Hallowed Evening

from: Astronomy Picture of the Day

You've got 2 chances: Buckley's or none

Portrait of William Buckley (1780-1856) by an unknown artist (after Ludwig Becker), c 1852, La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria.

The Telegraph Tree at Port Arthur; Ludwig Becker; December 19, 1851
Watercolour
State Library of Victoria

The Marylebone Coach

It was outside a 1950s milkbar in Broken Hill. It really was a 1950s milkbar. Bell's. The waitresses (two) were plump and wore bouffants and pancake make-up. One was friendly, one wasn't. The decor was impeccable, the provenance too. It was up on the wall in the museum section. Where you bought souvenirs. I had a Jaffa milkshake and it was just like the Jaffa milkshakes I used to have at Gilbert's Dairy in Greytown in 1963. Well, there's slippage all over the place, even in time. My friend had Creaming Soda or was it Vanilla? At Gilbert's (they were Lebanese but I didn't know this at the time), Peter'd put in a squirt of orange and then a squirt of chocolate: that was Jaffa. He'd ask if you wanted ice cream in it or not. But I'm talking about outside, before we went in. Sitting in the hot car waiting for the song to end. That was like the 1950s too, waiting for the song to end. It never did, or it always did, or it still is ending, I'm not sure which. Anyway, the song. Guess who it's by? I'm only going to post the lyrics, the rest is up to you:

I grew up here all of my life
I dreamed someday I'd go
Where the blue eyed girls
And the red guitars
And the naked rivers flow

Now I'm not all I thought I'd be
I've always stayed around
I've been as far as Mercy and Grand
Frozen to the ground

I can't stay here and I'm scared to leave
So kiss me once and then
I'll go to hell
I might as well
Be whistling down the wind

The bus at the corner
The clock on the wall
A broken down windmill
Ain't no wind at all

I yelled and I cursed
If I stay here I'll rust
I'm stuck like a shipwreck
Out here in the dust

(accordion solo)

The sky is red
And the world is on fire
And the corn is taller than me
A dog is tied
To a wagon of rain
And the road is as wet as the sea

Sometimes the music from a dance
Will carry across the plains
The places that I'm dreaming of
Do they dream only of me?

There are places where they never sleep
And the circus never ends
I will take the Marylebone Coach
And be whistling down the wind

So I will take the Marylebone Coach
And whistle down the wind


Afterwards, we just drove away.

White Hills

Yellow daisies in the tough grass of the Chinese section. An ochre lichen grows over the tilting, dun-coloured stones, through which gleams the red painted into the inscribed characters that name the dead. A circular tower with a conical roof, a hearth within for burning paper money? Offerings? Small, like the grave tablets. Some of these men walked five hundred miles overland from Adelaide, digging wells along the way, living on sheep they bought from local farmers. They were very cheerful, singing as they marched to New Gold Mountain to make their fortunes. Wind sighs in the Gallipoli pines. The yellow fields stretch fenceless away into the purple and blue-black gums. A rosella flies up into the trees, iridescence glinting from its wings. A lone cry.

Heard last week that East Street have sold the UK? European? rights to Luca Antara to Oldcastle Books.

They've put this gorgeous new cover on it & dropped the subtitle ... & there's to be a hardcover edition. I've never had a hardcover edition before.

Never had a book published outside the antipodes either.

Fata Morgana

Have just received a publisher's advance. To write a book about Ludwig Becker, the German artist/scientist who went with Burke and Wills on their doomed expedition to, and across, central Australia. It's not a large amount of money but enough, with the help of the credit left on my card, to make a pilgrimage to Becker's grave. I'm going with an artist friend who'll bring a camera and use it, and other means, to document the trip visually. We'll fly to Melbourne in about ten days times and there look at the art works Becker left behind from the expedition, and other sojourns in Australia - especially Tasmania. Then we'll set out to retrace his journey, which, for various reasons, differed from that of the more famous Burke and Wills. Ultimate destination is a spot on the Bulloo River in south west Queensland, not far from Thargomindah, where Becker died and was buried. I'll keep a journal of the two week trip and write it up with various digressions, mostly into the life Becker led before he came to the antipodes, and what he did here in the ten years before he enlisted with the mad Irishman ... it's pretty ... exciting ...


