Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Content
- Preface
- Foreword By John Lucas
- Prologue
- To Tasmania with Mrs Meredith
- On the Right Side of the Earth
- We meet at last
- I've been wanting to ask …
- Dear Mr Simpson
- Taking things in
- A Bummer
- Swanport
- And for the Record
- Fax from Launceston to Michael
- A Hasty Rejoinder
- Something you can't deny
- The Interview
- In Mount Field National Park
- News of a Death
- On the Answering Machine
- In Flowerdale
- Hadn't we the Gaiety?
- About as far as we can go
- Your art Mrs Meredith
- The Princess Theatre, Launceston, 18th October, 1995
- Threads
- Journal entry for Tuesday, 31st Oct.
- Dangerous I know
- A Poem for Wybalenna Chapel
- Making an Exhibition
- A Last Glimpse
- Epilogue
- Melbourne Central Cemetery
- Select Bibliography
A Hasty Rejoinder
from On the Right Side of the Earth
- Frontmatter
- Content
- Preface
- Foreword By John Lucas
- Prologue
- To Tasmania with Mrs Meredith
- On the Right Side of the Earth
- We meet at last
- I've been wanting to ask …
- Dear Mr Simpson
- Taking things in
- A Bummer
- Swanport
- And for the Record
- Fax from Launceston to Michael
- A Hasty Rejoinder
- Something you can't deny
- The Interview
- In Mount Field National Park
- News of a Death
- On the Answering Machine
- In Flowerdale
- Hadn't we the Gaiety?
- About as far as we can go
- Your art Mrs Meredith
- The Princess Theatre, Launceston, 18th October, 1995
- Threads
- Journal entry for Tuesday, 31st Oct.
- Dangerous I know
- A Poem for Wybalenna Chapel
- Making an Exhibition
- A Last Glimpse
- Epilogue
- Melbourne Central Cemetery
- Select Bibliography
Summary
I'm not recolonising, Mrs M, nor here
to put my words into your — nor
into the Island's — mouth,
nor to feel comfortable. I've seen
what's left of Port Arthur, have heard
the guide's hard hellhole narratives,
enough to make me feel
the sometime emptiness of love
and hatreds used to compensate.
Out in the blue harbour
the Isle of the Dead is always going to send
its ghostly stench inland.
I'm obliged of course to underwrite
the wonders of the place;
it's expected and it's right:
cliffs, crags, different-coloured birds,
landscape that's familiar-but-not-quite,
that makes me feel I've Star-Trek'd here,
will suddenly come to
in a staring seminar in Liverpool, babbling
of blue remembered hills and settlements
right out of Shane. In a one-horse store
a woman said ‘Everywhere you look's
a view.’ But views are history too.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Cutting the Clouds Towards , pp. 36Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1999