One More River; Back Street Aussie Rules.

Here the rules are god given, and the oaks and maples struggle for life in the valley clay soils of parched Victorian country Bendigo. They remember me and watch in silence as I climb the hill toward the forest of eucalypts which growl darkly against the morning sky of my youth. The paddock where I kicked a football seems to slope more acutely than I remember.

Long weedy grass clumps and tussocks grow where a hundred thousand voices roared as I soared above the pack to grab the mark of the century. I fired long punts and wobbly drop kicks at galahs that swung in shrieking pink and grey fits from sagging telegraph lines. I fired stab passes at my sisters who came with messages from my mother about dinner getting cold. They dodged or batted the ball away in annoyance. I bounced the ball and ran fiercely around my little brother who represented all defenders and non red and white players on earth. His laughter as he tried to lay a hand on me still rings as the forest trees rub together in the warm evening wind. The forest seems to suffer the drought more easily than the lonely maples and oaks.

I had wanted to wear skin tight skimpy shorts like the men did. I was unaware in my innocence of their bulging meanings below bright jumpers with numbers. I tore the sleeves from my best jumper and paid the price, but for three beautiful hours I ruled an empty paddock like Royce Hart, underpants knotted at the side to look like home shorts.

The citadels of glory were distant hopes for us, the country lads destined for hay carting and shallow marriage pools. Certain girls seemed to be attracted to the forwards, and some to rugged defenders. Some girls played with us for a while but dropped away as games grew more fierce and physical. They only flirted then.

I wander further up the slope away from the paddocks, into the tall dry weeds, and sit at the edge of the eucalypts. Their smell crackles through me tinged with wattle.

I have just returned from Uluru in Australia’s heart, where red morning suns crack through damp earth, releasing the children of Mutitjulu like swarming bees around a red leather balloon. They play football in mobs laughing and diving and creating new edges in ancient ways. I wanted to play with them but they are too fast and inventive. At their age I kicked end to end with a couple of mates. How stable and constrained we were compared to these red dust scamps with their twisting, bundling, melting, black scramble. They break apart squealing and colliding again, colliding each other into the dust.

From up here the old maples look distant, sagging beneath their transplanted expectations and Uluru now only a hazy memory. The rules are made but who are they for? It’s a question of culture the one hundred thousand throats shriek.

Ant Man - Inventor of Children

That great Cathedral space which was childhood – Virginia Woolf

Bucko and I were like Laurel and Hardy. I bent my lanky scrawny frame around my bike, low for less wind resistance. I tried to keep up with him as he pedalled upright; knotted long white hair bobbing and flashing with its nest of wind-filtered debris. Grinning like the mad dog he was.

My father, god rest his beautiful gentle soul, was cash poor but rich in finer things. He was unable to buy me the bike I so desperately wanted (and a guitar and a saxophone), but he took me aside by the firelight one night; alone with him in the old creaking wooden living room with its thick moth-eaten colonial carpets, and he brushed the scraps of dinner from the front of my pyjamas.

“I have something for you” he said in a soft, and I felt then, proud voice.

It wasn’t christmas or a birthday but I felt the excitement swelling behind the warm spot where he had finished brushing my belly with an affectionate rub like a football trainer massaging the wounded star. He went to the special locked sideboard and my heart sank. What could fit in there?

Bucko swerved in front of me, first into the green Jackass dam riparian approaches and then bursting through the skinny wattles; all charge and yahoo, then right into the muddy water up to his knees. I skidded on the bank and slid to the water edge amongst yabbies and rotten leaves.

We were exhausted and laughing.

That’s when we spotted him.

Across the dam in the forest shadows; a black figure flickering and gone. We stopped mid scraw and held a glance as if to assure each other. Bucko dragged his bike back out of the mud. He had no brakes as was the fashion of the brave; he pushed a sandshoe against the tyre if slowing down was ever a necessary course of action. Now we were both stopped in our tracks. We left our bikes against trees and scrambled off around the muddy edge and up over Tyson’s mound and through the barbed wire fence into the forest, after the ghost.

