Cardboard incarceration

This cardboard prison they call an archive

is cold, airless and silent as death.

Floor-to-ceiling boxes contain voices

no longer heard yet wailing within

faces no longer seen yet still missing in

a jail of captured snippets, images and memories

among the severed heads and bleached bones

of dismembered bodies tucked tidily away in vaults

and museums and universities of the world

in the name of science

or history or anthropology or

something else trendy at the time

justifying the collection of our bits and pieces –

as the Other.

Reams of records demonstrate how you measured

our heads with every Western yardstick –

examined us through voyeuristic lenses,

scrutinised our children’s fingernails

long under microscopes to find them remarkably pale –

gawked inside vaginas where that rosebud is

pink as pink is pink

despite the otherwise hypothesised differences

between black and white

intellect, industry and capacity to settle.

We are the inmates incarcerated within

cardboard cells where every neatly dotted i,

and symmetrically crossed t screams out:

Read this Black angst against

these white pages.

 

Colour of massacre

A new century dawned and white Australians got urged

to feel comfortable and relaxed about their history.

Shake off that irksome black arm band – legacy

of radical lefties who can’t leave well alone –

their tiresome chant that white Australia has a Black history and we all have blood

on our hands. We’ve got a new song

to sing now!

Right-wing historians hummed this new tune

set about to write Aboriginal massacres clean

out of the record, history books, out

of the classroom.

There were not truly fifteen thousand Palawa people

in Van Dieman’s Land before the arrival of

white Christians. They said. There weren’t

five thousand! Only a few hundred naked savages

roamed here and a meagre hundred or so killed

in self-defence – of course.

Perhaps they were stealing?

Darker still – they were cannibals –

weren’t they? Think about it!

What happened to the remaining?

Nobody wrote it – no history of

massacres here.

Perhaps saved by Christian charity?

Blended in with the rest – maybe they died of

natural causes, or perished just because

they couldn’t adapt. The rest is hearsay – oral history’s

words in the air!

Nothing on paper – so who remembers?

The Aborigines didn’t count in numbers –

why bother now?

Nobody recorded those other syllables in time,

full of sound, fury, punctuation

of blows, blood and screams.

Wasn’t their blood red?

Didn’t their loved ones wail?

Late in the twentieth century, a population

of eighteen million, the shootings of

thirty-five settlers went down in Australian history

as the Port Arthur massacre, prompting a prime minister

who denied Black massacres to buy

back the nation’s firearms to minimise

the chance of another white one.

But, wasn’t their blood red too?

Didn’t their loved ones wail?

What is the colour of massacre?

 

Remote community

In 2007 by the colonial calendar commands

were given from afar.

Suspend the Racial Discrimination Act

for Aborigines –

they can’t handle their rights

anyway. Troops marched in,

then –

Alpurrurulam, Anmatjere,

Bathurst Island, Bulman,

Elcho Island, Gapuwiyak,

Gove Peninsula, Gunbalanya,

Haasts Bluff, Hermanusburg,

Imanpa, Jay Creek,

Kaltukatjara, Kintore,

Ltyentye, Maningrida,

Melville Island, Mirrngadja,

Mount Theo, Mutitjulu,

Numbulwar, Palumpa,

Papunya, Ramingining,

Titjikala, Tjunti,

Utopia, Wadeye,

Wurrumiyanga, Yarralin,

Yirrkala and Yuendumu –

All shoved under the dictatorship,

a remote community on Capital Hill

called Canberra.

 

Child

On a winter day, against a pink streaked sky

we walked to school.

You clung to my hand like

I knew the world.

Grey clouds hung low kissing eucalyptus blossoms –

red and green king parrots clipped the skeleton bows

of frost-glazed trees like brooches. Your peals

of laughter swirled in the chilly breeze

across the empty park.

We stopped to look –

birds, sky and flowers – but not long,

I worried we’d be late. You grew up amidst demands,

busy timetables and hectic schedules.

Now I have the time

to think of that day.

