seem, in his fiction, the most impersonal of writers; but this volume reveals an engaging, intelligent, amusing, above all civilized man of the world. Most compelling for me so far is the 'American Diary, 1959-60'. Calvino went to the States on a grant from the Ford Foundation. His account is not really diary, rather it is excerpts from letters he wrote back to his colleagues at the Turin publishing house, Einaudi, where he worked. These excerpts were going to be published as a book called 'An Optimist in America' but at the last moment Calvino decided not to go ahead with it because he felt 'it was too slight as a work of literature and not original enough as a work of journalistic reportage.' Well, that may be so; but as autobiography it is wonderful. The writings perhaps have a particular force for me because they recalled in detail my own experiences of travelling to the States in the late 1970s, the first time I went overseas. Calvino went to many of the same cities I visited: New York, Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, New Orleans, Montgomery ... and spent time, as I did, in Taos and Santa Fe in New Mexico. Although twenty years separated our visits, and he was primarily involved with literary publishing and politics on his trip, while I was travelling with a fairly eclectic, almost totally obscure band of actors and musicians, some of his observations are uncannily reminiscent of things I remember noticing at the time. I don't mean to put myself in the same company as him; it is just that his extremely astute insights into a timeless, not a contemporary, America, did remind me of the place I saw with innocent eyes in my mid-twenties. I guess I mean to say they took me back in a way encapsulated in what Calvino writes in another part of the book: 'One sees one's past more and more clearly as time goes by.' I have a scrapbook of my travels in 1978-80 but not much else; Calvino's Diary made me long to recover the almost mythological flavour of those times in the San Francisco of the assassinated Harvey Milk and George Mosconi, of the Jonestown Suicides; of New York in the shadow of the meltdown at Three Mile Island; of the high mesa beyond Taos where the young Rio Grande flowed and where you could see the lights of Los Alamos reflected in the night sky; most of all, perhaps, of the extraordinary community of fellow performers met in the small bars and theatres where we blithely played in a world that seemed utterly removed from the perturbations of a doomed geopolitic.

bifurcation

I've started a new site, called dérives (the link is there on the right) where I'm going to post everything that arises directly out of cab driving. That which has arisen already is already there. And has been deleted from here. Why? I felt like sequestering those work related experiences. I was starting to feel they conflicted with the more, or differently, serendipitous pieces that I put here. Serendipities versus stochastics perhaps (thanks, Mark!) Anyway, that's what I've done. dérives is unlinked at present, apart from this portal here. Who knows what will happen there? Or here for that matter.

El Camino Real

This is my summons of a dream, my dream of a summons. To the other side of the mountains you must go. There, Joseph Conrad waits.

The town is flat, dusty, brown. A dusty inland town in the wastes of Gondwanaland. The address is wrong. One hundred and ten El Camino Real … there’s no such place.

I walk down the street parallel. Dark pigment stains the adobe red, green, black. Murals on the walls of all the houses. Through a door I see in the ochre light these paintings the colours of earth. A woman turns, smiling. Her body is a deer pierced by arrows.

Through the arcade and back to El Camino. A friend joins me, together we search. A woman approaches, the same one older or another, I do not know. She takes my friend’s hand and draws her into the cool dark.

Joseph Conrad lies back on the big bed, his head monumental, his expression grave. He tells my friend: I have met the Irish every place I’ve been. Welcome, I am glad you came.

She sits on a wooden chest against the wall. The woman stands on the other side of the bed, before a draped window; perhaps she is two women. In the swell of whitish light it is hard to tell.

Joseph Conrad is lighting a cigar. I look at my feet. Cracked shoes, yellow painted boards. Why have I come? I belong to another century, a later one. Now I am here there is nothing to say.

He lies back on the pillows smoking his cigar. The head, monumental, the expression, grave.


+ + +


Perhaps it was not Joseph Conrad but someone else? No, this man was neither blind nor a librarian. He was a retired sea captain.

There was something I was trying to recall. A newspaper article about a hulk in Tasmania, once under the command of Joseph Conrad. Money was being sought to restore it.

The Otago … I began. He shook his head. No questions, he said. The details of my life are gathered like shards of a great mirror in which destiny will be revealed. It is not so. Nothing is revealed.

The cigar fumes were making my friend uncomfortable. She said to the woman: Could I have a glass of water please? The women took a hand each. Come with us, they said.

I was alone with Joseph Conrad. He drew on his cigar. Blue smoke layered the air, drifting toward the white window. The translucent drapes belled.

Oceans of paper, he said. Voyaging on. I lived at a time when kings were dying. We saw the ends of the earth. Contracted to a sphere. It was necessary to invent infinity.

I had not thought him contemporary with Einstein, Apollinaire. C’est vrai. He wrote letters in French, books in English. In what language did he think?

The man with the piano, I said. On the dock at Circular Quay. An Englishman. You spoke together for an hour. You were a young officer on a darkened deck. You never saw his face. His name was Senior.

The great head inclined forward once, acknowledging – what? That he had heard? Remembered? We return to every place we ever were, he said. Oceans of paper, voyaging on. It is necessary to invoke eternity.


+ + +


The globe is small. It stands on three plastic legs, on the dresser before the dusty window. Outside, paint peels from a yellow wall. The sky is radiant, blue as ink.

This is where we wake up. Sometimes it is dark, there are small brown stars we cannot name. Bats screeching in the avocado tree. Cats squalling in the laneway.

Here blood threads our flesh with longing. Here is where we leave from on our inland journeys. We go together, or alone. It has happened that we set out for different places, only to find each other there.

Other times we go nowhere. Comatose. Sunk in our bodies as into dank earth. Choking on flints, mumbling over bones, thirsting. Then water rises and we overflow, running into each other like underground rivers, sourceless springs.

How do I know this is her beside me? How do I know it is me? There is no chest here, only the dresser, the mirror, the racks of clothes. The bed where we lie dreaming or awake, mingled or apart. The globe.

I ask that the two women come forward as witnesses. In the works of Joseph Conrad you will not find them written, nor any mention of my friend, myself. Only Mr. Senior is real.

Leaning on a crate in the half-dark at the semi-circular quay he smokes a cigar and converses with a man he cannot see. Wide-ranging, far-reaching, their words drift out towards the stars.

We turn and turn. Sometimes we are one, sometimes two, sometimes many. Each night is an ocean. Waking, we find a shore, ochre and blue. We set out, maps in the palms of our hands.

the invention of mirrors

One of the weirdest things about Çatalhöyük may be the uniformity of the structures. The houses in the town of perhaps 8000 people were all more or less identical. Like cells in a hive perhaps. Or apartments in a contemporary apartment building. (As a point of comparison, a fare I had the other week told me that there are 8000 people working in 'his' building on George Street in the City.) The spatial arrangements were the same for every house. Entrances were always on the southern side, beside the kitchen area. The same domestic activites took place in the same areas of different houses. It has been suggested that people were restricted as to where they could actually be in this highly organised space - as they were, and in some case still are, so restricted in houses in Fiji and other parts of central Polynesia. Whether this formalised space was as oppressive as some think is perhaps a moot point. In purely physical terms, it may have been - many of the skeletons dis-interred there have carbon deposits in the chest cavity, apparently because of long term inhalation of smoke from the ovens, where animal dung and/or wood fires burned. The picture of this very large number of people packed in their family units into functionally identical houses in a vast walled compound is very strange. What sort of psychic world did they inhabit? Are those images of wild nature in their murals and sculptures nostalgic, propitiatory, celebratory, what? There were no streets in Çatalhöyük and no public buildings, or public spaces, have yet been uncovered - which may not mean that there were no communal activities, only that they took place outside the town. There is little evidence of violent death among the population and the walls of the town were not defensive fortifications, they were simply the external walls of the outermost houses. A far-ranging trade in obsidian was centred in that part of Anatolia and it's possible that the people of Çatalhöyük participated in this trade, though it isn't clear what they might have got in exchange for the volcanic glass. They certainly used it to make mirrors, which were sometimes buried with the women who, presumably, owned them. Men were more likely to have obsidian daggers in their graves. What are the implications of the invention of mirrors? Each in our cell, dreaming of a cell, in which another also lives; another just as we are; while in the next cell ...

more bull?