The big wooden drawer squeaked and grunted as it opened and I could smell paraffin oil and dust. Dad carefully lifted a leather folder and held it in the suspense of his memory for ever. I waited. Then he turned and brought it to me.

I had never asked him about the war because mum said not to. He didn’t want to talk. He let us look through all the back volumes of Kahki & Green with their endless jokes about ‘Pull your head in mate” and paintings of heroic soldiers lugging cannons through the tropical mud forests of New Guinea, and shouldering bandaged comrades through swamps, but he never talked about it. Now he handled this big leather folder like an explosive, and brought it to lie on the carpet in front of me.

Three weeks later in mathematics, when, for the first time ever I drew some praise from Mr Hughes for my attempts to make the slide rule and compass produce an isometric description of a transparent tetrahedron, I was interrupted, because of Dad’s folder I guess. Taken to the headmaster and given the cuts. Mr Mac, towering six foot six with his leather barber strap. My tentative hand out, forced out into the air, and the big wind-up and down it came. Crack! And my hand went red. Again and Again. “I’m sorry young Doc but somebody has to teach you a lesson” The sweat clattering off his face onto the gleaming leather weapon. Crack! Each blow forcing the secrets deeper and deeper inside me, and knowing my guilt, accepting my fate. Only not knowing which particular misdemeanour was being heralded and exorcised.

Bucko’s shirt had torn on the barbed wire fence we had piled through, and he wiped the blood from his side with the back of his hand. Then rubbed it against his nose as the unstoppable river of Bucko snot always demanded. He looked like a wild eyed warrior idiot as he crept ahead of me, scouting for a trail. I laughed every time he peered back over his shoulder.I had never been this far off the back of Jackass dam. It was forbidden. Even collecting birds eggs we didn’t come this far. They said old man Tyson would shoot on sight. We went deeper and deeper and the tree trunks became thicker. Great Turpentines and Angophoras watching us from their towering white branches. Then we spotted a clearing. You could see the gold aura ahead where sunlight flooded into a space in the forest, and it seemed that a big earth hill rose out of the ground in the middle. Curling grey smoke dissipated from its peak.

We huddled at the edge of the clearing. Bucko’s wet trousers smelt of the dam and my shirt was wet and muddy still. We were like two sperm hovering in the undergrowth, contemplating the approach, contemplating the egg.

The fire smelt raw and warm as my dad carefully opened his gift. Page after page after page of stamps. The full collection. The full set. The stamps of Papua New Guinea and New Britain from 1938 to 1942. Cassowaries, thatched huts, outriggers. I watched as this gentle and amazing man gently touched one image or another behind clear tissue paper, the images calling my eyes from their wandering thoughts, diving now into the thick black-page mountings that cradled imagery. Some pages also had mounted pen and ink sketches which he and his friends from the regiment had done. I asked stupid questions but he only smiled and kept turning the pages for me. Suddenly my father had turned heroic and for an instant he let me lean up against his being. “It’s for you” he said simply, then he stood leaving me with the folder, went back and locked the sideboard drawer again, and left the room.

Bucko decided to let me go ahead. I stood, and strode brilliantly for a couple of paces, right into the clearing, right through the cracked long dry grass. Right up to the giant earthmound. Then a sound. I froze. A sound. What was it. A cough. I looked back at Bucko uncertain. If I ran for it I was certain to shit myself. Then silence. I turned back toward the mound and another cough.