Should I have the luxury of raising you again,

we’ll stop and look at all that catches your eye –

let the day go slow – watch the sun on your

face shine gold –

hold your little hand longer.

 

‘Kuller Kullup’ 

by Bruce Pascoe

 

Kuller Kullup walked

from the stoney shoulder of Targangil

to this bend of Birrarung

spoke to all the people gathered there,

Wathaurong, Bunurong, Maap

Wurunjeri, Ganai, Taungurong,

all the people,

and he said,

the sky is falling in,

bring me poles, the longest poles,

bring me axes of sharp edged greenstone,

for the sky is falling in.

The missionary arrived, as they usually do,

but Kuller Kullup refused to speak

while the man of god was there,

for these were the great seer’s people

and his message to them was

the sky is falling in,

bring me axes, bring me poles,

together we will repair the rent

in our world.

Of course the missionary

demanded to know what was said,

as they usually do,

and for the price of a loaf of bread

to a hungry man

and a blanket,

to a woman whose child was cold,

he purchased the information

that the sky was falling in.

Oh those natives,

those children,

their savage superstitions,

Henny Penny the sky is falling in,

and soon the whole of Bearbrass

was chortling at the foolish blacks.

Some guessed, as some do, that the need for poles and axes

had a more metaphoric intent,

a more tactical thrust,

and they made sure that,

Kuller Kullup, sky master,

dream master,

was never seen again,

just in case.

How dare he assume a superior dream.

And so the dust was settled,

the gold was won,

the sheep were shorn,

banks were vaulted

parliaments raised.

Of course the gardens

followed the rule of Kew, as you do,

no natives of course, no natives at all

for nothing in this land

could please an Englishman’s hall,

except of course, the grass and gold, the beaches

a sunrise or two,

the quaintness of the kangaroo,

the docility of koala and wombat,

the duck billed ornithorinchus.

Exotica, unnecessary really,

when you could have a fox and a rabbit,

a trout and a blackberry,

thank you Ferdinand von Mueller,

creator of the gardens,

destroyer of rivers,

the founder of the real Australia.

Kuller Kullup knew the sky was falling in.

And it still is.

 

 

‘My Country’

by Ellen van Neerven

 

my country

is between two rivers

 

two ribs

two hip bones

 

if I mapped it for you

it would be a narrow shape

 

like a truck

the shape of me is shifting

 

hollowing wrists

smaller breasts

 

the places I notice

are losing and lacking

 

one hip bone

more pronounced than the other

 

is a long absence from country

related to my eating

 

is interrupted sleep

rivers with no beds

 

is dirt under my nails

drilling

 

is naesea

clearing

 

I let my stomach hair grow

so you won’t notice

 

I show you my blood

goomera

 

runs into the sea

and is returned

 

my hands

push into the soil

 

my country and I

numb until fed

 

 

‘Empirical’ 

by Lisa Gorton

 

A factory, the train line curving off to cross the motorway—

between them, these two or three acres which unevenly rise

from the storm-water gully up to the railway line where for years

the city heaped its wreckage—broken horizon-stone with

head-high fennel, milk-thistle stark from the mounds—

as of a house erupting slowly up through dirt—After he had made

what he called his treaty Batman walked back through here,

ground ‘thinly timbered with gum, wattle and she-oak,’ and named it

Maria’s Valley, Lucy’s Creek—‘Track to the Salt Water River

and Geelong’—its dotted line crosses Robert Russell’s hand-drawn ‘Map

Shewing the Site of Melbourne’—where Lightly Wooded

opens out to WOODED, inches left blank except for that

curved word—A year later, Hoddle’s printed ‘MAP exhibiting

the situation & extent of the sections of land marked off for sale’

