a little beauty for the darker days...

along the road i caught the bus

and each night we slept over their bones.....

                            
                

Jan Hendrycks confesses that one day he had been called by Jeronimus into his tent and that he gave him to know that at night time he must help him with the murder of the Predikant's family. At night, Zeevonk has called outside Wiebrecht Clausen, a young girl, whom Jan Hendrycks stabbed with a dagger, and inside, all people - the mother with her six children - had their heads battered in with axes . . .

He said, certainly, I have a knife. So without any objection, Andreas has gone to Myken Soers who was heavily pregnant and threw her underfoot and cut her throat . . . 

and each night we slept over their bones..... all three of us tight together in a creaky iron framed bed.

Extract from Pelsaert's
The Disastrous Voyage of the Ship Batavia,
first published in 1647

a place to rest ones head

He carried Ulysses to the other side of the world and back again, unread.

He starts twice, turning a few pages only before standstill; a mirror, a bowl, a razor, no more. Each eve thereafter he places the book carefully under his head like a japanese sleeping block, to lull in the forest waiting for sleep, embalmed in the elsewhere night. Night belonging in a book, somewhere in a book he once read, in the many nights of books. With hands clasped to chest, tighter than imagined, he hunts frayed words with which to render the darkness familiar.

Something to splice the creaking ship's mast to the poplar's hawsering bowed note once more. Something to tether the screeching thunderbird when it came, talons raking a brimstone sea for whale and sailor alike, as to bind it tightly in the wind spinning off the mountain top. Wind he imagines only from deep under the kelp through halibut eyes, as current line whirlpools, churning the sea far above. Later he hears siberian vagabonds pass bye the bye, whorling iced expletives at painted shutters and doors as they go. Swaying left, right, drunk and belligerent, they stop suddenly. Nearby ? As if puzzled for a moment by a lilting song. A woman's? A woman who trails a sighing finger through the canopy and with a gossiping whisper sends them carousing away down the valley, to the old people Tseax buried with fire... those who wait for news of the sea each night....

quieter, then quieter still...

The ship returns to transcribing the tide. He hears a rat? or bigger? and it's gleeful companion bickering once more over gruel or seed... and when sleep finally comes it comes as a wordless tempest.

  

boats of alert bay

a picture for sontag

(Click for full size)

when it leaves...

Later


much later, he imagines it somewhat like the ebbing of a high tide.


The exact point of it's turn indiscernible under a fecund moon. When the fish suddenly stop biting the fisherman, so intent on the next bite, only realises it is already departing when he next pulls his hook to the surface and finds it not missing bait as he thought, but ignored and untouched. More so, that first clear sign is disbelieved as an aberration and the line is swiftly run out once more and fingered optimistically, patiently 


waiting until


finally it is only the tardy arrival of the grotesque.... 


eyeless pilchards festooned with sea lice, guts distending and the unbecoming writhe of a Port Jackson shark slapping against the gunnel, fantastical and disturbing in the moonlight, which irrefutably signals the now vast emptiness of the sea. Removing the hook from deep in the fish's impossibly white throat, recognition of some shared futile and primordial febrility gnaws deeply at the fisherman's gut... and he sits unblinking, barrenly attempting to reconstruct the point where time and tide stopped and 


waited


before slipping away unseen.

Klondike River

All Yukon belong to my papas. All Klondike belong my people. Country now all mine. Long time all mine. Hills all mine; caribou all mine; moose all mine; rabbits all mine; gold all mine.

White man come and take all my gold. Take millions, take more hundreds fifty millions, and blow ‘em in Seattle. Now Moosehide Injun want Christmas. Game is gone. White man kills all moose and caribou near Dawson, which is owned by Moosehide. Injun everywhere have own hunting grounds. Moosehides hunt up Klondike, up Sixtymile, up Twentymile, but game is all gone. White man kill all.

Chief Isaac quoted in Dawson Daily News, 15 Dec. 1911.

today i thought of you

click for full size

daybreak is early enough

"FuckFuckFuck..... FUCK....... FARRRRRRKKKK!!!!!!! FUCKING FUCKING FUCK WHAT A FUCKING CUNT OF A FUCKING IDEA"

It was the desperation and disbelief, more than the frustration in his voice which made me think that our current predicament was unexpected.

I had first stepped on deck not more than 15 minutes prior and met the bloke at the wheel less than 10 minutes before that. Up until then I had been sitting on the wharf in my car at 4am every day for the best part of a month, waiting for this chance. A sign on the front bumper read "qualified deckie ready to go". We had moved to town after the season started and now all I could do was wait for someone to sleep in, fuck up, crack the shits or turn up pissed straight from the nighty. The word was there were no second chances in this game, no written warnings, you were there when the boat sailed or it left without you and I was the first waiting in line. By the time a ute finally pulled up and a voice out of the darkness  drawled " you right to go?" there were another four blokes sitting behind me.