I probably shouldn't have been so hard on Balter's book, which I've now finished. It's not his fault that, despite our best efforts, no-one can figure out exactly what was going on in Anatolia nearly ten thousand years ago. It's hard enough to work out what's happening today. And there are nuggets of gold in amongst the inadvertance ... eg the people of Çatalhöyük, while they mostly ate domesticated sheep and goats, and the grains and legumes they cultivated quite some distance from the town they built among the marshes of a drying lake, had a special feeling for wild creatures and wild plants. They seem to have feasted ritually upon wild cattle, they enshrined the seeds of wild grasses in specially made pockets in the backs of goddess figurines. Even more fascinating, they apparently chose the site of their town not because of its proximity to cultivable fields or wild hunting grounds but because the raw material for the plaster they used on their floors and walls was bountiful in the lake bed. They - all 8000 of them - were obsessed with plaster and the reason for that may have been their linked obsession with the murals they painted onto the plastered walls of their houses and the sculptures they set into the floors and walls. And their art ... ? Like that of the great cave painters many millenia before in Western Europe, their subject matter was predominantly wild nature, especially wild animals, not fields of grain or flocks of herd animals. They also were in the habit of burning their houses before building new ones on top of the charred remain of the former dwelling, below the plastered floor of which lay their familiar dead. And, we learn, those plastered floors were swept meticulously clean at the end where the painted murals and sculpted skulls were; while at the other end, the living floors, where the ovens were and the ladders leading out onto the roofs - the only way they could enter and leave the house - were allowed to accumulate much more detritus. But why towns at all? One of the possible answers to this question is to rephrase it as another question: why houses? The house itself, the domus, some think, is the key: people stayed put because of their houses, and the domestication of plants and animals was subsequent to the (self) domestication of humans. Then again, why? Ian Hodder says: "It seems to me that this shift occurs through ritual, communal ritual ... at ... Göbekli Tepe in southeast Turkey ... enormous carved pillars (have been found) back around 9300 BC ... but ... there is no domestic architecture there ... you see similar things at Jericho in the Levant and Çanyönü in southeast Turkey, with its skull cult. The focus is on ceremonial ritual centres." The houses cluster around cathedrals, as it were. But at Çatalhöyük, 2000 years later, the church was in the house, or was the house. In the same way perhaps as it is for many of us today.

reaching natural

Many years ago, nearly forty, I was driving along Hakanoa Street in Huntly, where we lived at the time, in the front passenger seat of my mother's red and white Hillman Imp. I think it was after school, certainly afternoon. In what was obviously a pre-planned move, she pulled the car over to the side of the road, turned to me and said: "What's it going to be, a doctor or a lawyer?" To say I was gobsmacked doesn't answer the case. "Actually," I stammered, "I'm going to be an archaeologist." Of course I didn't, just as I didn't become a doctor or a lawyer; but I did investigate the option before deciding against it. Too boring, I decided. Too much hard yakka over minutiae. Not everyone, in fact hardly anyone, finds a Troy or a Çatalhöyük; furthermore, since the advent of processual archaeology in the 1970s and the post-processual archaeology that succeeded it, interpretation of the minutiae uncovered by archaeologists has itself become controversial if not actually proscribed. I've retained my interest in the subject, have continued to read widely, I'm still grappling with my own, perhaps idiosyncratic, explanations of how our distant ancestors lived, which is to say, how we came to be the way we are ... but I have to say it can still be hard yakka when it comes to the literature. This reflection is prompted by a book I bought recently, sight unseen, but with some excitement: 'The Goddess and the Bull' by Michael Balter. It purports to be a biography of the aforementioned Çatalhöyük, which has been of interest to me ever since I read James Mellaart's 'Ancient Civilizations of the Near East' not so very long after that epochal conversation with my mother. Indeed, she bought the book for me. Mellaart was a maverick, an enthusiast, a controversialist. By the time he came to excavate Çatalhöyük at the beginning of the 1960s, he had already dug, as it were, his own grave as far as working in Turkey was concerned. His involvement in the mysterious Dorak Affair ultimately meant that Çatalhöyük would be closed to him forever, and off limits to anyone else for thirty odd years. But in the early 1990s the site was re-opened and, under the direction of Ian Hodder, excavations have continued there for more than ten years now. And yet, in an index of how things have changed, in those ten years Hodder's team of a hundred specialists has excavated only a tiny fraction, not just of the mound itself, but of what Mellaart uncovered in less than half the time with a tenth of the people. And, somehow, no conclusions can yet be drawn from the meticulous forensics of this hundred-strong A team. Balter's book is full of brief, laudatory, mildly interesting bios of people on the site, of inadvertent impressionistic detail of their rather privileged lives, of 'dramatic' confrontations on the mound ... and reads not unlike a school magazine end of year report. Fine if you were there, if not, not. His account of the Dorak Affair, one of the main reasons I bought the book, is perfunctory and unconvincing, with no new information and several mis-readings of the excellent book written in the 1960s by two Sunday Times journalists. I can tell already, about three quarters of the way through, that 'The Goddess and the Bull' will end with a series of non-answers to resounding questions - like why and how people began living in cities at all? It is another case of a contemporary phenomenon, familiar from many other fields of inquiry, that the more facts you know, the less understanding you have. Science is perhaps a romance for those involved in it, but for those of us who are not it can seem like a massive, expensive, ultimately nugatory indulgence. At one point Balter writes: " ... archaeology is a destructive process. Excavating a Neolithic building means taking it apart piece by piece and layer by layer, until all that is left is the data on the archaeologist's recording sheet and the artifacts recovered ... the only way to get to the bottom levels is to take off the top ones." When you do that, when you do get to the bottom, you have, as they say, 'reached natural'. Where prehistory turns into geology perhaps. I know there are no incontrovertible answers to the big questions; but that doesn't seem to me a reason not to attempt answers. On the other hand, one of the truly unnerving images in Balter's book is that of goddess worshippers making their way past the labouring forensic diggers to join hands and dance on the top of the mound, in fealty to an ancient deity who, say the archaeologists, probably never existed. As if we were all, only differently, deluded.

Mohamed

Must be because of a profile I read recently in the press of Australian actor Arthur Dignam and his son that I've been thinking about Mohamed. Although I've never met Arthur, he and I were near neighbours for a while - he lived above a corner shop on Glebe Point Road while I rented a small flat in nearby Avona Avenue. It was on that corner I met Mohamed, who started talking to me one day, probably because my eyes were red like his from marijuana smoking, which I did a lot of in those days. I think I was also driving cabs at the time. Anyway, we struck up an acquaintance and he used to come and visit me at my flat sometimes. He was living - or rather, staying - with Arthur. He used to cook and clean and provide other services. Mohamed was a small time drug dealer, a hustler, perhaps a gigolo too. He was Gambian and his story was a strange one. One day, just a teenager, he'd jumped a ship, a freighter, visiting his home country and become a sailor. He'd jumped off this ship, or another, in Sydney some time later and then found himself unable to leave again. He was in fact stateless, without a passport or any other forms of identity which could have got him one. He had family in The Gambia but they weren't able to help him establish his nationality; and the Australian authorities seemed unsympathetic although far more tolerant than they are now, when he would probably be in a detention centre. Mohamed was an engaging soul, generous, cheerful, inclined only towards brief spells of melancholy at his singular fate. I never became his customer, but we used sometimes to share what we had with each other - marijuana mostly, occasionally ecstasy, and sometimes he would offer me unknown substances which I would usually, out of caution, refuse. He also liked to blow off steam, complaining about the things Arthur wanted him to do; but I think Arthur was kind to him too, giving him food and shelter and a place to sleep in return for those services. I have a couple of indelible memories of Mohamed: there was a small bone carving of a man, a Paul Klee like figure, which a friend brought back from Africa, the Congo I think, hanging on a nail just inside the door of my flat. Mohamed was looking at it one day when I remarked casually that I thought it might be carved from human bone. Mohamed, who was about to touch it with one finger, flew backwards in the air across the room as if recoiling from contact with a major electric current. Another time when he came around, a newspaper was lying open on the floor at a full page advertisement for women's lingerie with provocative, if somewhat smudgy, models showing it off. 'Oh, man,' said Mohamed, heartfelt. 'We going to die!' The last time I saw Mohamed was one day on Oxford Street. I was in a car - a taxi perhaps? - and he, resplendent in a somewhat disheveled white suit, with a white hat and white shoes, was walking along the pavement with a louche, sexy woman on either arm. He looked brilliantly happy, like King Alpha with two Queen Omegas. I say this because for some reason Mohamed's story always makes me think of the great song by the Melodians, Rivers of Babylon, which Boney M had a hit with in the 1980s was it? Anyway, the lyrics are in fact adapted from the Book of Psalms, #137 and #19:

By the rivers of Babylon,
Where we sat down,
And there we wept
When we remembered Zion.

Oh, the wicked carried us away in captivity,
Required from us a song,
How can we sing King Alpha's song
In a strange land?

So, let the words of our mouth
And the meditations of our heart
Be acceptable in Thy sight.
O Far I ...

As for Mohamed, that far I, I wonder where, or if, he is now?