marks Jika Jika Parish out in ‘1.5 acre allotments the greater part of which

are already sold’—The day he sailed for England

La Trobe rode his horse around this place and named it park—

bounded to the west of Hoddle’s map by a wavery line of circles—

‘Monee Monee’s Creek, a Chain of Ponds’—‘Mur-nong or Mirr-n’yong

may be seen growing on the banks of the Moonee Ponds’—

‘this part was called “The Fuse” because of the turns its course

there took and also “Lousy Pat’s Creek” after an old sundowner

who used to camp there’—Now a concrete drain beside the motorway

into the city—Moonee Moonee and Tullamareena run

from the burning prison at the back of Liardet’s watercolour painting

‘An Escape from the First Gaol’—Jin Jin, diving from the rooftop,

has flung his coat beneath him, its grey square like a trapdoor

out of the picture—Inside its soft-scribbled smoke, thin strips of flame

burn with the same soft red as its backdrop butts—In the foreground

two new-felled trees, bare stripped trunks angling oddly in, invent

a vanishing point out the wrong side of the picture—

Over the gully they used the land for a Model Farm—‘fences running direct

north and south and at right angles’—£904 4/- on fencing

in the first year alone—‘planting seeds of the acacia, cape broom,

thorn and privet &c that the live hedges will combine with and ultimately replace

the present fencing as it decays’—and ‘perennial rye grass, Italian rye grass,

Kangaroo grass, sweet-scented vernal grass, cocksfoot, Timothy,

meadow foxtail, crested dog’s-tail, hard fescue, meadow fescue,

red clover, white clover, Bochara clover, yellow clover, lucerne’—

‘It was proposed to carry on the necessary labour—by means of pupils’—

Enough sky here to watch where butts come in over the motorway

on slow dissolves of rain—Once in late-winter Burke’s cavalcade

rode past this place, ‘Burke leading on his grey horse, singing

“Cheer boys, cheer”’ as they followed him around the cattle yards,

the camel’s manure pile, past the swamp and out of South Gate

toward Essendon’—Away into TW Cameron’s magic-lantern slides,

the day of their departure mirror-bright on the blank interior

of St George’s Hall in Bourke Street—Prisoners in Jika Jika

made the camels’ shoes—‘The men have been for some time past

accustoming themselves to bush life by camping out in the Royal Park’—

The River Red Gum died that was their monument, replaced with a cairn

of mortared scoria in the shape of a chimney fenced with iron—

Esau Khan came back from Swan Hill on a wagon

to care for the camels left behind here which calmly graze

among the llamas, alpacas, cashmere goats and deer

in Edgar Ray’s etching: ‘Acclimatisation Society: Animals in Royal Park’—

The Society’s motto: ‘If it lives, we want it’—‘The introduction

and assimilation of every good thing that the world contains

seems about as legitimate an enterprise as can be conceived’—

‘During the past year there have been liberated at the Royal Park

Hares, Mynas, Starlings, Sparrows, Yellowhammers, Chaffinches, Blackbirds’—

‘The carp, tench, roach, and dace, and the gold-fish, have been introduced

and distributed in various localities favourable to their multiplication’—

‘Several of the English sparrows have hatched off young ones

in the neighbourhood of the Royal-park’—‘Sir.—It is well known

that a section of the council of the Acclimatisation Society has

long been striving to establish a miniature zoological collection

at the Royal-park—Does it not seem almost wicked

to throw away our money in the purchase of useless animals

when we have so much to do in the importation and propagation of

animals and fish which will furnish the colony?’—

‘Now that our Zoological-garden possesses an elephant, what more natural

than that it should be made use of?’—“Ranee” was at the Zoo

for 20 years, and was aged about 60 years when she died—

Her skeleton is now in the Melbourne Museum’—‘“Queenie”

has been engaged in her present task for more than 20 years’—

‘About 600 children experienced the joys of a ride on “Queenie”