In less than half an hour my relief at finally getting on deck was being tempered by the skipper's raging diatribe against the sea. We sat in a narrow channel with reef all around flaring an effervescent white in the darkness. Faintly illuminated by the spotlight, great foaming walls roared lumpenly past, port and starboard, before reforming bruised and swollen over our immediate past path. The channel ahead was indistinct and looking like it would close out any moment. The only gauge I had of our immediate danger was the brief time I'd spent on a jet boat, which worked the reef hard up in big surf. I'd rationalized then that your fear does not always correlate with the real danger at hand, so the the best policy is to stay cool and take your cues from those around you and then at least you won't look stupid if nothing happens. So here I was, peering out into the night thru a small humming clearview with a complete stranger, salt and spray obscuring the full gravitas of the situation. The only thing I knew for sure was that the surf was much bigger than he had anticipated and that he had been here before and was not very happy about it. Sometimes ignorance is a blessing.

" OHH FUCK! JESUS, FUCKEN FUCK HANG ON"

Suddenly we were racing at full throttle, headlong at a feathering breaker. We crashed wildly through the lip, and were momentarily weightless, engine shuddering and roaring as the prop cavitated before we pitched into the blackness off the back of the wave with a bone jarring thud. It felt like we would fall for ever. The third in the set was the biggest by far but we were almost clear by then and it closed the channel behind us completely.

Once we hit the deep water he backed off the throttle and told me how last season, his first as skipper, he had tried to take the same passage. Straight off the Point Moore lighthouse and just outside the marina, the south passage cuts out 20 minutes of steaming time if you are heading Greenough way. It's a complicated and dangerous zigzag through the reef, even in daylight and is often more of an idea than a reality; really little more than a way to get out to the back of the break on a surfboard, or windsurfer, once the southerly kicked in. But if you want to get to your pots at first light it's passage earned you a little more time in bed.

Last time he only made it over the first wave before the second broke square on the wheelhouse. It blew out all the glass and tore the bulkhead clean off the cabin, taking the sounder, radio and safety gear with it. The engine stalled and the water which had filled the boat to the gunnels poured back down into the forward hold making it sit nose down in a breaking sea. To complicate things my predecessor on deck had leapt up off the bench seat when told to hang on and braced himself on the handrail, facing the oncoming waves. When the window shattered the glass shards cut him badly, severing arteries in one of his hands. Somehow the boat started again and they scraped over two more waves before limping, bleeding and battered around to the shipping channel and back into the marina.

We didn't take the channel again after that and after a couple of days he got sick of steaming into southerly chop each morning and we took the pots north to the seagrass country.

the flip side of a ten cent piece

like the flip side of a ten cent piece

it seems you're underfoot

almost everywhere i wander

duplicitously evassive

ambigiously introspective

the list of places

of almost sitings

of song melodious

gets longer

everyday

the stage is waiting..... and was empty when last i looked

John Gould (1804-81) The birds of Australia 1840-48. 7 vols. 600 plates Artists: J. Gould and E. Gould; Lithographer: E. Gould.

abrolhos "keep your eyes open"

If you are having trouble working out the picture, it's a screen grab off google earth. The white area is a southerly swell breaking on shallow coral reef. The pale blue area slightly off centre is a sand hole in the reef in about 5m of water.

The sand hole first started to form 380 years ago today, when on her maiden voyage the VOC ship, the Batavia,  ran aground on a moonlit night with little swell. The watchman mistook the surf for the moons shimmer and the ship rammed into the reef under full sail. Half a mile either way and they would have sailed clean through the Houtman Abrolhos without ever realising. As it was, the pride of the Dutch fleet was doomed to break up on Morning Reef over the next week or so. The already mutinous crew and terrified passengers were either, ferried on the ship's longboat to nearly islands, which were sandy cays at best, or drowned trying to swim there. Some non swimmers stayed on the broken ship drinking the liquor, parading the deck drunkenly in the captain's finery before belatedly drifting ashore some days later, with the rats, on the spars and rigging of the 600t ship.

Pelsart the captain, after quick investigation of the islands and finding no water and little food struck out for the mainland with a small crew in the 30ft longboat. On hitting the inhospitable midwest coastal cliffs, later to claim amongst others, the Zuytdorp 83 years later in 1712, they found little to inspire hope and struck out for Batavia( now modern day Jakarta) which they reached some 33 days later. They arranged to return in the Sardam to rescue the others and I suspect mainly to retrieve the 12 chests of bullion on board when the ship went down.