“Hello?” I pleaded softly, ready for my fate, not worse than having to wash poop out of one’s shorts most likely but certainly unknown.He touched me from the other side. The side I was not looking toward. His great bony hand on my shoulder like the claw of the eagle reaching from the book of kells to grab the innocent lamb. Involuntary squirts came from every orifice though I was too frightened to actually cry. I dared to look up toward his hooded face, way up there. From amongst the height of the tallest leaves his voice came down at me: “would you like some raisins?”He’s going to poison me but what can I do? I am a lamb to the slaughter. I glanced toward the empty space at the edge of the clearing where the feckless Bucko had once been, and then gave myself up; allowed myself to be guided step by step around the great mound to the doorway of hessian sacks and beaten out tin cans. Into the mound; and into the cave of the inventor.He coughed a lot and smoked incessantly. His face was a molten rubber mask of folds and lines. In the smokey light of his fireplace I could make out glitters in the mask where his eyes would surely be, and his very thick lips were pasted wide across his face and seemed wet.We talked and talked and I ate his raisins and drank tea with him. Everything smelled and tasted of damp burned eucalyptus. I had to participate as I was his prisoner but I thawed in awe. He seemed as frail as transparent paper. He told me about the planets and how they were all in balance because they had pockets of protection and that they bumped softly against each other in a relative way. He told me that the Egyptians had built their pyramids by lifting them with little pyramids stuffed with prisms. “It breaks down the pressure of light you see” he said that as long as it doesn’t escape it can lift anything. “Mirrors and prisms and angles” he said. And he told me that the great wall of china was glued together with rice flour and his ant mound in which he lived was made of rice-flour and eggs and water and ant hills crushed up and not even the strongest bulldozer could break it. He told me that the planet earth had been originally populated by strange creatures half snake half bull and all sorts of other combinations and that the planet had been seeded by a tree which contained all of the genetic material of the world. “They are still up there” he said, “and that’s why they need worship, to stay alive”.

I walked away from the anthill, out of the clearing into the forest. It took me a long time to find the Jackass dam again and by the time I reached it Bucko was lying next to the bikes with his clothes drying on a branch and two soggy cigarettes drying on a rock. “You ok?” eyebrows up a little but careless too as if it had been expected. “He’s crazy but he didn’t try and hurt me, and he’s got this hut full of pictures that he cut out of library books” I said.

From the great height the last blow reigned down. Six on each hand had been my serve. I gritted as hard as I could and would not cry though the last couple had cut against the bones of my fingers. I think old Mac admired me for that. He put the strap back into his wooden bureau drawer pushed me down into his chair with his big meaty paws. “Wait here for five minutes and then you can go back to class” he said, and “I hope you have learned a lesson”. His enormous frame filled the opening as he left and when he closed the door behind him it felt like the credits rolling after doc holliday had cleaned them all up at the OK corral.

I had been hiding my bike down in the reeds next to the trotting track and each day we went back after school and tried to find the clearing again.On the weekend we cut Sunday school and spent our collection money at Rechters café where the paraphernalia of rock and roll and cigars and billiard queues and juke box selectors in booths was akin to a rococo cathedral. Bucko shared some extra cash he had collected from milk bottles left out by householders and we beat the older kids to the best music for that glorious day. We planned to visit Mr Peterson again and take him some food.

Winter arrived suddenly and Bucko was away from school, sick. Alone I went back and, after several searches, found the clearing again. Old Mr Peterson’s coat was on his hessian sack bed, just a bedraggled mess, with a sack of bones inside. I was shocked and ran and got lost for hours. A week later I went back and found it again but empty, though the billy still hovered above the cold fireplace, and the boxes of raisins nestled amongst the tobacco tins on his shelves. The earth floor was so cold it was moist. I hauled all his things out into the clearing and set fire to them, all his papers and bedding and everything I could move. I don’t know why.The fire got away a bit, into the forest, and I fled.

I remembered Bucko as I ran. As we had ridden back along the track from Jackass dam, he had been kicking my bike a few times to try and knock me off. We stopped and I adjusted my brakes. “where’d you get it? He asked”“I traded it for some stamps” I said.

Now Bucko was gone and I never saw him again, and I supposed all the blame must have been mine.

Soapy Moment from a Washing Basket

Notes on the gentle art of hanging for Ryan, Barlow, Chambers, the Husseins, and others….

