~ I try my hand at oding

Down at the Grey Creek, since the rain, there is a super-abundance of dragonflies and their smaller cousins the damselflies. In my experience, there have never been so many. They are hovering, flashing bolts of iridescence, almost surreal in their variety, like echoes from J G Ballard’s The Crystal World. They are hypnotic, suggestive of fairy tales, and cousins to the butterflies in that they bring fanciful unexpected colour to the world. At times, as I sit observing them, I feel a shimmer of magic, glimpses of another world briefly seen and then gone.

I’ve set about cataloguing them. Thus far, among the damsel flies, blue ringtails are by far the most common, tails striped with sky blue and black. There are common flatwings, a dark metallic green with a lightning bolt on the thorax, and tiny prismatic aurora ringtails. The most populous dragonfly is the tiger-striped tau emerald with its bold green face. There are blue skimmers. And red wandering perchers.

I’m beginning to see variations in their behaviour. Their mode of flight and their habits can be used to identify them, but I’m not quite an oder yet. Oder? Oding is the habit of dragonfly watching. Many of them flit by too fast for my eye to track (They are among the fastest insects) and few stay still long enough for a photo, but I lucked out with this common flatwing ...


and this wondrous spider, which I’ve been unable to identify. Perhaps, if there is an arachnophile reading this, he or she may be so good as to shine a light on my ignorance ...?

~ preserved in amethyst

I’ve been experiencing a hiccup with Ambergris, the play I’m writing set on an island off the Queensland coast. [You could call it Almost-Stradbroke.] The problem involves the disappearance of a girl, Lily, about seven years old, who ventures off with some hay to feed a horse and never returns. The play is set three years later, and the issue of the girl’s disappearance is important, but not central.

I’ve hammered out most of the plot, but what happens to the girl has been a sticking point. I haven’t been able to work out an appropriate fate. It can’t be too boring. And it can’t be too weird. [I’ve resolved myself to making this play a little less bizarre than my previous work].

There’s a dog named ‘Chunk’ who was with Lily when she disappeared. He knows something; he keeps returning to a certain place, but no one can figure out why. I also want to suggest, only vaguely, that the girl was ‘taken’ by the island. [with no similarity whatsoever to ‘Lost’] She is innocent, a child of nature. You know what I mean. Fodder for The Green Man.

Anyway, I’m getting close now. I’m thinking about the preservation of corpses.

I was at the Melbourne Museum yesterday with Polly and Lynne, attending The Bee Circus – a weird composite of bee information seminar and circus skills exhibition, performed and devised by kids from circus school. [Polly loved it.]

If I am to preserve Lily, I must decide how. At the Museum there was a replica of some corpses from Pompeii, but that’s far too violent a death. There was a mummy too, but that’s artificial – although the natron is a possibility. [Natron is a mixture of sodium bicarbonate and sodium chloride mined by the Egyptians in the Natron Valley. Just as salt sucks red wine from carpets, natron sucks juices from corpses.]


I need something slow and painless. I’m thinking of having her explore a cave system. After falling asleep, she could be gently gassed by some venting of the Earth, some mysterious Gaian afflatus, or else drugged by a dripping mineral opiate.

Then the processes of nature would set to work. Recognising the unique beauty of her spirit, the Earth will opt not to putrefy her, but to preserve her - with moss, limestone, lichen, rust and roots. Or might she be bitten by a snake or a gold and turquoise spider with preservative for venom?

There are a lot of factual options for preservation. Certain soil conditions can be responsible. Aridity. Ice. The twelfth Pandito Hambo Lama achieved preservation through ‘a form of meditation known as shunyata, or emptiness’, [Fortean Times #184], ‘coupled with prolonged starvation and slow self-suffocation using a special belt that connects the neck with the knees in a lotus position’ [Wikipedia]

Doctor Glob’s ‘The Bog People’ is a book dear to my heart. It deals with the marvellously preserved corpses found in European peat bogs. ’There is a strange power in bog water,’ it is said, ‘which prevents decay’.

Perhaps some of the chemical processes may be useful, but not the violence. A lot of these Iron Age preservations were human sacrifices found with garrottes about their necks.


Nowadays we have cryogenics, formalin and Gunther von Hagens' ‘s plastination technique, but perhaps there are natural analogues. My fictional island is rich in minerals, after all …

The most intriguing thing I encountered at the museum was this:


Lynne made the connection. Somehow, she has always been able to track the way my mind wanders. I could easily imagine Lily encased in something like this formation of amethyst, flesh transmuted into gemstone, like something from the pages of Ballard’s The Crystal World.

~ The Devil's Hexagons

I woke in the late afternoon and was shambling into the lounge room when a huge barbed psychic harpoon tore through the wall, winged Jenny who was reclining on the couch, and buried itself deep in the opposite wall - where the surrounding brickwork changed in its nature to become a form of highly reflective crystal. The Slammerkin were silent, their vile scaled bodies huddled together in fear.

The air became dishwater, the surfaces around me softened, beginning the process of decay. The Deadly Spores were in the room - and in overwhelming force. A blitzkrieg so powerful there was nothing to be done but ride it out.

The crystalline substance was propagating, cracking along the fault lines, disgorging more crystal. Rays of light lanced randomly about the room, in searing colours from an impossible spectrum, seeking non-spore substance, seeking flesh.

Already, Jenny was speaking in an aberrant voice, of things she would not have thought to say prior to the attack. Wearisome things. Ghastly things painted to entice.

Myself, I could not speak, and impotently shook my head from side to side. All efforts resulted in an involuntary spastic flailing that left me weaker and further disassociated. I reached deep into myself for the power to resist, but found nothing. I was buffeted on an angry tide of those most deadly spores, the elite among their kind, the long-range infiltrators, called by some The Nebula.

We were locked in a crystal prison. I watched with resignation as the walls made popping and fizzing noises, briefly became glass, and then were lined with dripping hexagons, honeycomb, each cell oozing a viscous tan fluid sweeter than the mind could bear.

And I gorged on that irresistible slime, forgetting the sweet lies coming like a black stream from Jenny's mouth, forgetting myself, and my purposes.

Few can prevail against such an onslaught, but fortunately its very ferocity seemed to drain - at least temporarily - the distributed power of the Deadly Spores. There was, thankfully, time after that to regroup.

The following day, we participated in a small war council. Organised resistance to the Spores is rare. There are larger entities claiming to address the problem, but on the ground it is almost always a personal thing. Soldiers must fight alone, and are often too psychically compromised to risk friendly contact. Their tactics, also, are often too private to divulge.

But from time to time there are small, brief gatherings where intelligence may be shared, strategies evolved and heads bent in desperate prayer.

We left the council and lay together for a time listening to the new P J Harvey album, White Chalk. It seemed like we had made it through.

For one day, I continued to believe that we had survived the attack unmarred, but tonight I saw dark clouds in Jenny's eyes and a cold alien wisdom directing her desires.