Yeah / No

A few years ago a friend pointed out to me "that New Zealanders say 'Yeah / No'". As is the way with such things, having become aware of this language habit, I now notice it all the time. It's not confined to New Zealanders - Australians do it too. What does it mean? It doesn't signal outright disagreement so much as a kind of reflexive acknowledgment of the other's position - remark, statement, supposition, whatever - followed by an assertion of one's own version. If the 'yeah' is an agreement, the 'no' is almost an apology. One person might say: "I thought you guys were going away this weekend?" and the other reply: "Yeah, no, we are." Is this a simultaneous registration of the other's doubt that the weekend was going to happen, followed by a denial that this doubt is valid? It seems to be. And yet ... there's often something fugitive in this surely bizarre conjunction of the positive and the negative. The shades of meaning conveyed can feel contradictory and, at the same time, ineffable. Perhaps 'yeah / no' speaks from a deep layer of the antipodean psyche, so deep that ultimate clarification is problematic, even, perhaps, impossible. Yeah, no, I know what you mean.

the ole dream factory

One of my earliest memories returned in a dream last night. This memory is olfactory before all else, though it has texture, place and context as well. It is the smell of my father's sports coat, a mingling of tweedy cloth, tobacco smoke and his own incommunicable personal scent. I have my face buried in the roughness of his shoulder or chest, he must have picked me up in his arms. It's round the back of the house we lived in in Burns Street, Ohakune on some lost afternoon in the 1950s. I don't know this but I think I must have been running out to greet him when he returned home from the secondary school where he taught. There's the car garage, the old flatbed of a truck next to it, the almond tree, the overgrown crumbly asphalt of the disused tennis court. The day is fine and I am happy beyond words. In the dream we were walking away from all this into a kind of whiteness which was both Burns Street running out into scrubby, derelict farms, and the future. Nothing happened. Just this wonderful sense of his nearness and the aching familiarity of that smell. Don't know why this should have surfaced now. It's fifteen years since he died. But it might have something to do with the book I was reading before I went to sleep: "Innocents in Africa" by Drury Pifer. It's a memoir about growing up in South Africa in the 1930s and 1940s and there are aspects of his tender and beautiful evocations of family life in the midst of hellish deserts and even more hellish mines in those deserts, which do recall my 1950s childhood in a remote rural town in New Zealand. The landscapes are of course entirely different but something about the way the Pifers constructed a rich and satisfying life out of almost nothing is reminscent of my own parents' halcyon days in 'Kune. As are the dark shadows of impending dissolution Pifer conjures from hindsight - he wrote the book as a sixty year old living in Delaware and this copy was published by Granta Books in the mid 1990s. It is a lovely read and if the book was what triggered this early memory - which I have been half aware of for a long time without ever quite clarifying - then I am grateful for that too. Even though there is an almost unbearable melancholy that comes along with it.

neighbours

It's a while since I lived in a densely populated part of a large city. Not that Summer Hill is that crowded, in fact to the casual eye it looks like a fairly quiet suburban neighbourhood. A few terraces, a few federation houses, the odd mansion and lots of apartment buildings. I live in one of these, with similar, older buildings on either side. I have the ground floor flat at the front, facing the street. There's six flats in the building, three up and three down. The ones on either side have four each I think, though I could be wrong about that. You get to know people by sight and there's a few I say hello to or stop and chat with. There are oddities - a couple of times when I've been up early I've seen a big white fluffy rabbit that seems to live around the back of the building opposite, nosing around on the front lawn by the dahlias. The other thing that happens is that you hear a lot of what goes on in other peoples' lives without necessarily knowing who it is you are hearing. Two examples. In the next door building on the right lives the Coughing Man. I have no idea who he is, have never seen anyone I could match to the extraordinary sounds that come from over there every morning, as he clears his passages in the aftermath of another day of what sounds like a lifetime of heavy smoking. And then, on the other side, there are The Lovers. Again I have no idea who these two are. They may be Chinese but I don't know why I think that. I believe the half grown handsome black cat who comes over sometimes is theirs; I hear a woman's voice in the evening calling Simba! Siiiimba! This is generally after they have done their washing up. I guess she's calling him in for the night. I hear their TV. Sometimes I hear him talking to her in a low voice, too low to make out the words. Whatever he is saying makes her laugh helplessly. Their bedroom is all red, not sure why, whether it's red curtains or a red light. I don't look that closely. My bedroom faces out towards their flat and sometimes, usually quite late, I wake up to the sound of their love-making. They're not really loud. I never hear him at all, I just hear her. It is the sound of a woman being exquisitely pleasured. It goes on for a long time. I like to sleep with the window open, for the fresh air, and I know that if I close it I won't hear her anymore. On the other hand, closing it makes quite a loud noise and I wouldn't like them to hear it and think they are annoying me. So I don't. Usually I tune out and drop back off to sleep before they finish. I'm not sure what to think about it. It feels illicit, being privy to such private moments between strangers. But it's sweet too. Much better than over-hearing a fight or an argument. I guess my main feeling is that I don't want to disturb them. I don't want them to know I can hear them because it might make them feel self-conscious or shy. I'm just in this weird position, an anonymous sometime witness to their transports of delight.

answering the door

The police knocked on my door last night - well, I think it was them. I was sleeping in the sitting room on the sofa bed because my younger son Liamh was staying and he was tired and went to bed early in my room. I'd fallen into a deep sleep so that when the rat-tat-tat on the door sounded, it seemed part of some other world, not even my dream world. Kept on happening. Attention must be paid. I rolled over and realised it was my door being knocked upon. There's two doors to this flat, one that leads out into the front garden, which is where I come and go, and another, always locked, that comes off the hallway where the official entrance to the building is. They were rapping on the official door. Oh, god, I thought, where's the key? Now they changed from knocking on the wood to banging the metal knocker that's there. It sounded much more urgent. Where was my dressing gown? In the room where Liamh was. He hadn't woken yet, which suggested he wasn't going to. Okay. Maybe I would get up to see who it was. It was on the third rap-rap-rap on the knocker that they said: "Police ..." They always drop their voices to the lowest register when they say that - I don't know why. "Police ..." comes out gravelly and low, like a warning: irony free zone impending. Fuck it, I thought, I'm not getting up for the police. Doesn't sound like they're here for me. Doesn't feel like they're going to break the door down. And anyway I haven't done anything wrong. Or at least nothing chargeable. Course I did get up, did get my dressing gown, did pace around the flat with my heart hammering, feeling furtive and guilty as hell. No longer secure in my own place, one of the usual suspects, a miscreant or a fugitive. Didn't dare turn on a light. Heard them through the bathroom window saying something to someone about a radio. That was when they were walking away. Their car started up and off they went. Now of course I'm consumed by curiosity. What did they want? What was happening? Wha ... ? I asked my next door neighbour but she slept through the whole thing. The Chinese across the hall? Seems unlikely it was to do with them. Liamh didn't hear anything either, though he was entertained by the tale. Damn! Wish I'd answered the door. Wish I knew ...

Hawthorne Canal

Today there was that first faint chill in the air cold climate people wait for. A cool wind whipping horse tails in the otherwise clear sky. A mix of nostalgia for winters past, anticipation for the one to come. Benign, anyway, in the temperate zone. It was also Clean-Up Australia Day. Remote from community affairs, I did not realise this until I watched the evening news on TV. Oh well. Went for a walk in the afternoon, seeking the sea in this inland suburb. North, I thought. The Dog Park I'd heard about. There's a canal running through Summer Hill, it marks the border between the Leichhardt and Ashfield municipalities. Once it would have been a stream but that's more than a hundred years ago by the look of the sandstock blocks with which parts of the canal are lined. Those neglected areas of a metropolis which belong to no-one but the graffitists. That are not real estate. In parts even the tree trunks are tagged. Coming out by the canal I caught the river scent that is so much a part of my childhood. There's no cleaner smell than clear running water, even when it's only a trickle in a concrete drain. Three sacred ibis were investigating the riverine wildlife. Schools of tiny transparent fish. Blue iridescent flash of a kingfisher's wing. Then startling green weed at what I took to be the intermingling of the fresh water and the salt. Two black teal beating up stream. A white-faced heron only feet away, pooling in the shallows. I ended up in a depot of some kind: old bricks, sandstone blocks, newly sawn timber, bark mulch, a disused bridge. Had to climb a hurricane wire fence to get into the Dog Park. Barefoot all the way to the bay without once stepping in the shit. There was the sea smell. Leaning over the side of the bridge leading back to the People Park I saw strange creatures moving through the khaki water of that arm of the Parramatta River which, by now, was surely all salt. Medusas. They looked like uprooted brownish-grey mushrooms the size of a fat-headed man's head, with a stem trailing stumpy limbs and a kind of grilled or gridded cauliflower membrane that expanded and contracted rhythmically as they moved upstream. Images from the Bridget Riley show I saw yesterday at the MCA came to mind ... the Rileys gave me a headache as well as a dangerous sense of the instability of my perceptual world, but these medusas, though grotesque, were calm. There were plovers in the People Park. The tide was creeping up the canal. I saw toadfish in the shallows, more schools of the tiny transparents and then, splash! a big fish jumping. Don't know what they were - mullet perhaps. There were lots of them, heading downstream to greet the incoming tide, undulating in slow waves from side to side in the canal waters, black from above but sometimes showing a startling silver flank. At the vivid green bit where salt and fresh mingled, the smaller medusas which had made it this far were a delicate lavender colour. Another flash of kingfisher wing, then another. I saw it perching in the branch of a tree, the dusty ochre colour they have on their breast. The nightsweet, which has nearly finished where I live, was here still covered with tubular yellow flowers. I imagine the heavy scent on the air now darkness has fallen and only the graffitists are out, inscribing that almost wilderness with their arcana.