I am watching an unknown blond,

secretly,

over the top of my diary

I am watching the blond strangling the life out of some distinctly working class jeans, here in this ponderous dry-lino soap-valley public washhouse

still using laundromats after 20 years I noted:

haven’t come very far, although I owned a washing machine or two along the way, and now in my distant modern laundry I watch the branches of the great moreton bay fig swing heavily dangerously near me… I am looking over the photographs I cannot bear to see, and my paper remnants with their embroidered holes made by cockroaches and slaters through time’s hunger for dead wood, and taking me back – my old notes --

The blond is creating sexual tension for me, secretly -lacy underwear spilling through fingers and out of the basket; those cascades those little deaths those suggested unions of skin and fabric and skin and sweat and shuddering unions stretching limbs and necks and craning and entwining and creating the smell of secrecy for me as they are unfolded…

-what hairy blond arms – I had noted next in my hungry textbook of days. (and a sketched tattoo “Luke 15.7” with an eagle)

Hairy blond arms handling sheets into the washing machine they remind me of Cliffy Stewart who played on the wing under Barassi; Cliffy the wingman moving across the gravel playground like a footballer and a poet; Cliff the dancer who ran up against the inevitable cliff-face of brutality-on-the-field; about face Cliff.

My stuff has gone onto SPIN without warningand the three machines start to shudder and whine as though being lowered into a grave still alive.

I find that my next note reads: -Bill White the reluctant conscript – So this must be 1966.

The shadows of the giant fig rattle in the wind and the scraps of paper try to move away…but I read:- 1966 and Harry Holt the disappearing PM has already beaten off Artie Calwell (the last of the old unguarded guard), and Holster-Holt has accepted the yankee-manufactured shotgun marriage to the big salary in Canberra; at the palace,

but I am living in a dingy single room in Brunswick, Melbourne; one dingy window over a dismal sink where a second-hand electric frypan perches in its grease,threatening me with electrocution; -sentenced to death by attempting to conjure up another magnificent spread of curried mashed potato on fried bread.

that was all I could cook; I had no interest.

sitting on a soggy bed (ex-army folding job),with a prickly greywool blanket reading ‘the Monsters of the Moors’ in the half-light.I had a fascination.

half of the light is obscured by the huge shadow of Pentridge gaol down the road.

-Ronald Ryan was here in Brunswick as a little kid.now he’s back again –

-Working at the Melbourne Uni bookshop I sell booksto students for their education through the day and try to flog them for myself in the evenings -for the hunger and the fascination.- I am a salesman and a thief -

-Valley of the Dolls Catch 22 Crime and Punishment

–there I was trying to learn the Penguin lists off by heart under Michael Cannon and trying to figure out what’s happened to Ronald Ryan under the death sentence at night.

- The blond has left;the basket of panties sits unguarded against errant semen on the floor

-I am amused by the dangerous link between soiled underwear and electric machinery; I think I must prefer something more physically direct like strong blond arms or a rope to twist the fluid out of something.

I used to spend a lot of my time back there in Brunswick,when the light had gored itself away to almost nothing, poring through photographic essays of women in French underwear, with a candle flickering for the crucial human weakspots and flickering myself into the sheets. It was all secret jotting at work;in the tea break sand overhearing the exciting political secrets to myself afterwards;

that was another note,

although, looking back, and around,it may be that it’s not all on the same side of the fence.

I was hopelessly in love with Juliet however,and I believed her feigned suicide;that she was secretly in love with another comptometry clerk in the National Bank, and this led me to decide that there was no point in joining one political party or another since trust had to be a basis for political fellowship and that had been executed;

at least I believed that then.

In spite of that I joined in some of the great vigil which is to come,and I’ll tell you about that in a moment.