on Monday’—‘Queenie, a zoo elephant, today killed her keeper,

Wilfred Lawson (69), of Brunswick’—‘The “old tip” has been used

to bury diseased trees and an elephant from the zoo’—Now

gorse, cape broom, privet, self-seeding out of the history

of their names, advance over its debris— Rebar, an iron drain top,

soft-edged blocks of gravelled concrete, a single piece of anthracite—

On the grounds of the Model Farm they made a place of Quarantine—

‘Sir—when I was getting the other children who had small-pox

removed to the Royal Park, Dr. K—informed me there was a child

in Jeffcot Street—On the next day, which was very wet and cold,

I was again sent for to see the child and told the policeman

he ought to urge the authorities to have the mother and child removed’—

That evening on an open dray they proceeded to the Quarantine-

ground at the Royal Park—The child died the next morning—

In a couple of hours the mother was allowed to depart home’—

‘In 1871, when the Board of Agriculture was abolished, Mr M—,

lessee of the Model Farm—sold off his stock—the lands and buildings

were converted into an Industrial School’—‘A large building—

orphanage and truant school combined—contains about 200 girls—

the girls learn housework of all kinds and the use of sewing machines—

At a short distance is a small farmhouse, with out-buildings and a few

acres of farm—boys drafted from Sunbury are sent here for various terms’—

‘Another batch of street arabs was brought before the magistrates—

Five lads—aged about 7 to 12 years caught wandering about the streets

at 1 o’clock that morning—The Constable ordered them off home—

Between 3 and 4 he found them sleeping in some empty barrels

in Flinders-street—Mr C— remanded the boys to the Industrial Schools

for a week’—‘Being so near their old haunts the temptation to bolt

has proved irresistible to several of the genuine street arabs,

especially as the grounds are bounded merely by rickety old fences

not even goat proof’—Boys from the Industrial School worked the farm—

‘Boys might be employed cutting some embankments and

filling up the gullies’—When the ship Faraway in Spring Cove, Sydney,

was filled with small-pox patients, in Royal Park they built

a Calf-lymph Vaccination Depot where the Quarantine-ground

had been—‘to continue and keep going the stream of pure calf lymph,

the first cultivated in Australia’—‘The Government having a building

in the Royal-park might properly be asked to send the immigrants there—

to guard against the spread of epidemic diseases’—That year

the Immigrants’ Aid Society took over the Industrial School building

and ‘Boy’s Receiving Depôt, Royal Park’—The Society noted

a ‘valuable donation of trees and shrubs for planting in the grounds—

from Mr Guilfoyle, curator of the Botanical gardens’—

Late winter, black cockatoos scrap and cry in the Monterey pines

which bank the gully’s soft earth sides, holding

an arrowhead of land where what was once named ‘Permanent Creek’

flows from a pipe under the hospital carpark to join the creek

now piped under the railway cutting—Along the cutting’s side,

spear grass and rye grass move under the wind like light on water—

They dug the railway cutting out by hand, down through sandstone,

its fossil shell remains—extinct nautilus-type molluscs, lampshells,

lace corallines, sea-urchins—overlaid on sheets of older lava

‘decomposed where it lies into a greasy fawn-coloured clay

that can be readily dug out with a pen-knife’—to Silurian bedrock,

broken, irruptive, inlaid with fossil sea liles, graptolites, trilobites—

‘Nearly every beginner in geology makes a collection of these

Royal Park fossils’—Near the carpark, where the gullies join,

‘there is to be seen a deposit of white clay overlying the bedrock—

fossil leaves were found in these clays which thus appear to represent

a fresh-water deposit’—A creek, or lake, which met old shoreline here—

In Melbourne Gaol, ‘the warder who looks after the hard labourers

is a bit of a geologist—He drew our attention to a large stone

in the prison wall—quarried, I believe, in the neighbourhood

of the Royal Park—in which he could see an almost perfect fossil duck’—

‘The idea of a collection of animals caged for public viewing

was not quite a century old’—For the ‘Centennial Exhibition’