The Undead

The other night I went with my neice to see Werner Herzog's 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre, a remake of F.W.Murnau's 1921 classic Nosferatu. It's a long time since I saw a Herzog film and I didn't know quite how I would go with it. The professionally and constitutionally dispeptic film writer John Walker's summary in the 1995 Halliwell's was not encouraging: 'Excruciatingly slow retread of the German silent film' he wrote. Yes, it is slow. Excruciatingly? No, I didn't think so. Camilla, who is 23, did. She also found it funny. And it is. But for me it was ... totally absorbing. Some of the time I was thinking about how it was made - the rats that invade the European city once the Count has arrived were a strange and changeable colour, because they were white Hungarian laboratory rats that had each been painted grey; the city also changed because the good people of Delft, where most of the European scenes were shot, would not allow even a limited release of re-painted lab rats on their clean streets and so the production had to move to Schiedam for those bits; the colour, as Walker does not fail to point out, is 'quite dreadful' at times. But ... as drama? Extraordinary. It probably does not surpass Murnau's version for sheer creepiness and starkness of image; on the other hand, there is nearly sixty years of European history between the two films and that counts. The film is about the contagion of history. And the tragedy that our shared dream of immortality has become. And the doomed eroticism that seems sometimes to be our one consolation, however inconsolable we may be. The slowness was like a bath. You could sink into the images because they lingered so long on the screen, as long as Isabelle Ardjani's white neck and dark hair, say, or Klaus Kinksi's immortal loneliness or even the foolishness of Bruno Ganz, the innocent who brings the plague back yet again. The ship motionless upon the ocean with its dusky, dried blood red sails and dead captain lashed to the wheel. The processional of coffins into the great empty square of the city. The shadows ... 1979 was when the governments of the Us and the Uk moved nuclear armed Persching and cruise missiles into Germany, a major play in the endgame of the Cold War. Where are those warheads now? Somewhere. At the end of the film, when Klaus is dead, having stayed too long in Isabelle's bed, and Isabelle is dead too, thinking she has prevailed, and her lover Bruno has become Klaus' avatar and is galloping across what look like salt pans or perhaps the deserts of Iraq with 'so much still to do', is chilling: there is a world out there that is yet to be infected with evil but he will do what he can. Which will be everything. Anyway. We walked away into the warm night apparently not much affected by what we had seen. Told stories about funny t shirts we had seen coming down the street. I kept thinking about the Gypsies who warn Bruno against going up to the Castle: their absolute knowledge that evil is there and can be awakened, along with their absolute refusal to do so. And, I guess, their forbearance, their stamina, once, yet again, it has been.

Luca goes to London (& Adelaide

Luca Antara (the book) is going to the London Book Fair, which this year is concentrating on work from the Antipodes. Also to Adelaide, where it will be read by a new publisher who thus far seem mostly to have done books on food and wine, along with Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton's autobiography 'Through My Eyes'. They are publishing a book on early Portuguese voyages to Australia, which is how the Luca connection came about. For the London package, my agent asked for a Content's page to go along with the cv, synopsis, excerpt and so forth. I don't usually like representing a whole with a part, but I enjoyed doing the Contents page in the manner of 19th century explorers' books - not a too far-fetched analogy. Here it is, as a teaser (it's just the words):

CONTENTS

I : Castaway

Antiquarian Books – Taxi Driving – The Ern Malley Affair – Fernando Pessoa – Simon & Margit – the QVB – the Marquesas – Jean Cabri – Pekio? – the Russian American Company – the Hordern Building – Leroy, Lautréamont & the Ville d’Orleans – Rouault & McCahon – Demolition

II : Salvation

The Cova da Iria Apparitions – Johnny Bear – Ricardo Reis at Fátima – Womerah Lane – the Third Secret Revealed – Elle – the Heroin Weddings – Essay on Poetry – the Wreck of the Batavia – Gnosticism – Houtmans Abrolhos – Heironymo & Lucretia – Jimmy Bonus – a Stranding – Convicts – Ventriloquism

III : Voyage

Pearl Beach – Portuguese Ventures – Manoel Godinho de Eredia – the MBRAS – Henry Klang – the Voyage of António da Nova – Mataram – Waingapu – the Timor Sea – Kaju Djawa – Marege – Estrela, the Degredado’s Daughter – the Aru Islands – Tanimbar – Malacca – Aftermath

IV : Return

Across Australia – Kuala Lumpur – Melaka – Museums – Henry Klang again – the Ray Bradbury Experience – MBRAS again – Ubud – the Wallace Line – Lombok – Sumbawa by Night – Labuanbajo – Mirror Cave – Rinca – Darwin – Da Nova’s Boat – Sydney – the Drowned Continent of Sundaland


... would you want to read a book like this?

i.m. HST

but it is truly the West
as no other place,
ruined by an ambition and religion
cut, by a cowboy use of her nearly virgin self

unannealed
by a real placement
this,

this
is the birthplace
of Mr. Pound
and Hemingway in his own mouth
chose to put a shotgun.


Edward Dorn: Idaho Out

sisters of mercy

Sometimes on Sundays I like to go for a walk. Who doesn't? I find my walks tend towards the east, I often visit Petersham Oval in the hope that there will be a cricket match going on and I can watch a few overs. On the way to the Oval you go past the Australian HQ of the Sisters of Mercy, which I find comforting too; it recalls the Leonard Cohen song, singing on in my head for a few hours afterwards. There's a Primary School with white marble statues of saints lining the asphelt pathways, a 19th century sandstock church with the stones blackened by soot from, probably, the railway line only about a hundred metres away, quiet green lawns where no-one walks under the eucalypt trees. Going up that way last Sunday I found a throwout, as they are called here: a line of things someone didn't want any more neatly arranged on the footpath. Naturally I stopped and looked: some crockery, some books, a brand new kettle still in its box, a whole range of differently flavoured skin conditioners, a few children's toys ... melancholy remainders of a shared life? Or just surplus from someone who had too much? Or not enough? I sorted through the box of books and chose two of them. One, a novel, is by Irish writer Michael Collins who is both a relative of the famous political figure and a world class extreme sportsman: he has run and won marathons in the Antarctic and on the Himalaya. He writes a good thriller too. This one is called The Keepers of Truth and is set out on the Great Plains of America at the dawn of the Reagan Era. The other, a Picador from 1975 with browning pages, was The New Journalism, edited by Tom Wolfe and E.W. Johnson. I've read some of the books from which selections have been made for the anthology but I hadn't come across the anthology itself before. Course I sat down and read the introduction first: why would I not, since the perhaps problematic relationship between fiction and non has been interesting me lately. I'm not going to write an essay on Tom Wolfe here. I'm not going to say much at all, except that, at a certain point last night, I started wondering who he was? Was he the same guy who wrote The Bonfire of the Vanities? was my question. Even though I knew he was, I had to go on the Net to find out for sure - and there was an article about what George Bush is reading these days. The point of the article was that, not on Dubya's official reading list but, according to the cognoscenti, on his bedside table anyway, is Tom Wolfe's latest, I am Charlotte Simmons. Tom supported George's re-election, by the way - as surprising (not) as the news that British novelist Ian McEwan thinks Tony Blair might be doing the right thing in Iraq. The placement - of the article, of the book on the bedside table, of the news that Dubya reads - was impeccable. I went back to Tom Wolfe's intro with new eyes. It is an immaculate act of self-promotion. It is a kind of virgin birth of himself. His later career as the Balzac or Dickens of late 20th century and early 21st century America is prefigured here. His disastrous relationship with the movies, likewise. His politics ... are nowhere evident. You could assume he was as cynical as Daniel Defoe. In fact it is Defoe who comes most strongly to mind. The Defoe sketched in Diana Souhami's Selkirk's Island, the writer and poltical advisor who did whatever he needed to do to keep the wheels of commerce turning. The Defoe who was a friend of William Dampier, whose fate is so strangely entwined with that of Alexander Selkirk. The Defoe of whom Virginia Woolf wrote: There are no sunsets and no sunrises; there is no solitude and no soul. There is, on the contrary, staring us full in the face, nothing but a large earthenware pot.