- I am a protester

-First let me tell you about Juliet; she used to wear French underwear; the stuff that has lace around the thighs and is slightly loose to allow the loving passage of garters,and the fabric of which absorbs yet smears depending upon the fluid it concedes contact with,receives, pulses with and rejects, ultimately;

I used to live on curried mashed potato and my love of Juliet’s sex; of course that wasn’t all but it’s all I remember. Morning noon and night it was curried mashed potato. I used to tear at her stocking tops and bite her thighs in desperation and reckless risks of a pregnancy that never happened;

(thankful, cruel, dimwitted, hungry – I must make a note of these words)

- I am a risk taker

-I make a note of these words: -Ronald Ryan was a Catholic altar boy –There is no coincidence, not there; Such as being in Brunswick as a child and ending up back there,

except perhaps

That father Brosnan was Catholic,

And Ryan made his break from ‘the go’, same spot where Kevin Joiner had been gunned down years before; I wonder if Joiner was armed

And if his killer had a necksnapping end.

the state ripped Ryan from Brunswick and nowthe state has brought him back. the police called Ryan ‘the homing pigeon’ because he loves his family, that’s how they caught him; steel-bar irony perhaps more than the co-incidence of blood.

Why has the pile of dirty underwear been left on the floor in front of me?

I used to wash all of my clothes in the shower behind a gritty fungus stained curtain of privacy back then. I think the prospect of all those Sharpies and Rockers knifing each other out at Elwood Beach made me want to keep my clothes washed;what if I got mistaken for one and was picked up with a bag of deals for the Uni bookshop on me; I might end up somewhere awful; go directly to ‘the go’ do not collect $200 do not get caught.

Catch 22 I was learning was the American psyche’s dirty washing, and Ronald Ryan,for me was top hat landing on Mayfair, and General Dreedle owned the hotels.

-Ronald Reagan has just been named Governor of California –another note, this one marked ‘humorous’ for some future joke.

I have a couple more marked coincidence that I would like to read to you but bear in mind that I have never been clear on the distinction between wicked coincidence and an irony (assuming there is a difference). Anyhow, while I wait for the blond to come back and start sorting the basket of underwear I’ll list you a couple and call them ‘coincidence’:

1) Ron Barassi went from Melbourne to Carlton and took them from bottom to premiership (near bottom anyway).Then he went to North Melbourne and did the same for them.At last he went home to his precious Melbourne club and failed.

2) William White’s father attended his son’s conscientious objection army trial (after William had been force-goose-marched to the cliff-face by the army) wearing his returned serviceman decorations.

3) Ronald Ryan was sentenced to hang on 31 January 1967. 31 January is the date of celebration for St John of Bosco who founded the Silesian Order which taught Ryan his schooling.

4) Harold Holt imported Air Vice Marshall Ky (the American-made puppet dictator of South Vietnam) for a propaganda tour. While Ky was here the two were photographed in a navy craft cruising the beach at Portsea, the very spot from which Harry scuba-dived his disappearance from history.

The big blond and the woman who takes the role in my imagination of his lover, and most probably the occupant of that underwear from time to time, come into the laundromat. They commence an argument over the basket, ignoring me and I am especially embarrassed because my spinning cycle has ended and I have to get between them to take my stuff to the dryer.

I think about the great vigil and how we celebrated at the bookshop the morning the reprieve came through at the eleventh hour, nine hours before post time, rope time, neck tie for Ronald.

They step apart and let me through.

I was depressed by the news that Juliet meant,when she said she never wanted to see me again,that in fact she couldn’t stand the gangly fleshless awkward and finally embarrassing sight of me. my only compensations that morning had been that I didn’t have a mirror in the flat and that Peter Hudson was going to play for Hawthorn. when I arrived at work there was champagne laid out over the anti-hanging edition of Farrago. There was so much excitement around, and so little work,that I was able to pilfer ‘The Idiot’ and ‘The Trial’without anyone, I thought, noticing.

there were sick jokes that Dorothy would marry Ronald againsince the man with whom she had subsequently united had died of a heart attack.

