Wild Sovereign Development Site

Category: i wish

  • crepuscular

    crepuscular

    As the evening creeps across the land/groping its way towards us like the bleeding protagonist stabbed who refuses to die/darkness is a promise/like cousin cool/do you promise? I have sweatered so much this day I can jumper no further.

    As coolth lays its stealth in a beam lowly under the trees/we stagger out/of the shopping mall carrying strawberries and tomatoes in my hat/swung by its string, a bonnet punnet/and all the trees/little and large and oblivious to cars one hopes/lay their shadows down/long on the green evening grass like ballgowns’ trains/everything wonderful cool beneath the branches/one by one the skateboarders pluck their boards out of the water and go home.

     

  • poor freedom

    Queenslanders! If you want to feel good about everything, get yourself a European recently arrived from their winter and take him to the beach. Mine had never seen waves above hip-height before, but he charged into the surf like a snuffling dog. Every time I wiped the salt from my eyes there he was, plunging and lounging, spearing under curly-headed wavelets like a cormorant, trying to catch already broken arriving waves (“This one’s mine!”), surfacing with a massive smile across his face. I lay in the water, it’s been so long, and the line of buildings tilted on one end of the sea and the mountaintops tilted at the other. Plumped up Australians dragged their bellies and boards. When I was a child only ladies who’d had children were jiggly, and old men might have a beer belly: now it seems the whole nation’s jiggling, even muscular men in their 20s. Sugar, sugar. The water accepted us all. The ocean too is thicker and slower than it used to be and off the coast of California, apparently, carpeted with deceased sea creatures. But on the surface between the flags we were quite happy, one of us ecstatic. He plunged past me spluttering in sheer joy, legs flailing. “It’s… like…. pure freedom!” he shouted.

     

     

  • great barrier grief

    I feel so ashamed and disgusted and frightened at what’s happening in my country. The inhuman way the world’s oldest civilization are treated. The lack of generosity towards people needing help who arrive on our shores. The decision to dump dredging waste from the expansion of a coal port within the National Park created to protect the world’s largest living organism, the Great Barrier Reef. The carte blanche offered to quick-buck miners who gouge what they can from our ancient resources – I’m including forest-strippers and tree-pulpers here as ‘miners’ – at the cost of sacred sites, irreplaceable rock art, and whole mountains which have withstood millenia but crumble before the dreary dollar. The cars stoked with air conditioning in which we transfer ourselves from one over-stuffed mansion to the next. Malls filled with landfill. Food which is hardly food, young people’s beauty marred by the treacherous marbling fat that comes from addiction to additives and inactivity, trans fats and sugar. We are so rare and beautiful and our earth, on whose surface we are still a minority, exquisite beyond words. There is more microbial life in a teaspoon of soil than there are humans who have ever lived, all counted together. My heart is sick and heavy and I don’t know how to drag us to the point where how we live remembers that.

  • sun crema

    Sunday. Drive down to the beach. Past all the worlds. Seaworld, Dreamworld, Movieworld. This tiny horseshoe strand was a favourite of mine. Now to get to it you have to round a dozen roundabouts: long miles of wilderness which now are smooth resorts. At the mouth of the bay a smooth cafe stands. It is full with people in smooth shoes and clothes. The irons have entered their souls. Only a few dozen are on the beach itself, or in the ocean, the water and sand rough on their skin. Years before, the beach would be full, the cafe empty. As we come down the hard-trod beach bridge with our feet scritching the yowling hot dry soft sand a girl comes up past us, body folded round her swimsuit the way a skin forms on sour yoghurt, smooth youth creased and jiggling like old age, her eyes down, her thumb ardently scrolling the smooth glassy surface of the palm-sized computer which gives her a mirror, I suppose, of who she is on this wildly sunny day on this hidden beach between the shaggy headlands and behind the smooth cafe. She has bought a lifetime season ticket to Phoneworld. She is never alone, but she’s always alone. Oblivious and knowing behind her the surf brings in its trays of crema.

     

     

  • so little, so long

    We say, they have so little, yet they complain so little. They have so much suffering and stress, yet they smile so much. Secretly we think, I think, That’s because they feel things less. Otherwise the difference would rub intolerably. Secretly we must think, the smiles mean they need less: we deserve all this.

    Imagine someone living in a long row of tents between two countries. Imagine them imagining a mansion, overspilling with one unhappy person who is home alone, with the maid, the cleaner, can’t count it all, a lottery winner to whom a lot means but a little. Imagine that lonely pioneer of loneliness is on the moon, left behind, shut out of the endlessly imagined Gatsby parties, a liner of communion which steams by while they are on their fur-lined raft. Once again they go to the fridge, open the two doors on the rows of shoes, can’t count and don’t count, roaming their overfilled unfulfilled life like a coin in a bloated cow’s belly. Or so we might imagine.

