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
In Flowerdale
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 have no ambition
to see a goodlierman.Barney snaps a blade of grass and pokes at a hole
in the old eucalypt up near the house. Closer, he tells me,
and, like tuning ancient radios, there's a funny sort of buzz,
sugar gliders trickled pink by his cat's whisker.
In the old landrover he will not sell his neighbour for parts
a family of pardalotes is nesting, chicks chuckling
in the wispy chassis … and there! like a leaf swooping
(Did you see him?) an adult bird too quick for me.
Buddy, buddy! he calls, sprinkling maggots of cheese,
and shiny-in-blue-sequin wrens come hop-skip-and-jump
like he's an Oz St Francis. He takes me this morning
into the Bush, a place of the spirit. It's a kind of initiation,
there's privilege to it, the steep descent into Quartz Creek
down to a green tribe of man ferns it belongs to,
then steeply out again to an immensity of sky.
He tells me stories of black fish, of duke witty's chirrupings,
Hank and Loch his brothers in the warm-sitting-around-comfy
feel of seventy years ago in Flowerdale when Kay his Dad
smoked a sagacious pipe and Mum translated Greek.
Where's morning gone? he asks, then quickly says Or has it?
wishing and making me memories too. For it seems the man
tolerates only love round here. There are good sons
in the paddocks with the sturdy cattle … but I also see
a dead cow's hooves poking the hugeness of the Flowerdale sky
and there, against a fence, aborted calves with eyes that say
we had our chance in this Edenic Flowerdale but just
missed out. I listen to his quiet talk of being buried here
beneath the silver birch he planted and there's
an OK-ness to it. So Barney here's to you,
it's been a privilege, an honour and a joy. As we in Liverpool
most definitely say, god bless ye owld gums is gold!
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Cutting the Clouds Towards , pp. 44 - 45Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1999