In the meantime one of the bloodiest incidents in Australian history took place on the small island I called home for a couple of cray seasons. Well documented elsewhere, the massacre and subsequent trial which took place on Beacon and Long Island respectively, meant that by the time the survivors reached Batavia, only 68 of the 341 listed on board remained alive. Two of the mutineers, Walter Loos and cabin boy Jan Pelgrom, whose crimes were deemed minor, were marooned on the mainland, possibly at Kalbarri with a dingy and supplies. They were also given beads, toys, knives, bells and mirrors along with instructions on communicating with the natives and when the best time of year to watch for passing ships would be. They were never heard from again.

As far as I know they were Australia's first European settlers.

That blue hole is where the Batavia lay for centuries until discovered in the 60's, the hull furrowing a channel into the reef under the weight of it's cannons and the pounding rhythm of the surf.

Several people took credit for the find, but those that would know reckon Black Knackers... who liked to go bush in the off season, set his pots on it for years, but never bothered to tell anyone about the cannon he saw on the millpond days or gave it much thought past the value of the metal as scrap. Rumour has it he had a skull in his hut somewhere too.

Djeran

a pause
a lull
a breath
a sigh

and i

sleep behind
a dune
by a river
under a tree

wake to a kingfisher

it is

time
to
sing
walk
and fish

and even i
a blind djanga
watch the fires
from the hilltops
on a surrendering sun

breathless

to get to this point today

i needed

cannabis
good cannabis
rolled into a long thin joint
made with a king size Rizla +
upsold to me by a 16 year old girl
in the Ellecker General Store
when buying.....

"a packet of drum and some papers please....... the blue one..... just above your hand..... no the dark blue one, yes that's it....the 30g please"

"ummm ok why not I'll take some..... hang on, best give me some tally ho's as well... just in case"

but she will soon learn that

people who buy tobacco do not often buy king size papers
and people who buy king size papers do not often buy tobacco

and maybe one day understand that

the last line of text on the inside cover of the Rizla+ papers
is written especially for an certain type of english speaker
who will stumble through a seven line paragraph written in German
before deciding Frankfurt sounds like a place to visit some day...

RIZLA - DAS ERSTE UND IMMER NOCH BESTE ZIGARETTENPAPIER
AND AS WE SAY IN FRANKFURT, "ROLL WITH IT"

and roll with i did

but today i also needed

a cold can of coke

and

3 small white 5mg dexamphetimine tablets

once, twice, three times
i am saving the bottles to make
a lifesize sculpture of myself one day
driving a tank or flying a plane
like a WW2 serviceman addict

stand sentinel men

and coffee
always coffee
three as before

and cigarettes

too many cigarettes
rolled loosely without filters
so as to squint smoke
and sweep tobacco from my lips
like Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless



and now that I am at this point in the day

I will lie down on the floor

and pretend i am pulling faces at you while I lay dying

when the bluebird of happiness telephone company comes calling

phone ringing again, half an hour after closing

buzzzzzzz ..........clunk

"Hello?" buzzzzzz clunk " hell, hello? HELLO! Excuse me, I believe I am talking to the business owner of this business"

" Yes................? "

Normally I am not, the business owner that is, when they call, but I was struck with a sudden epiphany that maybe my tactic of " Sorry he has just left for the day " was only keeping me on the call back list. Normally it's a surefire way of cutting the call short without resorting to the Colonial rudeness of swearing at or hanging up on a Indian call centre worker. Most of the time they will hang up on, "left for the"clunk buzzzzzz. The other tactic involves putting the phone down after saying yes and letting them go until they realise that you're not there any more " hello?..... hello? ......hello sir?....... sir?........" clunk buzzzzzzzzz, or " I'll just get him for you.", put down phone and make a tea. The downside to this is your phone is tied up and just what if someone interesting calls and can't get through. The absent descision maker excuse had become the most time effective solution to the relentless optimism of India calling. The legitimate reason, that all my communications are bundled and contracted with our own headless hydra, just took too long to explain and involved at least two or three more qualifying questions from the caller, especially when they were new or their english dictated reading from a script. So today I was available.

"Yes, Yes it is"

" How are you today, Sir in...(check screen, hesitate) Aulbeny"

" Good and yourself?"

" Yes, very good Sir, very good Sir, thankyou for asking. Sir the purpose of my call is to tell you that you have been pre..."

" Hey look before you start, I get at least 20 calls a week selling telephone services and I am not interested in them"..... " I am not going to buy anything from you today , do you understand?"

" You are not going to buy anything?" (slightly disappointed tone)

" No I am not going to buy anything, you understand that, yes?"

I am guessing that the person on the other end was around my age and most likely university educated.

"Yes Sir."

" Listen can you do me a favour? Can you please tell me how I can be taken off your call list, because I don't want to have to be rude to the people that call me, but 20 calls a week is just too much and it is wasting everyone's time."

" Yes Sir, I can do that for you, Sir I will put you on the Do Not Call list, Sir. "



"Sorry?"

" I can put you on the do not call list, Sir "


"Really, you have a Do Not Call list and You can do that?"