    Isn’t it amazing how bright the children smile? They have a sack filled with rags and are kicking it. Children are easy to love, like foetuses. The first tenet in an advice column “how to tell if your children are spoilt” was: do they find it difficult to enjoy themselves? Does nothing seem to make them happy?

     

  • Survival Day

    Survival Day gleanings. This is what I cleaned out of my bag after we got home. Started out to hear the speeches and to march, ended up with our hearts broken and opened up all over again, robust in anger and delicately rejoicing, heart flooded like mangrove roots with a myriad various Indigenous faces including people I’d had warm contact with in the past and hadn’t thought of as Indigenous until we met again in this context, fringes of greenery shaping the old wood lace under the eaves of beautiful Jagera Hall every time I looked up to give my mind a digestion break from John Pilger’s movie, bellyful of sweet crumbling smooth bunya nuts and lilipillies, whole handsful of intensely beautiful gleanings from overhead and underfoot. The ones that caught my eye today were the colours of blood, resistance, kidney, heart, lung, fury. Oh and we brought home a bird. Just a tiny baby wattle bird, who fell down out of the overhanging tree onto a lane of the road as we passed and was kept alive in a sun hat filled with grasses and fed on pulped lilipilly and coaxed to take little beaky sips of water fed to it on a stalk of grass. He seemed to bond instantly with my companion and rode home serenely – we walked, under starlight and bursts of fireworks – on an outstretched finger. By the time we had reached the river he was asleep, with his scrappy head tucked into his fledging feathers, bobbing gently as we went along. Yesterday he rode around the house on his new, male, mum’s shoulder and began to let out lovely peeps. Today he is feeling more adventurous and is being given flying lessons, in German, by a man with no feathers, no beak, and no wings.

  • daintily, handily

    daintily, handily

    All the noisiness of sun. To a German, the crashing in the bamboo at 3am sounds like a housebreaker festooned with plastic bags. How could a little possum make so much noise? Why must the birds all shriek? When you lift a painting off the wall, exposing a transparent lizard, who exposes his heart lungs and liver to the world but will dart away into hiding when his cover’s lifted, that’s a shock. A person with no fear of local pushers, addicts, drunken punk louts, untethered giant dogs and bad buskers can be remarkably unsettled by the rustling and crashing that midnight brings when it’s hot tagsüber. “During the day,” I say, “everyone’s sleeping. Then at night when it cools down, they all come out to live their lives.” Handily our small grey cat has arranged herself across his extended hand to illustrate this point. She yawns her pink yawn.

  • the dogover nation

    To the person who decided that every cafe, restaurant, waiting room, bus station, bus, and public space had to have a television screen in it: I disagree with you.

     

  • ring Tony

    Phone call from Berlin, around two months ago:

    My mum: yes, and so

    Me: yes, and then if we

    Mum’s phone: buh bah dah da bump..

    Me: is that your ringtone? Why do you have ‘Bad to the Bone’?

    Mum: what?

    Me: George Thorogood and the Destroyers

    Mum: who?

    Me: bad to the bone. Buh bah dah da bump. Bad to the bone. Buh bah dah da bump. B-b-b-b-bad. Bad to the bone.

    Mum: oh well it was the only one I can hear.

     

  • a little brown bottle wrapped in paper

    a little brown bottle wrapped in paper

    Went into the corner store. “Do you have olives?” “What?” “Olives.” “Oil?” “No, um, olives.” “What is that?” “It’s a kind of… tiny vegetable. I’m looking for the kind that come pickled in a jar.” “What would you do with it?” “Well, you might put it in a drink.” “Is it a medicine?”

    Actually, yes. Went into the bottle shop. “Do you have vermouth?” “Vermouth?” He looks it up on his computer. “We do! It’s over here.” Pulls out the one brand of vermouth they sell. Ratchets the other bottles up to the front of the shelf. Behind me I hear another woman come in and ask. “Do you have vermouth?” I show her my bottle. “Are you making martinis?” “Yes!” she says, “we looked them up on the internet.” “Oh, excellent. Cheers!” “What are you putting in yours?” she wants to know. “Apparently you can put bitters in.” “What is bitters?” my companion wonders. The two of us combine to try ineffectually to explain. “It’s made in Trinidad and Tobago,” she says. “It comes in a little dark bottle wrapped in paper,” I say. We won’t be putting any in our martinis so I guess he’ll just have to keep wondering, for now.