Image: Border of the Mud-Desert near Desolation Camp. March 9t 1861. Ludwig Becker.

tungurahua erupts

dark of the moon

One star shines through a hole in the leaves of the tree outside this building. What star? Don't know. What kind of tree? A gum, it flowers whitely or yellowly, profligate, often; though not now. The street so quiet this could be the future. The one without us in it. A cat walks along a wall, stops, walks some more. That makes two. Survivors. Cat pauses again, looks up, a green flash from its eyes. Does it see me? Or just ... sense an alien presence there. Street seems somehow soft, rubbery. As if it would sigh and give a little if you walked down it. Cars made of charcoal latex. The White Lady like a ghost, she hasn't moved once since I sold her, weeks ago now. Feel like ringing the new owner up and berating him for neglect. Except what about my own neglect, almost total. I've never seen a night quite like this, so absent, so empty, so unforeboding. The world as it must be when there's no-one here to see it. The yellow star still hangs in the hole in the heaven of the tree, making me think of Magritte, those trees with doors in them that open upon marvels. Light spilling from the darkness within. So quiet, did I say that? Now I will discard my butt end, swallow the last of the wine and step off the balcony into the air. You will see the trail of my tears hiss softly across the leaves. Some slight disturbance blur in the branches and then I will be gone. Into the umbra of that yellow star. Into the aching mysterium. The nebulium.

The Pink
and White


Terraces

... as painted by Charles Blomfield (who some say never saw them). More here.

smokin' dust

If it had not been for ... if it had not been ... if it had not ... if it had ... if it ... if ...

That's, in six words, the essence of, why, why & how. & who with.

The chance not taken, or taken, takes us, whither.

Dark eyes in the night, out on the smoking bridge. Littered with unsipped glasses of bourbon & coke.

Fugitive crackle of some kind of plastic, sewn into the seams of an old black dress, 1940s.

The taxi I didn't take, looking down from the bridge, I saw it pull away, someone else in the back.

The garden of forking paths.

Sometimes you stand there & know you are there, at the nodal point. Sometimes you don't. Know. But you're there, nevertheless. Never. The. Less.

Didn't even realise Chris smoked. Lifted fags for both of us, from some bloke who worked for a university press. Then left.

Leaving me ... there. At the nodal point.

Where if decays into something more like its opposite. Whatever the opposite of if is.

Inevitability.

Think war might be like this? You gallop down a path that was just the faintest trace of a white thread on the night, some possibility that delayed you for the infinitesimal amount of time it takes for a decision to be made.

Or not made.

That taxi. Those dark eyes. Another ... smoke.

& there I am, going ...

For years I've been carrying round in my wallet one of those little slips of paper you get inside fortune cookies:

A scholars ink lasts longer than a martyrs blood, it reads.

Now I've got another one: The pen is mightier than the (s)word.

dust devil

A dream of dust. It lies along the edges of all the bookshelves, on the tabletops in the study, the sitting room, the kitchen, it congeals on the ledges of the skirting boards and on the wainscotting, on the pelmets, everywhere. The glass-topped dresser. The windowsills. I run my forefinger along the flat wooden surfaces, pushing up cloudy skirls of grey and brown and letting them fall onto the dun-coloured carpet which, later, I think (in the dream) I will vacuum. The windows themselves are golden with grime that filters the late afternoon sun to revelations of dust and one day I will hang out of those that open and clean them too. Or inscribe them with sigla encoded perhaps with the secrets of time. The dream has a soundtrack, it is Mazzy Star, Hope Sandoval's melancholy voice drifting in and out of the debris: I could possibly be fading / Or have something more to gain / I could feel myself growing colder / I could feel myself under your fate / Under your fate. Never knew until this actual moment that that was what she was singing. This moment of awakening, slipping across the purple sheets, rolling out from under the blue duvet, looking for those dust devils. And they're gone. Or rather, not here. It's just the ordinary familiar chaos of things. Feathers, stickers peeled off apples, sequins fallen from the kaleidescope, crumbs. Where has the dream dust gone? What is dust anyway? Planetary dust. Dust of light, dust of skin, dust of books. Curators are advised no longer to wear white gloves, the abrasion of cotton causes as much damage to paper surfaces as the oils in the whorls of fingertips. Dust of tears, what's left after the liquid evaporates and only the salt remains. The heart's dust. Or the galaxy's. It was you breathless and tall / I could feel my eyes turning into dust / And two strangers turning into dust / Turning into dust ...

images of dust devils on mars from wikipedia (worth looking at - the second is a moving picture)

lyrics from Into Dust, Mazzy Star, on the album So Tonight That I Might See

Don't ...