austral asia

Don't know how many times I've flown across the Tasman Sea ... only that it's either an odd or an even number. I should be able to work out which, since I started in New Zealand way back in 1981 and, inevitably, like now, end up here. Odd how certain things recur. I remember how determined I was, when I left New Zealand the first time, not to come to Australia ... I went the other way, to California, New York, London, Amsterdam; then back the same way some years later to Auckland. From thence to here, because I had to get out and could not then afford the northern hemisphere. There is a certain inevitablility about Australia for New Zealanders and I wasn't expecting much that rainy May day 25 years or so ago ... it was the sheer geniality of the people at the airport that struck me first, so unlike the buttoned down puritanism of New Zealand officialdom. The way they cracked jokes at you, or, if they didn't actually crack them, looked as if they might any moment. That pervasive irony, always squinting into the gap between what's meant to be and what is. New Zealanders have that quality too, in spades, but they don't bring it out for official inspection much. This time was like a strange repeat of that first trip. I was stung at Auckland Airport for an incredible sum of money for excess baggage; first time that's ever happened to me though I don't believe it's the first time I've travelled heavy. I could tell from the check-in clerk that this was new; she was embarrassed and would have liked to have helped but was unable, as they used to be, to wink and let you through. There was a queue at the excess baggage counter, which I haven't seen before either. And this was about 6.30 am. The guy was full of false bonhommie, pretending it wasn't the rort that it was. I paid with as much good grace as I could and continued on. Sydney airport was hellish, queues everywhere but ... different. I was carrying electronic goods, a cd and a dvd player which, while neither new nor expensive, could have attracted interest or even duty. Some Aussie at the security end of things, where your luggage was x-rayed, gave me one of those looks and said "Just walk down there, mate." There was the concourse into the terminal; I was free. Later on, waiting for a taxi, in another queue, the guy behind me, a Slav of some kind probably, and a family man with a wife and a couple of kids, became irate at the senselessness of the procedure, which required us to shuffle slowly along in full view of literally hundreds of empty taxis while we waited our turn, and they waited theirs. My cabbie had been there half an hour, just as I had; you used to be able to walk out and get into the first one in a line at the cerbside. Anyway, this Slav guy started ranting: at the despatcher at the head of the queue, who was a young Polynesian boy of 18 or so in a uniform. The Slav yelled and waved his arms; the Polynesian smiled serenely and took no notice whatsoever; the rest of the people waiting took sides, mostly with the Slav. It was serious but it was also somehow comical; and therefore fun. Everyone felt better, blowing off a bit of steam. And this wouldn't have happened in New Zealand. In New Zealand people would have complained to each other, or sighed, or fumed, or simply suffered in silence; no-one would have dared take the stage, as it were, and say what everyone was feeling. In many ways Australia is harsher, crueller, more disillusioned and disillusioning than New Zealand; but it isn't more repressed. And that's something I can't help but like about it.

last rites

Here I am sitting in Room 522 in the Arts Building on the City Campus of the University of Auckland. I've packed everything up, taken the bits and pieces off the wall, recycled the waste paper, dusted down most of the surfaces, deleted all the emails, copied my documents to CDW ... an impulse to erase all casual traces of my fellowship here, which ends with the month. Yesterday I gave a copy of the manuscript of Luca Antara to Special Collections at the University Library, along with the Report I had to write for the Departmental Files. The Librarian suggested we embargo the ms until it's published. Then the question: what if it doesn't get published? I didn't want to go there.

All endings are melancholy, I guess, though perhaps for different reasons. I know I will miss the fortnightly paychecks but then I always knew they would cease when the year ended. I don't think I'll miss the physical space much, though I did like the separation of workplace and living place which I've enjoyed only intermittently over the years. The friends I have here, and the friends I've made, will, I trust, stay friends. The City of Auckland ... I don't know. It's a town of ghosts to me, I heard myself saying to someone last night. That's, I don't know, sometimes true.

Over the weekend I went up to stay at a friend's holiday place in Mangawhai, a couple of hours north of here. We went fishing out by the Hen and Chickens one day, with a conspicuous lack of success; to the beach another day; I had my first swim since dipping in the Flores Sea back in November. I was worried about my ears, which have still not unblocked, but, if anything, the swim seems to have helped. The milky aqua sea, the jagged profile of the Hen offshore, the faded red of the last flowering of the pohutukawas on the white-grey sand ... such a familiar landscape.

On the way up we had a look at Puhoi, a little village off the main road which was settled by some Bohemians in the 19th century: Catholic farmers from central Europe, not artie wastrels from big cities. I lived near there for the best part of the year 1973, in a house in Pukapuka Road. We went and looked at that too. It's still standing, renovated, the residence of people with a boutique farm growing, among other things, olive trees. When I knew it, it was a small tumbledown wooden cottage in amongst swampy paddocks where farm animals grazed and arum lilies grew in a profusion I've not seen since.

My Report on the Fellowship suggests that I might write an account of my year here as a way back into those early 1970s years I spent as a student, an artie wastrel, an inept rural labourer, which culminated in that fairly disastrous sojourn in Pukapuka Road. But now I don't know. Do I want to revive those ghosts? For what reason? To lay them once and for all? Perhaps it's better just to shut the door on all that and go looking for something more prospective? These are questions I can't answer now, I'll just have to put them aside until they either lose their force or demand answers.

Now to expunge the last traces of my presence here ...

a note on the above (below)

"From Sind to Sunda" is a proverb I use in Luca Antara, it means spanning the known world. 'Sind' is said to have been a word for 'sea' and the origin of the name India; present day Sind is a province of Pakistan in the Indus Valley. Sunda, likewise of unknown provenance, is an old name for a kingdom in eastern Java. The drowned peninsular of Sundaland was twice the size of India in its heyday; it must indeed have seemed that around these two poles the whole world did revolve. I sometimes wonder if the now popular way of spelling Sindbad with a 'd' has a relationship with Sind ... quite possibly, since the voyages of Sindbad tell the story of the Arab - or perhaps earlier - exploration of the Indian Ocean. It is interesting also to note that the very first utopia we have a record of, written by the Greek Euhemerus circa 316 BCE, is about an imaginary voyage to uncharted islands in the Indian Ocean. From Sind to Sunda ... It is perplexing to me now where this proverb came from. I no longer know if it popped up somewhere in the reading I did in and around the writing of Luca Antara; or whether it is something I invented. But then, most of the book is like that: an inquiry into the precise status of the 'non' in non-fiction perhaps.

from Sind to Sunda

I sent the manuscript of the (perhaps) book from which the title of this weblog is derived to my agent today. Now I don't know what to think. Most of what I have posted here, however disparate, has had some kind of connection to this book, which predates the weblog by some months or even years. I do remember how it came about. I had written an essay, called "Fenua Imi, the Pacific in History and Imaginary", for Alan Brunton's imprint, Bumper Books. It was the last thing Bumper published while he lived. In the interim between its publication and his untimely death in June, 2002, we were tossing ideas back and forth for another essay, one which might give his New Zealand based imprint greater access into the Australian market. I suggested, perhaps naively, that I could follow up "Fenua Imi" with a book about the Indian Ocean ... unaware at the time how vast that subject is, how much human history is (literally) submerged there. Anyway, after that project was unavoidably curtailed, I could not get the ocean out of my mind. It was my attempt to grapple with the histories of the seas lying to the west and north of Australia which led me in to the writing of Luca Antara, the (perhaps) book. In fact it does no more than toe-dip into those, to us, western seas. The first part of it ventures from Sydney out into the eastern Pacific and then follows late 18th and early 19th century trails back to Europe. Part two is largely set on the coast of Western Australia. Part three goes up into Southeast Asia, but only to describe a 17th century voyage from there to here. The last part is a description of my travels in those countries of Southeast Asia where the (perhaps) voyage originated. None of these distant locations is exclusive, in that all sections of the book are narrated from a point of view anchored, if that is the word, on the east coast of Australia: Sydney and environs. Now I don't know what to think. There is a tsunami in Luca Antara, one of the images in the book is an evocation of the catastrophe that drowned Sundaland circa 8000 BC. Not much is made of it, in that it doesn't occupy much space in the text, but to me it is central. This is why the event of 26 December 2004 seems so strangely like a memory ... but is it a memory of the future or the past? Or a present memory? Or immemorial? Or memorial? I don't know ... what to think?

from ... the Aitreya Brahmanan of the Rig Veda

There is no happiness for he who does not travel, Rohita! Thus we have heard. Living in the society of man, the best man becomes a sinner ... Therefore, wander!

The feet of the wanderer are like the flowers, his soul is growing and reaping the fruit; and all his sins are destroyed by his fatigues in wandering. Therefore, wander!

