Wild Sovereign Development Site

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  • two men took everything away

    Two men next door with an FM radio addiction came this morning and took half the lovely garden away. Distressed by the noise at first I went over to the fence in my rumpled tent of hair to ask them would they mind turning the music off. “Turn it down?” one guy called back, raising his head from the battered rusted skip they were filling with sawn trunks. They both wore identical dusty boots and ankle petticoats of puckered nylon. “Off would be wonderful,” I yelled back, waving my hand at the new house to show them, “I’m just… Right there.”

    I know asking such a question I have no right to it, it is merely a staining imposition, we have now a right to noise and sexual explicitude and self-expression and sweet silence is a concession, embarrassing to want, awkward to ask for. And I remember being of an age and golden brownness when such men would do such a thing, just to please me.

    They turned it off and I went back indoors to my page. This afternoon the machinery all stopped and I went outside in the pining light, carrying the cat. The next-door yard looks plucked and shorn. The big white house stands exposed with its weatherboards stained where the tiny claws of vines have clutched at it so long. All around the water tank bushes are slashed to sticks, where little purple flowers used to drop on the mesh over the dark reservoir and geckos rested, pulsing their throats.

    This garden was a repository in my mind of olden spaciousness, leafy tranquility, domain of clover and birds and bees, privacy. This was the garden I hid in when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, puberty had me in its prickly ferocious embrace and solitude was the only real empire of mine. This garden was ours then, we planted those trees, I have watered in those shrubs and bent over the ground covers and lost things belonging to me in its grasses: thoughts, ideas, whole afternoons, rustling and resting and waving things.

    I thought how the trees seemed to belong to themselves, not to anyone human, and wondered why ‘our’ garden, long ago sold to this nice bluff man who smokes on the verandah at night and who likes everything to be pared and pruned like a fruit basket for hospital, seemed not in fact to belong to him the minute he set out to cut it. I told myself, I grew up there, though this is in fact not true, much of that was done on an island well north of here, itself a fruit basket, itself a hospital. There is a camphor laurel, unwelcome intruder but so leafy, so green, so generously spreading and which has the long-ago beams of our teenaged treehouse buried in its trunk. I put the cat up on a high branch where she could see into both properties. I said: this was back before real estate investment spread its cold dry hands around even the smallest, most natural town and took our homes from us.

     

  • plain clothes police

    This cafe installed in a loading bay has floor-length open windows, I am sitting with my back to the sun reading an ambitious local free paper. It has a row of Brisbaneites each standing holding their sign, the sign of what they’d love best to see, the signs of the kind of world they want. Invariably, or infinitely variably, it is a form of ‘everyone accepted for themselves’ or ‘a world without prejudice’ or ‘an end to war’. However underneath the idealism are pragmatic and tousled lists of self-love, love in the most measly sense: what I’m wearing? Label X jacket, shoes by Label Y. Even the youngest, even the oldest, are able to parse their outfits breezily, ‘a loafer,’ ‘a pant.’ Where I like to eat? Groovy Bar Z.

    Last week we read an earlier issue of this publication in the same two seats in the loading bay, then as now a cold breeze running through the crooked, open space like large, stately passages of cool sea water. A fly tried to drown in my eggcup of honey, I fished him out with a teaspoon. Flung him out into the sunny breeze and he flew free, a kite trail of honey sprinkling the grass. Moments later my companion nudged me: Butterfly! Indeed, as if out of thin blue sky, her brown wings velvety light and tremoring she supped the round drops of honey. She laid her wings open in an ecstasy. I scooped a little more out and flung it wide, see if I could make her dance. She did.

    A police car pulled up under the tree. A man in casual clothes got out. He was unshaven and looked rumpled and sweaty. He slammed the door then thought better of it, reached back in to retrieve something, a folder, locked up behind himself and came past the long draughty doorway. I began to laugh and pointed past him at the police car, accusingly. “Did you steal that?” “No,” he said, surprised, good-humoured. “I know,” I said, “just it would be so funny.” I cracked myself up. My tablemate reported the off-duty officer was still laughing when he crossed past the open passageway which is their galley kitchen and which ends in a slice of street. Two men came in and sat across from each other at our next table. The table was white-legged with a polished wooden top; of a series of mismatched chairs the guy in neon pink singlet drew out the one painted egg-yolk orange. I went over to them and crouched by their table. They looked startled. “I’m sorry to interrupt. I have this friend who’s obsessed with orange. Would you mind if I took a photo of your shirt and the back of that chair?” He waved his hand and the other guy barely smiled. “Sure, knock yourself out.” But twenty minutes later when they had finished talking and I had filled three more pages of my notebook they got up to leave and stopped off with us. “Did you get it?”