Once knew a woman who always said Don't. Meaning, don't say don't. To me. Because if you do, I will inevitably want to do the don't thing. This was true, particularly in regard to drugs and alcohol. Don't go out and score today meant going out to score. Don't have another drink meant having another drink. Or three. Didn't work for everything, eg sex. Don't make love to me ... what sort of a come-on is that? Used to wonder about the psychology of this. Was it Catholic? Something to do with sin, confession & forgiveness? If so, how? Or was it something else? Perhaps a notion that any attempt to establish authority over her would always be resisted. Funny logic though. She was Irish. Told her one time what Oscar Wilde said: I can resist anything except temptation. She laughed. But she could resist temptation, at least some of the time. What she couldn't resist was being told not to do something. Then she had to do it. For a long while I couldn't understand this state of mind. Now, quite suddenly, I do. Don't.

Warwick Roger

While I was in Auckland, up at the library with Michele going through various boxes of the Red Mole archive, I came across a clipping from Wellington's Dominion newspaper from, I think, 1976. It was a judgment by the Press Council upholding a complaint I'd made on behalf of the magazine Spleen against said newspaper. The Dominion was obliged to publish the judgment in full and so they had, even though it was highly critical of their conduct and in particular of the conduct of one of their journalists. Here's the story:

That year in Wellington film maker Richard Turner was preparing a documentary about Black Power, the gang, and as part of those preparations he'd recorded taped interviews with some of the gang members. He offered one of these tapes to Spleen, which regularly featured transcriptions of interviews with all sorts of people, from bus drivers to performance artists. I transcribed it myself and prepared the transcript for publication. It appeared in issue 6 under the title Yeah, we're bringing in the real shit. So far so good.

Subsequent to the interview, one of the interviewees was charged with being a party to a murder that happened in Wellington's Te Aro. A drunk had racially abused some Black Power members and they had beaten him to death. Horrible crime.

One Monday morning, before the case went to trial, the Dominion's billboard advertised a five part series of articles, to run every day for a week, that was called Anatomy of a Murderer. Each in the series was published beneath banner headlines on the editorial page of the paper. They carried the byline of a journalist called Warwick Roger. The bulk of the material in the articles was in fact lifted, holus bolus, without permission and without attribution, from Spleen.

Well you can imagine how we felt. Not just at the rip off, also at the flagrant disregard for the Black Power member's rights: he had been charged but not yet tried. Since he hadn't been found guilty, why was the Dominion calling him a murderer? The matter was sub judice and the articles surely in contempt of court.

The founding editor of Spleen, Alan Brunton, and I went in high dudgeon down to the Dominion's offices and bearded the editor of the paper in his den. I remember Alan, who could be fearsome when in full cry, telling the editor he was a casuist and then looking at the editor and realising that, while he knew he was being insulted, he didn't actually know what the word meant. We wanted the paper to withdraw the articles but they would not. We wanted to see the journalist in question but he didn't show. The most they would do was acknowledge the source of the material, which they did, grudgingly, on the Thursday I think it was.

We could of course have sued the Dominion and we would probably have won; but we didn't have the kind of money you need to hire lawyers. So we took the complaint to the Press Council instead.

At no stage in this imbroglio did we meet or otherwise communicate with the journalist, Warwick Roger. Not for the want of trying however. He clearly avoided us and, in my own case, has avoided me down all the years since. He has, however, just reviewed one of my books, Waimarino County, for a magazine called North & South. The review is short, contains some glaring inaccuracies (he says the book is in two parts; it's actually in four) and, after some rather fulsome praise of the first section, dismisses the rest of the book as perhaps cathartic for me but pretentious and largely incomprehensible to him. He doesn't mention the three essays on Alan Brunton's life and work that are contained therein. Well, why would he? He probably didn't read them. Mr Roger's review emboldened another NZ reviewer, Sue Edmonds at the Waikato Times, to say that she too found much of the book consisted of pretentious intellectualism.

It would be drawing a long bow to suggest that those far off events in 1976 had any influence on this review, more than 30 years later; anyway it doesn't matter. One thing I will say: to be found largely incomprehensible by a man of Roger's stature, with his peculiar understanding of journalistic ethics, is perhaps no bad thing.

the b-b-b-big b-bang ... whimpers

have always been a BB skeptic, if not an apostate.