The fortune of him who is sitting, sits; it rises when he rises; it sleeps when he sleeps; it moves when he moves. Therefore, wander!


quoted in Anita Desai's JOURNEY TO ITHACA, p 196

Gate of Grief

The recent tsunami in the Indian Ocean is the latest in a series of catastrophic events in that part of the world, most of which have disappeared from human memory. One of the oldest in our experience is the Toba Explosion, a volcanic eruption in northern Sumatra circa 74,000 years ago. This was the largest event of its kind in the last two million years, causing a six year long nuclear winter and covering India, Pakistan and the Gulf in layers of ash up to five metres deep. A one thousand year long mini-ice age followed. At this time modern humans were already on their way south and east from Africa; many must have been wiped out by the event; the survivors may have numbered as few as ten thousand. In a book published a few years ago now, called Eden in the East: the Drowned Continent of South East Asia, British pediatrician Stephen Oppenheimer reconstructs another catastrophe, this one at the end of the last Ice Age perhaps 8ooo years ago, when melting ice caused a series of tsunami-type events which inundated most of the low-lying land areas in what is now the South China Sea. He traces myths of the Flood back to these tidal waves and speculates that refugees from a civilization flourishing in old Sundaland carried both knowledge and stories out of the east into the Indus Valley and the Fertile Crescent. Oppenheimer's latest book is called Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World; it reconstructs the movement of modern humans out of Africa and into the rest of the world, using genetic keys on the one hand and climatic evidence on the other. There were, he suggests, only two ways out of Africa, a northern route across the head of the Red Sea into the Levant, only available during the brief warmings known as interglacials; and a southern route at the other end of the same sea, crossing from Eritrea into Yemen at the Bab al-Mandab or Gate of Grief. It is this path, he concludes, which was not closed during glacials, that our ancestors took in a single migration some 85,000 years ago. One of the curious facts derived from his synthesis is that all modern humans with the exception of Africans are derived from those same intrepid ancestors who came through the Gate of Grief; and that, further, those populations we now know as European originated in South Asia, perhaps even as far south as Sri Lanka. Oppenheimer's work, which is well-informed, readable and highly civilized in itself, confirms Africa's place as the crucible of humanity as well as restoring Asia as our second home, as it were, the place from which we radiated out to populate the rest of the world. The Gate of Grief is so called because of the many shoals and reefs which exist in the narrows at that closest point between Africa and Arabia; but we can hardly fail to hear in the words the cries of all humans faced with the calamities of tectonics, climate and weather.

letting go

The next time I went down into the laundry the moth had died. Those ragged bits on its wingtips a sign of decay. Did she lay eggs in my papers before she fell? The things I will uplift sometime soon and take to the new place might have a few secrets concealed in them; or they might just be dross. I'll have a look when they arrive. When I arrive. New glasses, I have new glasses too, as well as a new place to live. The government remains the same. And the book is written, all four hundred pages of it. 105,000 words, many of which are not different from one another, the same words in different orders, or with different neighbours. It will have to be revised now, that process of shaping which I love so much, which is so unlike the drafting process: as if you had chosen to climb a particularly steep hill which, in the end, you only managed to reach the top of through sheer bloody-mindedness, discarding clothes, oaths, graces, style along the way. The vista is your brief reward as you survey the domain of your wanderings, seen all at once and only once as a whole; followed by the long, contemplative stroll back the way you came, picking this up, leaving that behind, moving something else somewhere else. Until you arrive back at the beginning again. And then ... let it go.

Twice Travelled Trip

I've been back two weeks from my jaunt through south east Asia. Somewhat steadier on my feet than I was, though I still can't unblock my ears. This was no pleasure trip ... this was work: I was looking for the concluding section of the book I've been writing this year, which has the same (working) title as this weblog. Strange thing to do, in a way, since I deliberately made minimal preparations and so had very little idea what I might encounter. I did however have a mental checklist of things I hoped I might find, questions I might be able to answer, places I might get to see. From that point of view it was a success; from the serendipitous point of view too: there was enough of the unexpected, the bizarre and the moving to keep me interested, nay, fascinated. Now I'm writing it all down, or all that I think is worth relating, mentally travelling again the route I took physically just a short time ago. And yet it all seems oddly distant, as if it happened in another time from that I live in now.

The coincidence which pleased me most was the announcement of the discovery of little people on Flores just as I was about to go there: a friend emailed me in Bali with the news. But the counter-chorus of sceptics has already begun. An eminent Indonesian archaeologist is quoted in today's paper as saying he believes the skeletons may be those of modern humans. Well, they could be; Adam, the anthropologist I met on the flight from Labuanbajo to Denpasar, hinted as much when he said the local people in that part of Flores are also very small. It is peculiar though, the way 'science', which has spent so long insisting upon the irrationality of world-wide beliefs in little people, is so quick to claim credit for their (re)discovery when it happens. Why didn't they believe us? Because there was no proof, of course. But ... proof? What is that?

Carpet Moths

Earlier today I went down to the laundry under the house to put a load of washing on and noticed, clinging to the door jamb, a big triangular carpet moth with intricate patterns on its wings, including a deep red central spot either side. Nothing unusual there ... except this: I first noticed one of these moths at a flat I moved into in Glebe in 1983; it was on a painting a friend had given me which was hanging in my study. What is unusual is that, every year about this time, at every one of the many places I have lived in the twenty odd years since then, one of these moths has appeared, as if, somehow, I carry the seed of it with me as I go. Does it live in my luggage? My papers? My soul? I am about to move again although I do not yet know where to: will the moth, or its descendants, accompany me there? I'm not exactly sure why, but I hope so.

A Town Called Alas

On Sumbawa there is a town called Alas. We passed through it in the dead of night, the night before the US election, the night of November the 1st, as it was in that part of the world. Everyone was awake, all the lights were on, the greeny-blue, low wattage lights they use in that part of the world. Every house had a TV set on also, brighter than the lights in the room, showing soap operas, dreamy laid-back music videos, advertisements for things the people watching or not watching would never be able to buy, interspersed with Muslim hymns and sermons and rants. The people were awake not because of the US election but because it was Ramadam and they had spent the day fasting and sleeping or fasting and working and were now spending the night eating and talking or not eating and not talking. All the young men with nowhere to go and nothing to do, sitting outside watching the traffic (except there is no traffic apart from the occasional bus like ours roaring through the night), playing guitars, or chess, talking and not talking, waiting. For what? Alas, like every other town we passed on that strange hot night, under the yellow moon, a gibbous moon, was a town of hovels with, every now and then, a splendid, no, resplendent mosque, where the light was not that subaqueous greeny-blue but bright white, a tiled, clean, well-lighted place where white-robed men and women sat and talked or didn't talk, sang or did not sing, with, in almost every case, a white curtain made of sheets pinned or sewn together slung across the space to separate, I thought, the men from the women or perhaps the children from the adults ... the hovels explained the mosques, or the mosques explained the hovels, I couldn't decide which it was, but in that part of the world it is understood that a mosque will be made available if there are ten believers who want one, and some towns, the larger ones, really do seem to have a mosque for every ten hovels. But not Alas. Alas was just a small town, a few hovels, one mosque, and still that crowd of young men sitting outside on the stoops in the hot night with or without their guitars, waiting. Small children, dressed in rags, ran after the bus as we passed down the dusty single main street of Alas, yelling out in shrill high voices, boys and girls but mostly boys, dropping behind as we turned the corner and changed down and headed further east, where the road ran out of town and along a low shore with palms and the shadows of islands further out, behind which the yellow moon, the swollen moon, rose up in the brown sky. Alas.

On Flores

Coincidentally, I was on my way to Flores when the announcement was made of the hominid remains, called Homo floresiensis, found at Liang Bua. There's, of course, a heap of information out there on the web about this, but I have a few things to add which come from local knowledge, or local gossip. The site is near Ruteng, a town in western Flores, about four or five hours by bus from where I stayed at Labuanbajo, on the extreme western end of the island. I didn't make the pilgrimage to Liang Bua because I couldn't face another bus journey, having already crossed Lombok and Sumbawa in this manner in the previous few days; besides, I didn't find out where the site was until I was leaving the island, by plane - the man sitting next to me, Adam, who was from Ruteng, told me.

However, while at Labuanbajo, I did visit another cave where, the guide, Sebastian, told me a Dutch pastor by the name of van Houven had unearthed a human skeleton in 1945; this, too, was of a small person and these remains are now in the museum at Maumere on Flores. This cave affected me strangely. We climbed down into it by ladder then crawled through a passage in the limestone, past great thick stalagmites and stalagtites, into a vast interior space, quite dark, yet pierced from above by the roots of banyan trees running down the walls and across the floor like electrical cables or water pipes. As I stood up in here, breathing the dry, faintly ammoniac air, I felt a strange dizziness or vertigo. There was a deep humming sound resonating through the cavern, from the bees which made their hives high up on the rocks in the blinding sunlight outside. Where did they find the human? I asked Sebastian. Just there, he said, pointing to a nearby rock floor. Later he showed me a complete turtle, fossilised, upside down, in the roof of the next cave; and a fish, likewise turned to stone, in a wall.

According to Adam, a trained anthropologist, van Houven had also worked at Liang Bua ... but I have not yet been able to find out more about this man who was, incidentally, a Catholic not a protestant, because the Dutch sent only Catholics to Flores, where Portuguese Dominicans had been before, while reserving nearby Sumba and western Timor for the protestants. Adam also told me that the local Manggarai people who live in villages near the site of the find are renowned for their tiny stature. How big? I asked. He held his hand out into the aisle of the plane, about a metre and half from the floor. There was a sense in his conversation of, not exactly scepticism, but rather a kind of amusement that the whole world was talking of something that he and others already knew a bit about. I asked him if he'd heard that the Dutch in the 17th century gathered reports of little people living on Flores, which they dismissed as folktales. He smiled. The Dutch, he explained, did not really come to rule Flores until the early 20th century.