  • tell me in tongues

    Yesterday three of us went along to a workshop whose purpose is play. They say, there is no wrong way of doing this. If you run into someone whilst crossing the room, say “Thank you.” This saying of thank you rather than sorry has transformed my street life. I no longer apologize simply for being here nor do I feel they owe me apologetics either. In this workshop we had to sit in partners and explain to each other something using a made-up language, or any sounds: “the last film you saw,” decided the convenor, 70. My mind flooded with The Great Beauty. I described it to my companion in a torrent of what doesn’t exist. Now, it does. The room was filled with people’s sounds and the great flooding windows stood open. Afterwards she said to me her dark eyes glittering with tears “I was nearly crying. That film was just so moving.”

  • heel and toe, thyself

    Jogging up the stairs through a fresh afternoon breeze past which all I can hear is shredding treetops, dense with roaring leaves, the wind pouring through and through and through them, a movement: a little hand catches my eye. A little furry hand, neat grey, ending in claws, extended past the upholstered arm of the couch, the rest of its owner snuggled away in couch’s lap. The hand is the size of my thumb and I know in whom it ends. This little girl is luxuriously cleaning and grooming herself, rounding the corner I see her toes stretch out hard in an ecstasy and then contract. She doesn’t think, it’s such a beautiful afternoon. Should I really be lying here all day just licking myself? I haven’t got a thing done since this morning. I think she’s thinking, Mmmmm.

  • she-moon

    Can there be anything more magnificent than clouds passing, at night between us and the stars, unhurriedly and without pause passing from east to west like the sun. In the distant western hills a community of storm birds screeches and wheedles and spools and yearns. The visitor I brought back with me from Europe had never seen the Southern Cross. It took him a long time to see what I was pointing at, some weeks back, because it is famous and small and dim: a cross properly. Dame Southern Land. The reef, the trees, the ineffable quiet hills. All of the creatures who burrow along the branches or through soil here underneath my head. The long beach, the wrecked mountains, the pulse. I’ll fight for you.

  • biggles

    But it’s not bigotry, it’s just smallotry, littlotry. What’s happening in Australia this week, laws being rewritten to accommodate cruelty, underlines the unease I have always felt about the sneering term ‘political correctness’, which seems to me to substitute rules for real empathy. Once the heart enlarges enough that other people’s humanness can be, must be welcomed, respected, gratefully loved, there’s no desire any more to ‘get away with’ demeaning jokes, excluding language, the mummifying pariah fire that dries the occluded heart. Andrew Bolt, Tony Abbott, look deeper, look closer to home.

  • rustling and dark

    Last night I climbed into a tree that took me into its embrace. The saddle of the tree was high enough from the ground that I could draw my feet up and rest my forehead on its forehead, you know how trees do, and only the soft balance that is innate and the relatively large heft of spinning Earth in comparison with Earth’s fast spin kept me resting there. Me & tree, tree & me. Far away on the other side of the oval the lit windows of the little sports club shone all their inner information onto the dark pitch. Somebody was having a meeting and their backs turned to the long windows faced me. Underneath the boughs of the tree and around its skirts someone else, or maybe some of the same people, had planted monstera dark and rustly like elegant dinosaur hands. They had used a rotted horse manure or somewhere nearby hessian was rotting or somehow or other the tree smelt of horse. Stables and horse. Climbing a tree, crouching in its lowest branches, closing my eyes and smelling a scent of old stables was as high as I wanted to climb just then into such heaven as is available to us. That’s how it felt. The breeze moved around me like night, like a thousand little whispering hands.

  • we want our country back

    Most joyous demo/march I’ve ever been involved in. There was a sense of colourful exultation, a kind of rejoicing, a feeling of laughing at each others’ placards and of coming together to ridicule the ridiculous. So many intelligent, open facial expressions, so many cool handmade signs. Someone had made extra signs, proper ones on poles, and left them leaning on the corner of the old Treasury building for people to pick up: one of those said: YOU WORK FOR US. There was HOW DARE YOU, ABBOTT, HANDS OFF OUR WORLD HERITAGE. There was a family of three solemnly crossing the road every time the traffic stopped, holding high their placards so the waiting drivers could read them. Before the march, joyous reefs of cheers rose up during the distant speeches. The square was teeming and people stood thickly on the sidewalks on all sides, holding their signs. When we set off, an upper storey of more drunken Australians leaned over from the balcony of the Irish pub, cheering and clapping and unfurling huge flags. My friend dropped out to get a bit of shade and when we ran into each other again, she was exultant: there were people going past me for ten minutes!