The White Lady

Yesterday I sold my car. To a guy who lives round the corner. She's still parked where I left her, outside the building next door ... but she's not mine any more. I haven't quite understood this yet. I bought her in 1991 with some money I got for a film that was going into production. So, what's that? Sixteen years ago? Always meant to restore her to original condition, never did. She was a sort of talisman that decayed into a relic. I thought she would be hard to sell. She wasn't. I thought that, once she was sold, I would never see her again. Not so. Curiously, the fellow who bought her is a film person. Has directed a feature called Roseberry 7470. That's the final of all the postcodes in Australia. Down in Tassie somewhere. He also runs the Sydney Underground Film Festival. This car has appeared in a feature film, called Violet's Visit. Perhaps her career in film is not over. She always took me where I was going, mostly up and down the east coast of Australia; she also gave me many sleepless nights as I shunted helplessly between the ideal and the real. One more sleepless night last night and perhaps that's the end of it. Or ... not ...


photo by C. Garth Thompson

returned mail

The frenzy passes, leaving a silvery trail, like longing, in which are glints of lapis. The scent of blue hyacinths. Mail continues to come back, read or unread, I can't remember. I could work it out but why? They are like fragments of some old conversation, drifting out towards the stars, forever whispered and forever unheard ... unless some unimaginably delicate sensor in the Andromeda Nebula picks up the transmission: You are so perceptive ... it hears and then cancels the thought. Wrong. And after all it isn't as if I haven't been here before. Examine the dark interior for signs of shame. Minimal. Regret? Yes, but isn't that a constant? A sweet sadness that isn't always there, for what might have been, for what shimmered delusively into view for an hour or a day then fell into starry dust. Recall a friend telling me how, as soon as she leaves work, the characters in her head begin again their long extrapolation of the possibilities. One of them will be herself. Or a version thereof. Others will be unreal, or thus far unreal. Still others will be ... real but not as they are in the world. I am myself perhaps sometimes among them; though not as I am. Nothing is ever lost but much passes away unheard, unseen. Unthought? The un thoughts gather at the margins of sense, a great hissing cloud like the dead. The unborn. What might have been. What could yet be. What was. Is.

... that bird again, calling three times at my window, in the early dawn, summoning. It's a currawong, I'm sure; that is, if it is a bird of this world at all.

For a while now I've been wanting to write about the flour mill. Called Mungo Scott. I used to see its sign from the train when I came into town from the Central Coast to write a film script that would never be made. It was called Blue Fields but the flour mill sign was ambiguous, a C or a G? It still is: Munco or Mungo? When I was younger I had a dog called Mungo, after Mungo Park the Scots explorer. Some kind of retriever though I never hunted him. I did fabricate a pedigree, said he was a Lord Park Hound. Some of my classmates thought it was so and that was the first time I knew the quandary of a liar believed. Have re-sought the experience, never without trepidation, always with the wariness deliberate ambiguity breeds. Yesterday when I paused on the bridge I could smell the wheat smell on the damp air. Was reminded of when we used to feed the chooks, throwing them handfuls of the grain. Many pigeons on the wires and a train on the line, stopped, a red light on the last truck. The red light was my baby, the blue light was my mind. Or should that be the other way round. There was no blue light, but I paused anyway, thinking the train might pull out of the siding and go but it didn't. The ambiguity I live in now is not deliberate but no less confusing for that. I know I will never know the truth. Once I was on the bridge thinking about birds on wires as musical notes, Ezra Pound via Leonard Cohen if such a thing can be. Well of course it can. Another time, a Sunday, the pigeons were feeding on wheat thrown down on bare ground outside for them. There were spotted doves too but they are shy. Where is this going? The flour mill is painted cream, it is large, with well-tended gardens, functioning security but here and there, as in all industrial complexes, there are strangely neglected parts, sheds and things: I am particularly drawn to those corrugated iron structures that cling to the high and far off roofs of the silos, what are they for? Who works, or lives, in them? Sometimes at night there are lights burning there. If I went out now, would I smell the wheat smell, see the grain swelling in the wet air, the bursting of the seed, the radical and the plumule? Is it my heart that goes like that, whether I am at the bridge over the flour mill or here, now, writing? Swollen, I mean, bursting, sending a root down one way and a green shoot up the other? And how could it be otherwise? You cannot live by bread alone.