the Park Trustees staged mimic warfare here with cannon fire—

while the Director of the Zoological Gardens and Acclimatisation Society

fetched a man, a woman and two children in from Coranderrk

to ‘populate’ the display which he and his wife had made—

‘an exact representation of an Aboriginal people’s encampment’—

‘On the sheet of water close to the camp there has been placed

a native bark canoe of the olden times’—In the Director’s

family archives a cutting, ‘Zoo House, Once Attacked by Blacks,

to be Pulled Down’, leaves out the story—Outside the zoo

‘a dozen companies of redcoats are in motion—the bugles peal out

with their quick long notes—there is a delightful apprehension

amongst the children that they will be in some fashion surrounded

and mixed up with the soldiers whose bayonets flash so bravely’—

‘Huge and empty, but not yet “swept and garnished”, stands

the military infantry camp high on the hill at Royal Park

waiting for 6000 or 7000 men who are to enter into it this week

from every part of Australasia’—‘The most modern 15lb quick-

firing field guns, of a type in use in the present war in South Africa,

will be furnished to the Victorian Field Artillery as soon as possible’—

‘Nearly 150 tents have been erected and stand now in ten long lines,

with the officers’ tents lying grouped fifty yards to the eastward’—

In the First World War the AIF fenced in these acres

for a rifle range—‘each unit of the AIF shall be at once supplied

with the necessary equipment for musketry instruction—aiming rests,

sand bags—dummy cartridges, rifles for miniature practice,

landscape targets and visual training figures’—‘In a misty shower of rain,

the Royal Park camp where 1,200 men are in training

was yesterday inspected by five representatives of Royalty’—

‘A Special Military Mental Hospital was opened at Royal Park in 1915’—

‘If [Gunner] P— had hysteria would he be a malinger?’

—‘No, not if he had hysteria.’

‘How would you test him for malingering?’

—‘With pretty strong electrical treatment.’

‘Of course, you could get an admission from an ordinary man

by using the thumb-screw?’

—‘No, there are men who will stand pain.’

‘Do you know the battery that was used?’

—‘Yes, in the Melbourne hospital we frequently used it

on this class of cases—hysterics, malingers, drunks’—

After that War, they levelled the hill for a playing field

where the swamp had been—‘to create an ordered

public recreation area from a previous wilderness’—

In the Second World War, the 1^st Australian Guard Compound

in Royal Park was fenced with barbed wire—In a photograph

from the newspaper, ‘The 17^th battalion—jubilantly march

towards the Royal Park railway station on their way

to overseas service’—Libya, Greece, Papua New Guinea—

‘For the return they marched as heroes—from central Melbourne

out to Royal Park’—In 1942 the US Army set up its camp

in metal huts over the railway line—Their Signal Radio

Intelligence Company used these acres as a training gound—

‘THIRD BROWN-OUT MURDER IN MELBOURNE’—

‘Two Australian soldiers from a camp near by, Driver M— and Cpl F—

walking through the park, were attracted by the driver of a butcher’s cart

who called to them, “There is a body on the bank” —

The soldiers ran to the locality, where slit trenches had been dug,

and saw a woman’s body lying face down in the mud’—

‘Black-trackers brought to the scene were greatly hampered

because many soldiers had trampled mud in the vicinity’—

Private Edward Joseph Leonski, tried by US court martial,

was hanged in Pentridge—He said, ‘She was singing in my ear.

It sounded as if she was singing for me’—

‘Tremendous excitement prevailed at Royal Park camp

when the long convoy of cars arrived from the Otranto—

many of the Army men were ex-prisoners from Germany—

‘The crowd of fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, wives

and sweethearts, and little sons and daughters waited

longingly in the cold’—After the war the US Army’s metal huts

were used for housing—‘Three families lived in our Army hut—

Our address was Area 4, Hut 7C’—‘Their meat, bread, vegetables,

groceries, and milk are delivered to their door’— Mrs—,

who came from Ouyen, planted maidenhair ferns on either side

of her front door’—‘Camp Pell kids, Camp Pell kids,

Camp Pell kids are we, always up to mischief, wherever we may be’—

‘Camp Pell is, in plain language, nothing but a dump

for human beings’—‘Camp Pell must be cleared at once and

handed over before the start of the Olympic Games,

Mr Bolte Premier said’—The huts sold off, foundations razed—

Now bullet casings, bottle shards, steel mesh alike

turn to monument under my eye and by this trick

here I have felt the past around me like a landscape—

ruinable, massed, a blank in thought which sets the names

in their array—Now at the level of my eye, its close horizon,

impasse—What I have named weeds and flowering grasses

being to itself single, singly forward in the instant of its

happening, pitiless, walled in silence—

The stone heaps lie around me and nothing is mine—

 