But then hell broke out once more:Hobart was being burned to the ground,Holt was off fiddling in New Zealand with Holyoake,the South Africans had banned D’Olivera on the basis of his skin colour and were giving our cricketers a thrashing to boot,our young men were getting blasted to pieces in Phuc Tuoy, the pieces of Grissom, White, and Chaffey were disintegrating in space alongside the Apollo debris,and the affidavits of Ryan’s new-evidence-witnesses were discarded.

what’s more I was freaked out by eviction from my cupboard and the finality of Juliet’s rejection of me: she took a lesbian lover and I knew conclusively as I slunk home from my dissolving bookshop job with another stolen title hidden in my coat that I had caused myself to be stripped of any power in any direction.

-I have had my head in the dryer

–that is another note explaining to my future self just why that woman with her basket of wet underwear is giving me such a strange look. I put some more money in the dryer to finish the sheets and pyjamas. She puts her stuff into the dryer next to me and I can smell her skin in the dry powdery dust and through the hungry dampness of wet fabric and we watch it begin to tumble and mix in freedom.

I sat outside the Carlton cemetery reading the paper on the hot morning of 3 February 1967 when Ryan got his neck snapped by the rope; it was like a hot summer day back in Bendigo when he was on one side of the fence inside studying for his matriculation which he got and I was on the other side studying for my matriculation which I got, though we were years apart in getting them.

He loved his sisters I loved mine.

I know who arrested Ronald Ryan:Inspector Ray Kelly; like one Irishman arrests another for the murder of George Henry Hodgson (an Englishman?)

I wrote a letter to Juliet about the chance that Ryan would hang in spite of three sworn statements and one unsworn statement,which may have merited some attention.

- I am a person who likes letters

-The letter I wrote was about the rush to judgement but I did not send it so great was my own guilt. instead I sent a letter to Michael Cannon concerning Sydney and the rum trade in heroin; still singing the same song… and confessed to stealing books from his shop and congratulated him on his excellent historical works…

if only if only I could understand if it means anything that hanging warrants are signed, it seems, on Thursdays in Malaysia which is the same day on which Picasso used to sign his works. I’m sure it means nothing.

My fetish for lacy underwear survived but I gave up stealing books.

I gave up Brunswick and Carlton but I still love Melbourne because I go there every now and then if I have a chance like the pigeon that I am, always hoping for a glimpse of Juliet’s thigh in a dream,or the sound of the gallows finally burning down, or maybe another Jonny Famechon or a Peter Hudson…

I don’t know if Michael Cannon ever got my letter,

Or if the blond and his lover are going to split up over the washing,

because my basket is full of warm dry clothes and cotton sheets like a Bendigo summer day in your face and the smell of the free wattle and the dry clay earth as it rushes promises at you.

I leave the laundromat and scurry to the car with my dogs and search my memory for Ronald Ryan’s words which he penned to his mother after learning of his destiny as determined by the State Executive Council:

- I was able to accept it with equanimity, my concern was for its effects on you –

- thus spake Zarathustra, secretly, and Ronald Ryan privately -

-I am cooking dinner tonight –another note to myself from some years later and the Irish in me ensures potatoes somewhere in the menu.

- by the time I have eaten –the later note continues- Barlow and Chambers will have been hung in a foreign land

down the spout for drugs

-The car won’t start in the rain and so that gives me time to contemplate the Penguin Book of Australian Short Stories which I carry for laundromat reading in case I’m stuck (with nobody interesting to watch) The first story still niggles me with its essay on the Australian colonial hanging psyche.

I wonder whose graves they would spit on…. Barlow and Chambers,or Ryan…

perhaps Barlow and Chambers knew too much or else just a couple of convicts getting it in the neck.

- through the rain on the car windows I secretly watch the blond and the lover load their washing into their small asian car

–my final notes from that day describe their final act…

- her white legs with little hairs that seemed to stand erect against the static charge of the laundromat... her long fingers twirling the end of a plait into the curl of her melting collarbone... his thick tattooed arms that touch her briefly….