The traditional houses of the Manggarai people are conical and arranged in concentric circles around a round, walled, sacrificial arena. Their rice paddies, too, are round, divided up in sections like a spider's web, with each clan receiving a slice - amazing to look at. They wear black sarongs, breed droopy stomached black-haired pigs and beautiful miniature horses. Two brothers, they say, came out of the west to found their kingdoms; their original houses have turned to stone. In a Manggarai village two houses face the altar stone: the one on the right is the Mbaru Gendrang, the chief’s, all ceremonies begin here, and here the open-ended gendrang drums are hung; the one opposite is the Mbaru Tambur, where the two skinned tambur drums are hung. Here ceremonies end.

Q

Have recently finished reading Q by Luther Blissett. Except, as is pointed out early on, Luther Blissett, a soccer player, had nothing to do with the writing of the book, which was actually done by four anonymous Italian men from Bologna. Q begins 'out of Europe' in 1555, with the (also anonymous) protagonist reading a notebook which he has somehow acquired. How this notebook came into his hands might be one way of describing the story, which begins in Wittenburg in 1518, just after Luther had made his move, and whose action proper starts with the crushing of the Peasant's Revolt at Frankenhausen in May, 1525 - an action which, according to W. G. Sebald, so distressed the painter Grunewald that he covered his face with a cloth and refused to leave his house for two years. The second part of the book concerns the Anabaptist takeover of Munster and its proclamation as a free city in the 1530s; and the terrible events which followed, as Jan of Leyden became intoxicated with power and, later, the city fell, with much slaughter and many reprisals. The third part of the book takes place mostly in northern Italy and deals with the intrigues around the Papal Court as opposing factions seek the ascendancy, and the next Papacy. 'Gert from the Well' to give the hero his most used name, is a radical free-thinker, a common man, uncommonly resourceful, not a fantatic, a kind of everyman; his opponent, Q, or Qoelet, or 'Carafa's Eye', another German, is a Papal spy who has worked under cover to compromise and destroy the various radical Protestent experiments; the two, who are known to each other, but do not 'know' each other, conduct a pas-de-deux over a period of thirty odd years, which culminates in Venice in the 1550s. Wonderful book, written in a series of cinematic grabs of action, on the one hand, and a series of letters, on the other, to give you a succint, vivid and always humane account of the period.

It is followed by a series of illustrations, maps, portraits, beneath one of which (a map of central Europe at the time) is an excerpt from the press release by the authors on 1.4.99, against the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (seems like an age ago, don't it? ...) : "We have never been interested in generic calls to peace: there is an extremely strong rationale for the existence of war today, just as there was four centuries ago. It is deeply rooted in the criminal economic and political choices made by states and multi-national powers, whether they are the United States or the Empire of Charles V. And similarly there is a rationale behind the ethnic cleansing and reprisals, one to which we do not adhere and have always fervently opposed ... "

The last words of the book, which ends where it began, in Istanbul in 1555, are worth meditating upon; they, are, as it were, the accumulated wisdom of Gert from the Well, that great survivor: "Do not advance the action according to a plan."

Freedom Square

After the torpor of the Museum of National History, I was walking along the far edge of Merdeka Square towards the River Klang - where Malay freedom was proclaimed in August 1957 - when I saw a tall skinny black man in shirt, trousers and sandals coming towards me. He asked me where I was from and how I liked it in KL. Oh, you should have been here when the British ruled, he said. Those were the days. We sat down to talk; he carried a small cushion because the stones were hard and his bottom was thin. He had no teeth, caved in cheeks and when he talked his very red tongue protruded from his mouth, top side up, like a large plum. His name was Gerald John Baptiste and he was a Christian. His plastic identity card showed a gap where the word Muslim would have been written if he was one. Three percent of the population, he said. We get a hard time. This was not his only grief. As a homeless man, he faced endless persecution from the police, who like to keep the old colonial district free of vagrants. They pick them up in their cars and take them far away and let them out in another part of town, which means they then have to walk back to where they stay. Over the road was the magistrates court and the high court, enormous faux Moghul and Arabic buildings built by the British in the 19th century; I had walked past there earlier, as clerks and lawyers with briefs in their hands, bizarrely suited and tied in the intense heat, hurried to court or to chambers. The pristine oblong of grass between us and the courts was a cricket ground where John Major had once played; behind us was the mock Tudor pavilion, now a classy restaurant. Gerald pulled a selection of tourist brochures from his bag, a pen from his pocket, put on the glasses hung around his neck and gave me a detailed, informative and very clear account of the local attractions, where the best markets were for electronic goods, cds, dvds, and so forth, all the time annotating the map in a firm, fine hand. He said he went to church every day; of the other religions, he liked the Hindus best because at their temple, when there was a wedding, the homeless could go and share in the feast. His ambition was to be a tourist guide, but there was no way the government would let such as he do that. He was not a sad or an angry man; resigned, perhaps, but cheerful along with it. He said he had a 2 million dollar bed, pointing to the immense flagpole at the end of the cricket ground. That's where I sleep, he said. Can I give you some money? I asked him. Oh, yes, he said, I am very hungry. I saw his eyes flash as he saw the colour of the notes in my wallet. Then we shook hands, exchanged names, and said goodbye.

How it is

Last Thursday we had the talk we've needed to have for a long time: not about the past and what went wrong but about the future and how to manage it. It was really good, we worked out how to go forward in a positive and companionable way. Next morning, Friday, we woke up to an eviction notice, the one thing we had not factored in to our plans was the need to find another house - almost impossible in this place at this time of year. Saturday I went down to vote and then started cleaning out the garage, a task that has been waiting a long time; I had this pleasing notion that all our accumulated junk might be thrown out along with the Howard government, not that that seemed very likely. At some point I opened an old suitcase and found the box of badges I used to wear in the days when we wore badges: among them was the one I used to pin on every election day, saying No Matter Who You Vote For The Government Still Gets In and wished I'd worn it down to the local hall that morning. The election was of course a disaster, but not until I checked the news Sunday morning did I realise the Xtian fascists have won the Senate was well. Now they can do all those unspeakable things they've wanted to do for so long. We will regret this result for a long time, I thought, even those who voted for it. Later on that day I lost my glasses, which I've had for more than ten years, which I love, and which I've feared losing as long as I've had them. Last time I remember wearing them was playing scrabble with the kids; they seem to have disappeared from the face of the earth. Did the young sulphur-crested cockatoo that's been hanging around suggesting we owe her/him a living make off with them? Or the testosterone-enraged brush turkey that's building a mound in the yard next door but one? I simply don't know. I had a script to re-read so I could make some notes for the next draft - deadline today - but that was of course impossible. This morning, Monday, I tried making the type bigger on the screen but it just didn't work. So, in amongst getting birthday presents for the kids and a new spring for the driver's side windscreen wiper on the Falcon, I bought a cheap pair of menu glasses from a chemist. They work, but not so well as my old ones did. I have to peer at the screen like one of the myopic electors of this my adopted country, which today I love and hate in about equal measure. So: no house, no good governance, no glasses ... these are not major afflictions when you think what some people in this world have to live with. And I refuse to despair.

The Big O Revisited

It could be that the reason Roy's recording of Will You Love Me Tomorrow - which may have gone out under the title But Will You Love Me Tomorrow - doesn't show up in any of the lists is because it was recorded in New Zealand while he was there in whatever year it was that he toured there. A local recording might well not be included in US lists, might not even have got onto vinyl, maybe a radio station recorded it, maybe even the station in Hamilton we heard playing it.

Plenty to go on with there. I remember a friend of mine telling me about his concert at the St. James, I think it was, in Wellington, how she was majorly impressed by his immaculate moontan and the fact that he never once took off his dark glasses during a sublime two hour set. Now, when was that? Late eighties perhaps.

"Truly, it seems that this Republic has become a republic of men bewitched, living outside the natural order of things."

Martin Gonzalez de Cellorigo, AD 1600

Potosi

Potosi, over 4100 metres above sea-level (c. 660 higher than Lhasa!), was a sport, a freak; by far the highest city in the world, it was itself dominated by the Cerro. This immense ruddy cone rose nearly 650 metres higher still, and was riddled by veins of one of the world's richest ore-bodies; the surface exposure found in 1545 was ninety by four metres and 50 percent silver. Altitude and terrain were themselves advantages from a technical point of view, since there was no fear of flooding and much of the ore was accessible, to begin with at least, by adits and relatively short shafts. But these factors added a new dimension of suffering for the mitayo: an average winter day may range from -16 to +17 degrees centigrade; some mine entrances were at 4500 metres, nearly 15,000 feet. In the shafts, up which men and women carried heavy burdens on dizzying ladders, the air was hot and humid, poor in oxygen but rich in carbonic gas; at the exits, sweating and under-nourished bodies were plunged immediately into icy and rarified air, well above the altitudinal optimum even for Andean Indians. Well might it be said that only the heat of human greed could temper such a climate. Yet on this highly unfavourable site, too dry and cold for cultivation, rose one of the greatest cities, numerically, of the early modern world. It had some 120,000 souls of all colours in the late sixteenth century, and by 1650 claimed 160,000—as large as Amsterdam or any Italian city, probably twice as large as Madrid itself. The European populataion was numbered in thousands or even tens of thousands, and a very mixed lot it was.