NOTE

In writing about the colonial history of this patch of public ground, Royal Park, I was provoked by a statement in the ‘heritage assessment’ carried out by Andrew Long and Associates, in consideration of the East-West Link: ‘This location would not appear to have been of great likely attraction to Aboriginal past populations given its distance to local watercourses’. This claim seems to me to epitomise how a manufactured landscape can conceal the history of country. The ground now named Royal Park opened out alongside the Moonee Moonee chain of ponds, now a creek enclosed in concrete; what were its creeks are now storm drains running under the golf course and the railway line; and its swampland was drained for playing fields. This poem collects fragments of colonial history from maps and pictures in the State Library of Victoria and contemporary newspapers, which cite among other things reports from the Model Farm and Acclimatisation Society.

 

The architect enters the room
Wearing a black velvet blazer
Crisp white shirt, skinny leg jeans
A caricature – oozing ‘starchitect’ cool
He’s won the tender
To design an Aboriginal health centre
He’s saving our lives
One commission at a time
He promises community engagement
Indigenous design through collaborative consultation
Hand in hand
We’ll Reconcile
Treaty unsigned
Another scrap in the pile

The meeting starts
MacBook Airs charged, iPhones on silent
His portable projector
Boldly animates the wall
With technical drawings, gum leaves and
kangaroo paw
His young assistant smiles with eyes that beguile
Their knees uncomfortably close
And a suffocating power clenches the room
His presentation ends with a photo
A black hand holding a white hand
Cos it’s all okay
Nothing ever happened here they say

Mob gently start to share their stories
But the loudest voices are white
The complexity of colonisation erased
Although a white council officer knowledgeably explains
That the design should reflect the river
White voices drown out community who sit silently by the end
I guess they speak better than we ever can

The ‘starchitect’ leaves smugly
Muttering how he likes to explore Australia’s
deep cultural dimension
Another project to boast about
Bringing cred and status to his illustrious career
The health centres vital
But no one can guarantee
There’ll be free services
For those in need

Back in the office
I sit at my desk
On the thirty-fifth floor my window
Lingers on the William Barak building
An Aboriginal leader
Designed by a white man
Gazes down Swanston Street

Moving through the city
Other identities thrive
On the periphery:
Street art by Lisa Kennedy
On an old post-box in Bourke Street
A torn Gary Foley poster
Clinging to the railway’s underpass

Fierce, fighting, alive
Denied a spot in the public eye
And I wonder if
A living black face
Could ever exist
On a thirty-one-storey building

Cos whose land is it anyway?
A bunch of white academics from RMIT proclaim
Another urban planning conference on the way
Colonial property rights will be erased
Alternative living, squats and co-housing
Yarning circles and lemon myrtle flavours
The new themes of our progressive left-wing
white saviours

Anti-eviction and anti-gentrification
We need to reorganise our neo-liberal
property relations
Squats for the rich and a high-interest mortgage for the poor
Just before they decolonise us all

 

The People’s Justice

by Soreti Kadir

 

My people have always known justice through song

My people have always known justice through song

When feet started pounding the ground to resist the coming rampage

the Songstress stood by closely

if you choose to see what most see

which is mostly

misperception

“Why are you busy with those sounds? How will they sway parliament and the crown?”

But my people have always known justice through song

When war comes we sing strength into the masses

When lose is known we sing spirits back home

When confusion comes melodies male way for sureness

When victory is known we stamp our feet on the earth returning it’s mud and fire

We sing praise into the moment

And sorrow out of memories

Misdirected is not what we are

Divert the distraction

Parliament only holds a fraction of the power it parades

The people’s song is know charade

We know justice through it

Do you want me to prove it?