-and they were suddenly gone with their scents and their rustling hands of arousal and their innocently offered exchanges for my diary…..

and they’re gone

- like Cliffy Stewart; just a constructed memory without right or wrong, or truth, but most certainly a reality to someone else,with right and wrong imposed

–and so I crumple the notes back into the elegant scented envelope from my old amnesty cell-mate, with the photographs of Hussein and his brother;...head and body separated like washing spilled on a dirty floor…

I hear the laughter of my children behind me reflecting life out of the misty rain, like wet leaves on the great fig tree, and they do not need to see this letter and its crumbling foolish hopes

so I light my fire and determine not to reply this time.

Constriction – This Sporting Leaf

A ditty to be recited out loud after several scotches, and in the style of John Cooper-Clarke

Constriction visits my chest perhaps because these cigarettes have tarnished me burnished me vanquished me banished me from the field of sports ravaged me savage tar nicotar push me out throw me down cough me off slough me off gasp me out rasp me out lasting out in-between fags like the stub of a man / high-lunged man who once ran so / ran so /ran the lengths with a burst finishing burst finishing first lost that thirst now I’ve cursed my veins my heart my head my hopes and give cancer a chance….and the lungs bellow lungs bellow bellows bellow out just below the next smoke next moment next moment next moment bellows my lungs could be the one – cough! cough! – could be the one I’m sorry to say here is your last sentence, cough your way through it….

But then

Maybe my chest is constricted because of the motor cars passing me charging me rushing me battering one battery down on another one battering rams splattering rams motor car rotor car crossing kids tossing kids splitting lids splatter bids bleeping and blasting and smogging and fogging me petrol in money out stifling rifling stacking and jamming and rushing the green orange screech at the red with their stress factor mess factor hell bent let hell loose and lined faces twitching from white line line fever or is it hard artery fever or is it the galloping gear-change accelerator factor clutching me?my – cough – cough – chest….

But look

Why should I care when the trees are endangered and cut down and burned up and woodchipped and cardboarded threeplied and hardboarded cleared off and burned off and cast off and….they don’t have chests to constrict but they die so why worry why care if I work enough hours and build enough towers they say I can be an Australian millionaire…. like Langhang in a plane or reef buster Joh making cash by the bucketfull flash flesh the skilletfull millions you’re laughing and double it twice and in Switzerland clinics for cancer are nice…

Big Game Fishing... More Than Sport Really

I balance, supple at the knees as instructed, and curl the 13 foot throw-net across my right shoulder.

Balancing in the prow of the dinghy I take up most of the white knotted fabric in my left hand, with the last ten weights clustered in my right, like a Russian bride engulfed in a giant sagging heavy wet veil.

I coil to the left ready to cast.

As I look back across my right shoulder waiting for the flickering colours of yellowbellies coming to the bread crumbs I spot a leg sticking out of the distant opposite bank. The leg of a cow discarded by a sated crocodile. An old withered leg poking out of the mud with a bit of dried skin hanging limply off it. In the oppressive wet season heat it is lit oddly by a spotlight of sun shafting through a hole in the clouds.

Not a breath of wind.

A crack of thunder brings old William Ezekial to mind. His bellowing laugh across the concrete floor of my office. His skin so black it is blue and grinning like a movie star he wants to know if I can buy a barge. From King Ash Bay to Bing Bong he is Yunyuwa, with more than thirty words for dugong and fifty ways to cook a turtle. He sits beside a map of the outstations for whom I am trying to find sustainable avenues of economic survival. An area as big as Wales with islands, estuaries, mangroves, mountains, plains and hidden canyons, and marked with red dots for the 27 outstations. Can I organise the buyout of the local barramundi man for half a million? I want to laugh back, with him, but he is too far ahead of me, too old, too smart, and too embedded in an ocean of culture in which my European colonial vision is humbled. I cannot see that far but promise I will try.

I am his net.

A yellow flash and I swing into my cast. A great circle floats from my arms and settles gently into the swollen highway of ancient trade that is the Macarthur River. My circle disappears into the deep water. Smooth washed pebbles and Casuarina forests watch me from the bank as I step one pace sideways in the boat to balance against my cast.