    I fell back, attracted by the band. They had struck up a spurling tumultuous din and I boogied and jittered my way down shady Adelaide Street and back into the sun. I’ve never seen so many people lining the route of a march holding up their own signs: LET THEM LAND, LET THEM STAY, and HANDS OFF OUR COUNTRY. A guy up a tree rattled his sign and whistled and waved. A man propped against a light post held: WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CARING, SHARING AUSTRALIA? I ARRIVED AS A REFUGEE 26 YEARS BACK.

    Everywhere evidence of people’s sincerity and generosity. Four girls in front of us had on boat hats folded from newspaper. A bikie with a creamy white beard stood in front of his motorbike on his head and his big boots did the splits up in the air – his friends either side held up placards and everybody hooted and hollered. An eight year old boy had made his own fiercely vehement, illegibly penciled sign on a folded piece of paper studded with exclamation points and was wearing it paperclipped to his visor.

    Now, I hate marches. I’m shy and I don’t enjoy crowds. I find it mildly traumatic to be around mobs of angry people, even when I agree with them. But this was delicious from start to end. We rounded the corner back into the shade, there were colourful people filling the street as far forward and as far back as I could see. A man marched on crutches. A plump guy held a gigantic placard saying YOU KNOW THINGS ARE BAD WHEN EVEN I GET OFF THE COUCH. The feeling that ran through the whole gathering, for me, was that reasonable, kind, humane, open, curious-minded people have mobilized and sat up and said, man, this is an outrage, we’re putting a stop to it. Before all the dancing I was marching in hot aching tears: for my country, beloved and troubled occupation that has yet to face its own history. For the goodness and generosity in our hearts. For the inexplicable bold kind tyranny that fearless truth-telling and balanced perspective have over shady dealings, and dire manipulations, and all the kinds of politics that sink us into the stupidest and most destructive, dangerous kind of animal.

    “If this was in Germany,” my companion pointed out, “the entire route would be thickly lined with riot police in riot gear.” Instead, our friend told him, the Queensland police have been really supportive of this gathering. I could feel joy and celebration in the air and I felt we were all on the same page, same rambunctious rampage. A bewilderness of thrumming democracy, an entire array of people, a luscious diversity, a beautiful thing.

     

     

  • crimes against children and our rage

    A sex offender or child killer gets convicted. Somebody posts about it on Facebook. Their thread fills up with eager commentary, almost lip-smacking: Got the bastard! May he rot! Hope he gets raped inside, hope he gets torn. There’s a self-righteous tone of “He deserves his victim’s fate, only worse.” This vindictiveness and the sense of moral entitlement sicken me. “He” had “that” done to him, as a child, almost certainly, or has been damaged in some way. Where is the difference between him taking it out on another child and us punitively taking it out on him? What is the difference between what he put that woman through and what we are now so virtuously decreeing he should suffer? It feels Old Testament, feels primitive. I discuss this queasy feeling with my local German, who instantly gets it. He says: in Germany on Facebook there are many Nazi pages, real Nazis, always hiding behind this same rubric of “death penalty to child molesters.” It’s under the flag of “save our children,” he says. I’m uneasily reminded of anti-abortion extremists who believe that “baby murdering” doctors are so evil they can righteously be shot in cold blood. Nobody deserves rape. Nobody, not even a rapist. They deserve a heavier sentence than a smuggler. They deserve to be stopped and prevented and given at least the opportunity for rehabilitation. Some are unrepentant and can’t heal, true sociopaths who need locking away, for the safety of the community. But who are we as a people to gang up and declare that we are pure and they must suffer. 90% of our most commonly available porn according to an article I posted this week involves violence against “the talent” – usually women. Foulness and entitlement and a spoilt, rotten, egotistical, moralising snatching of what suits us best, no matter what, pervade our culture and are draining the teeming seas, lopping whole forests and beheading mountains, rupturing the very liveability of the Earth. You can’t fight fire with fire or fear with fear. The fantasy that all the evil can be projected cleanly onto one monstrous, identifiable stranger who is then locked away is a dangerous and to me deeply repugnant fallacy.

     

  • Orion’s belt

    Lying on my back on the sharp grass I saw the stars, some of them, saw Orion’s Belt, or some of him, he is who the Greeks once saw they say only instead of Orion arching his back I saw a giant dragonfly plummet like a biplane doomed in the direction of the distant soil, dragonfly ploughing through Orion’s chest, a kind of shield ingrown, gone awful. I have left it there and come inside.