 

 

Heavenly Queen by the Maribyrnong

by Lian Low

 

Home

The Chinese, my father’s ancestors sailed into the Straits of Melaka and settled into the Malay peninsula,

They prayed to Datuk Gong, his altar hidden in forests and crannies

Gave him offerings, they wanted to make peace with the spirits of the land,

Where I now live, call home

Heavenly Queen Mazu gazes steadily over the Maribyrnong / bidding seafarers safe

 

On the lands of the Kulin Nations / I pay my respect to elders past, present and future /

In solidarity, with all First Nations Australians

Whose sovereign rights, ancient wisdoms and stories were never ceded

 

 

Australia is Melbourne is Glen Waverley 

Australia is Melbourne is Glen Waverley is my new home. Where the moisture is sucked dry, where I can trace a cartography of where Malaysia ends and Australia begins on the contour of my papery skin; but connection to place is beyond physicality, I had yet to uncover.

 

Connection to place is about a love for the familiar, tracing a memory, and finding that sweet spot where you just know you’re home. Wherever home is. Whatever home means.

 

In 1991, I’d moved continents, settled into Kulin Nations country the year before terra nullius ended, and hope for a new nation was stymied, stunted, bludgeoned by the fury of anti-political correctness campaigns. Howard. Hanson. Racist rhetoric.

 

Australia is Melbourne is Glen Waverley is my new home.   Connection to place is about a love for the familiar, tracing a memory, and finding that sweet spot where you just know you’re home. Wherever home is. Whatever home means.

 

 

The Heavenly Queen

When I craved love, I would look to the heavens, hoping to catch a glimpse of paradise in the sky

Stars twinkling like fireflies

Melbourne’s overripe moon glowing an outer space gold

I looked, onwards and upwards

For that invisible road to Heaven’s Door

Hoping the Doors would burst open to show my destiny

Little did I know that Paradise lay at Footscray’s riverbank.

 

Grounded along the Maribyrnong,

Oblivious to industry, machinery and heavy traffic

Glimpsed by thousands as they sped across train tracks

The sixteen metre Heavenly Queen’s gaze is serene as she looks past black swans, cormorants, swamp hens, red-rumped parrots, marbled geckos and Pobblebonk frogs

Her gaze drifts towards Footscray Road, floating past the Yarra, until her wide- open eyes contemplates the Bass Strait.

In her fingers, a small ball of light,

Beacon to shore.

 

Patron of seafarers, demon destroyer, rainmaker and healer

One legend tells that Queen Mazu’s origin was humble

Not yet 18, with supernatural powers

She fell in a trance when her fishermen father and brothers were caught at sea

Their lives about to be loss in a storm

She manifest in spirit, guided them to shore

But before all were safe,

Her mother broke the trance and her father died at sea.

 

Up close, Queen Mazu’s gold paint is chipping,

And the lake surrounding her base is filled with weeds and rubbish

Duck feathers and shit

A swamp

No tossed coins from lovers wishing for good fortune

 

The Queen’s slow decay mirrors the fallen stars I’d found along the river near Newell’s Paddock,

An exoskeleton of five arms,

Yellow speckled in purple stripes and tips,

They lay unfurled, arms spread equidistant

Sometimes scrunched up

Unnervingly still

Underwater creatures stranded on land.

 

22 broken, crumbled, dried, sun-burnt to the bone

Northern Pacific Seastars / marine pests

Plucked from the muddy riverbank and weeds, not far from the mussels and the patient fishermen, after bream or yellow eye mullet or silver trevally.

 

Someone wanted to piece together paradise on the pavement,

Maybe it was someone also looking for love.

 

They are eating the photographs

Because

there is no bread

The photographs proliferate

 

Your excavated back looks suspended

we are looking down on you

 

And you are caught on the crumbs of buildings

we are standing on that

which stood on you

 

The space between the crumbled parts

of which you are a part

exists

 

For your ashen powdered self is

Dimensional and recognisable

I lifted a city off your face

 

My little ash-boy

My little dust-puppet

Of concrete grey and dusted edifices

 

Your black eyes are curious

 

Your toes are lifelike

Your black eyes are liquid

 

Your cheeks curve like apples

Your black eyes are alive

 

As we try not to see