Or try to at least.

I can hear the sea eagle laughing from above as I topple sideways, leg caught in the netline.

One assumes that floating to the top is easy but in the silty murk river which hungrily enfolds me all is a half light of wet gloom. I am suspended in the silt. My shorts have come off and I have to work out which way is up. I free my leg and pull on the rope as water forces into my nostrils.

The end of the rope passes by me coming down. At least I have discovered the way up.

“We don’t fish” William had told me, “we just live and enjoy. You blokes fish. Sometimes the fish come after us. It’s like a game.”

Something brushes my leg as I leap from the water back into the boat. How did I do that? I check my leg and it still has all it’s flesh intact. The thrownet is gone forever or at least until a big dry when it’s picked out of the riverstones downstream and comes alive in safer hands.

My companion in the boat is an eight year old girl I have been minding. She reads a book and sucks her thumb through pink pre-raphaelite lips. She looks up and smiles and goes back to the book.

Not my game really, fishing for sport. Best get back and see about that barge.

The Home Advantage

“Like you they suspect idiosyncrasy of witchcraft. Above all, don't get out too easily,….” from The Aboriginal Cricketer by Les Murray

Contact from Rhino.

He only writes letters and is the only person I know who quotes Les Murray. His weightlifter hands played classical guitar for fifteen years but refuse emails, so my news is slow.

Rhino is at the annual Imparja Cup, a national indigenous cricket tournament in Alice Springs. Rhino has connections in New South Wales cricket and is jealous that Rod Marsh is “here stealing my future stars”... Signed: “as ever Rhino COP”.

We still exchange letters every year.

I once spent time with Rhino cramped into a university four-wheel-drive during a three week trip from Adelaide to Fregon community for the 1981 aboriginal football carnival.He had folded his bulk amongst the swags and water bottles and, as we clattered and cramped north into the desert, he recited, through owl glasses, the form for twenty-three community teams we would witness playing in the dust over three days.We slept on dewy cold earth under star carpets, and woke from primordial crying dreams, each dawn a little further inland, and deeper amongst camp-fires crackling about eagles and giant goannas.

Before cutting into Pitjantjatjara lands from the highway we stopped into a roadhouse.

Last pies and iced coffees.

Rhino and I had last beers.

Immediately below a battered, two gallon pewter mug, a bar-sign read:

“peacekeeper - if you haven’t had the vote for 18 years f..k off”

Fourteen years earlier a Commonwealth of Australia Constitution amendment granted indigenous australians citizenship. Since our trip to the carnival was partly a celebration of that emancipation, Rhino made the obvious enquiry.

“Keeps blackefellers out. Can’t hold their grog and anyone who doesn’t agree can f..k off too” came the considered reply. The dents in the pewter cup clearly showed that non-compliants were methodically dealt with. Our red, gold, and black armbands made us candidates.The giant cup stayed on it’s wooden slab. We edged out into the gushing heat.

In the shade of a Moreton Bay fig, like refugees, we agreed to always stay in touch.

The football carnival was won by home side Fregon per tradition. Fregon timekeepers kept the grand final going over four hours until their side at last hit the lead and the siren blared it’s conclusion over the mayhem of dancing and music. Fregon had won the carnival cup. We had been a hidden yet intrusive part. My Pitjantjatjara language skills advanced a little, and my understanding of indigenous carnivals and the meaning of reconciliation improved slightly.

Rhino doesn’t tell me who might win the Imparja Cup this time, but merely adds the PS that he’s “off the grog and going to the Caribbean World Cup”. He fancies the home side at 15/1.

Out of my jealous window there are giant pines towering clear from sub-tropical rainforest canopies and weaving negative blue shapes of mystery;

cup after cup of peace across an unending horizon.

As the cyclone approaches I can hear his voice in the crack of branches as the willow drives a hard red ball through the swirling clouds around me: "Keep it noble, keep it light" as Les would say.