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
Threads
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
1858: under what she thought
Wagnerian doom, the curse of wandering,
she was, at forty-six, prepared
to brave another change:
Twamley (with several more to come)
the latest humiliating move, the sixth
in fifteen years —miles back from the road
along a grinding track — she christened with
her Brummy maiden name, as I suspect,
to make a point about control, as if
sympathetic magic might
just stabilise their lives.
Cambria and Riversdale, alas,
each with their pretty gardens, now
hopelessly gone, the inheritance lost
with three out of her four boys
(sixteen, twelve, and nine) alive
(one a sickly child), both husband
(whose single asset was
a silver tongue) and wife at loggerheads.
1995: we dusted up the track on Prosser's Plains
to find the house. Two yapping dogs
ran figures-of-eight around the car. Ayoung
woman fetched a grandad-gnome from hoeing
the vegetable patch to tell us how
a bolting horse had crippled him and how
at eighty-six he took his time and would not
pose for photographs. Had it not been
for eucalypts you'd have sworn it was an English Spring
along the Downs, so green the undulating fields.
Here in a rain forest at the back of beyond
Louisa Anne sent Charles to work at politics,
and here they told us things not found in print,
Charles's love of rum and of the sealing wax
(still there) she'd used to fix
spidery filaments across the cellar door.
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- Information
- Cutting the Clouds Towards , pp. 52 - 53Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1999