" Yes Sir."

"Hey, thankyou very much, I appreciate that."

" You are welcome Sir. From today you will not receive any more calls from us."

"Hey, can you tell me something, just out of interest, where are you? "

A hesitating shy laugh echoed down the line which said I am not supposed to but...

"Calcutta Sir"

"Calcutta! Oh well you have a good day in Calcutta, Thanks for your help. "

Ok, so that's one of an estimated 1.3 million Indian call center workers done.........






"

the pale blue dot

This excerpt from A Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

sourced from http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/voyager/pale_blue_dot.html

it's a cunt of a place....

" its a cunt of a place if you're a blackfella" 

He had slurred this at me over the thumping crap they were playing in the nighty. Minutes previously he had been ready to take me on . I had turned when he lurched into my back at the bar and quickly caught the pent up anger burning in his eyes. 

" Hey man, how are you going ?" 

" You got a fucken problem with me? "

I smiled and laughed, trying to defuse the tension. 

"No man, I don't have a problem with you." 

" What are you looking at then?"

"Hey man,  you bumped into me, I was just seeing who it was. Why would I have a problem with you?"

"Why do you fucken reckon?"

"Hey I don't have a problem.....never seen you before in my life....... how could I possibly have a problem with you?"

" Fucken Bullshit! YOU and every other WHITE CUNT in this fucking town." 

He sprayed this with weary bile, an inch or so from my ear, and it cut through the din,  so close I could smell the sweetness of the alcohol on his skin over the smoke and stale piss odour of the bar. I got pissed off at this point, I didn't belong here either and wasn't ready to be a white cunt any more than he was a black one. 

" Hey listen mate, I'm not from here and I couldn't give a fuck what colour you are, so don't lump me in with the rest of the pricks. But you want to know something........ this is the most racist, fucking redneck, cunt of a place I have ever been and I can't even imagine what it must be like for you man. Just don't assume we are all like that and I won't make assumptions about you." 

He thought about it for a moment.

"yeah it's a cunt of a place if you're a blackfella."

"what are you drinking man..... yeah I'm serious hey,  what would you like ?"

A couple of drinks later  he was the second bloke to tell me I was the first decent whitefella he had met in this town. He was from Carnarvon and had come down looking for work on the boats but never got a look in. I told him he was welcome to come out with us anytime, fuck what the skipper would say, but I reckon he may have forgotten the next day or maybe just thought better of it and left town as fast as he could. 

The first bloke was from out bush, Mullewa way somewhere, and had turned up on our front porch on one of those summer nights when the bogong moths fluttered thick out of the desert on the back of a ceaseless, overnight easterly. The days unbroken by a sea breeze sat in the mid 40's, the nights bought little saviour and the townsfolk got murderous. 

Drunk, broke and heartbroken, looking for his cousin and not knowing what to do next, he wandered, wide eyed and lost, in through the front gate as we sat drinking, listening in silence to the sounds of the city disembowelling. I plied him with water and offered to call him a taxi, then in lieu of a destination, gave him some cash and half a pack of cigarettes for his journey. Suddenly he was overwhelmed, sobbing in my arms, wanting to be home and out of this hard bitter place, that rips the hearts out of men and suffocates their dreams with red sand and wind... 

the wind... the wind.... the wind...... it whistles evil songs in their ears......

And wiping tears and snot away, he cupped the back of my head and held me close and told me quietly.....

" hey brudda, you the first decent whitefella i met ere eh, the first decent white fella eh" 

a less than auspicious start... (warning: contains image of unknown deceased aboriginal man)

from Vancouver's Log 1791....

"At the borders of this clump was found[the] most miserable human habitation my eyes ever beheld, which had not long been deserted by its proprietor, as on its top was lying a fresh skin of a fish, commonly called a leather jacket, and by its side was the excrement of some carnivorous animal, apparently a dog. The shape of the dwelling was that of a half a beehive......"

"The reflections which naturally arose on seeing so miserable a contrivance for shelter against the inclemency of seasons, were humiliating in the highest degree; as they suggested, in the strongest manner, the lowly condition of some of our fellow creatures, rendered yet more pitiable by the apparent solitude and the melancholy aspect of the surrounding country, which presented little less than famine and distress." 

I found image 1976 trawling through the online catalogue of the Albany History Collection   (sans date, location, subject and photographer). When I go to the Library I hope the original has some information attached. This collection has no information attached to any of the images and is arranged in a bizarre seemingly random fashion. It must be one of the first photographic images taken of an aboriginal man locally and although obviously taken some 100 years after Vancouver's visit, his words were the first thing which came to mind when I saw the photograph.  

Vancouver's quote came from Douglas Sellick's First Impressions of Albany. It makes me wonder what the Nyoongar, whose lunch was rudely interrupted, and probably ran for his life from the white devils, thought! 

Bald Head today....