The basis however remained, as it had to, the Indians, whether conscripted mitayos or more or less free 'fringe-dwellers' ... the mitayos lived mostly on chuño, frozen and dried potatoes, and kept themselves going by chewing coca leaves from the eastern Andean slopes and Chochabamba, whence also mine timbers had to be brought. Amalgamation needed great quatities of salt—1500 quintals a day in the 1630s—but this was available from the great salt-pans of the Altiplano 200 km or so to the west. Staple European foodstuffs came from Arequipa or from Salta, Jujuy, or Tucuman, which was also a great supplier of mules; further south the inland plains of La Plata supplied leather and tallow. While the official port of entry and outlet was Arica, this reaching down into the northern marches of modern Chile and Argentina was to become a major, though officially improper trade route ...

Alongside this mundane trade in subsistence and production goods was that in sinfully costly frivolities for the conspicuous consumption of the newly rich élite. Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, the gloriously inconsequential eighteenth century chronicler of the city, gives a glittering and much quoted list of the luxuries which flowed in from all quarters of the world for the pleasures of the opulent Potosinos; many of these came in the back door, brought from La Plata by Portuguese merchants, the notorious Peruleiros—another leak from the official channels of exchange. Between these Perulieros and Peruleros, the merchant capitalists or their factors at Seville, the profits of Potosi were largely drained away; enough were left, however, to support a society raffish on a grand scale, out-Westerning the Hollywood West. Solid piety and good works did exist, but were overlaid by an atmosphere of fiesta and brawl: alongside the eighty churches were fourteen dance-halls and thirty-six gaming houses, staffed by 700 or 800 professional gamblers. Civil commotion was violent and endemic. Respectable Spanish women were relatively few, partly because childbirth at the high altitude was thought dangerous; but apart from many Indian women living by exercicios amorosos, there were 120 professional ladies, at their head one Doña Clara, who lived in a style ranking her with the grandes horizontales of the French Second Empire or Third Republic. And all around, gasping in the mine or shivering in the thin sharp air, the drafted relays of mitayos choked their lungs and lives out.

from The Spanish Lake

Juan Fernandez

The discoverer of the open-sea route which circumvented these inordinate delays [between New Spain & Chile] was one of twenty-six people, several of them sailors, living in Santiago de Chile in the 1570s, and all named Juan Fernandez; the meticulous researches of José Toribio Medina have narrowed the field to one. He discovered the island long named after him, but since 1966, by official decree of the Republic of Chile, styled Robinson Crusoe's Island.

Juan Fernandez seems to have come to Chile about 1550-1, and in the next twelve years had much experience, as boatswain and later master, in navigation between Peru and Chile. In February 1574 he was in command of the Nuestra Señora dos Remedios from Valparaiso to Callao; and when, on 27 October 1574, he took her out on the return, there can be scarcely any doubt that his southwestwards track—into the open Pacific—was deliberate. The wind régime on the coast is such that he could hardly have been blown off-shore; on the other hand, he was a close friend of Gallego, Mendaña's pilot on the 1567 voyage to the Solomons and from him he must have learned that once out of the mainstream of the Humboldt Current, and well into the Southeast Trades, winds and currents made a good southing much easier than it was close to the coast.

On 6 November Fernandez sighted the barren rocky islands he named San Felix and San Ambor ... and on the 22nd two islands which he named for the day, Santa Cecilia's. These were certainly the group known by his name ... thirty days from Callao he reached a Chilean port, either Valparaiso or Concepcion ... although his island did not appear on the maps until early in the next century, his 'new navigation' was soon adopted as the standard track.

One of the founders of Santiago, Juan Jufre (who introduced goats to Chile, and hence, at a remove, to Crusoe's Island), backed a reconnaissance in 1575, perhaps under Fernandez, though it is not certain the latter ever set foot on his islands. Nothing came of this, but in 1576 Fernandez was sent by Jufre ... to discover 'the islands which are frontier to this kingdom.' Knowledge of this expedition rests on one of the memorials with which the highly uncritical Dr Luis Arias sought to revive, in the totally unfavourable climate of Philip III's reign, the grand designs of Mendaña and Quiros for a vast religious imperialism in the South Sea. Fernandez is said to have sailed, from about 40 degrees south, on a westsouthwest course for one month—and to have discovered a land with well-clad white people and many fine rivers. In the eighteenth century this was taken up enthusiastically by Alexander Dalrymple—to whom it must of course have been Terra Australis—and considered more cautiously by James Burney; it has been variously identified as Easter Island, New Zealand, Australia, the Solomons, Tahiti, and (by the Chilean Vicuña Mackenna) as fantasy; which last seems most probable. Arias himself is most confused, and his evidence is—at best—third hand; Medina makes a gallant attempt to show that Fernandez found somewhere, say Tahiti, but carries no conviction. At all events, what with the Araucanian Wars and Drake's raid nothing could be done—the heretics might hear of it—and any follow-up was put off from day to day until Juan Fernandez died in 1599. The mantle fell on Quiros.

more from the shores of The Spanish Lake (op.cit.)

Armenicão

Of all the mythical isles of gold and silver, perhaps none has had a longer paper existence than Rica de Oro and Rica de PLata, supposedly lying between 25 and 40 degrees north and at an indefinite distance east of Japan. Pedro de Unamuno searched for them in 1587 and, so early, expressed disbelief in their existence; but the Dutch looked for them in the 1640s, the Spaniards did not officially write them off until 1741—and one or other of them appeared in atlases of repute as late as 1927. Findlay in 1870 listed at least eleven highly dubious reports of islands in this general area, and his irritated comments recall those of the more level-headed Spanish officials.

The origin of the fiction is in the report of a Portuguese ship—no name, no date—blown east from Japan to rich islands, with white and civil people; they were known, from a merchant on board, as the Armenian's Islands, later as Rica de Oro and de Plata. What core of experience there may be in the fable is not of vast import, but the story seems to stem from Francisco Gali's voyage of 1584, more important as really bringing home the vast width of the North Pacific. He took over a Manila Galleon which had put into Macao, obviously to take on cargo for New Spain—illicitly, for though the Crowns were now united, their colonies and commerce were by law as exclusive as ever. Gali probably heard the tale in Macao; at all events, he looked unsuccessfully for 'Armenicão'. His report inspired Fray Andrés de Aguirre, who had been with Urdaneta in the San Pedro, to recall an old but seductive document he had seen long ago.

Dahlgren suggests that this account of Aguirre's is a recollection of a Portuguese letter of 1548 read by him with Urdaneta in 1565—two decades earlier!—and that the islands were the Ryukyus (Lequeos), which in the earlier decades of European penetration in these regions were important and wealthy intermediaries between China and Japan, while both Chinese and Japanese were certainly civil people and commonly described by the Portuguese as white. Mere lapse of memory, with lapse of time, would account for Aguirre's placing them east and not south of Japan. Chassigneux finds this reasoning 'very ingenious ... [but] very difficult to accept' and invokes a double typhoon ... legendary and elusive, indeed totally fictitious, as Rica de Oro and its sister-isle were, they ... played a considerable role in the exploration of North Pacific waters.

from The Spanish Lake, by O.H.K. Spate, Canberra, 1979

The Roy Orbison Motel

It was sometime in the early nineties. We checked into a motel in Hamilton. A big old wooden colonial building near the river in the southern part of town. Might once have been a residential hotel, certainly not a pub. Strange fifties decor, tiny rooms, narrow uncomfortable beds. A little old fashioned bakelite radio which played mostly static. Then, it happened: the white noise cleared and we heard the unearthly voice of Roy Orbison singing the Goffin/King song made famous by the Shirelles: Will You Love Me Tomorrow. It was sublime. One of those moments you never forget. When the Big O faded, the static returned ... ever since then I've been looking for that recording, without success. I haven't even been able to find a record of the record, if you know what I mean. At allmusic, 369 versions of the song are logged, mostly releases by the Shirelles, but none of them is by Roy. Was it an illusion then? We didn't hear the DJ back announce it, but I don't think I could have mistaken the voice ...

I returned to the Roy Orbison Motel in July; it's being pulled down soon. The decor hasn't changed, nor the strange pokiness of the rooms, but the bakelite radios have gone. We listened mostly to Polynesian rap and hip hop the night we were there. In the communal kitchen there were three German women and a guy from West Virginia who was studying astronomical physics at the University of Waikato. He got anxious when he realised I was waiting for a pan in which to fry our steaks, emptied his half cooked noodles out of the one he was using into another pot and then cleaned the pan for me. Only he didn't notice that I was already using the sink to wash our vegetables in. The broccoli got bathed in dish detergent. Oh well.

This lost song still haunts me ... it's as if, without it, my life doesn't have the shape it might otherwise have taken.