~ falls the shadow

It’s a demanding old life, is it not?

Things have been riotous, strange and extreme. I’ve been challenged with calamity, yet somehow, from the chaos, with the help of friends and family, using resources I didn’t know I possessed, I’ve been able to confront the encroaching darkness - just by living my life.

In fact, it’s turning out to be a wildly interesting year. The Ears reunion. Who could have predicted that? I’m spending more time with old friends than I could possibly have forseen, and no friend is better than an old friend. Richard is re-releasing Dogs in Space, a mere two weeks prior to the show, together with We’re Living on Dog Food, a 'doco that explores the making of the film and the scene in early Eighties Melbourne which inspired it. Providence walks before me, seeding my trail with stardust. I’ve even scored a ticket to the opening night of the film festival.

And the granite-bodied men of St Kilda Football Club have won fourteen games without a loss and look set to challenge for the premiership.

And the light of my life, my daughter, is happy and growing. We’ve just returned from three days in Bairnsdale with Tosie and her son Kyowa, who is just a little older than Polly. I really needed the time; I was getting a little frayed at the ends, and Polly loves Kyowa, and vice versa.



We saw fat koalas lodged in the forks of trees, regarding us with the inscrutable expressions of the profoundly stoned. We rode a ‘fairy’ to Raymond Island. We explored a secret place - a mossy rainforest gully of tumbled granite boulders in the deep shadows of water gums. We had dinner at the property of an old bushie called Mick, where the smell of burning bracken was as evocative as Proust’s biscuit, where we turned a giant fallen stringybark into an adventure playground, and where I explained that Betelgeuse, in the constellation of Orion, has recently reduced in size by fifteen percent and may be about to explode, turning our nights into day for the first time in a millennium. Elsewhere, we fed crimson rosellas and king parrots. I saw a bronzewing pigeon, the kind which leaps into flight with a characteristic flapping sound caused by the particular shape of its wings. I saw a male satin bowerbird, the kind that collects blue things for its prospective lovers.



But, almost inevitably, I received a call from Melbourne. My wife, who was not too well to begin with, was in hospital, having taken a decided turn for the worse. As with my legal problems, I can’t be too straightforward here. Suffice to say another heavy weight of responsibility and potential stress has been hefted upon my shoulders.

But never mind. No fear.

Many don’t make it through times like this. Often, it's simply the pressure that defeats them. Tosie’s brother recently died of a heart attack. He was in his early forties .He was brought low by the stress of a bitter struggle with the evil mother of his young daughter. Me, I will work towards tranquility. I know there is only so much I can do. There is no profit in savaging myself over things I can’t control. And in the end ...?

With the beautiful people on my side, I know it will turn out well.

related posts:
~ red in tooth and claw, ~ aerobones, ~the den of nargun

~ red in tooth and claw

My small family succeeded in breaching the psychological barrier constraining movement beyond the city of Melbourne. We traveled east with Emely McCord to a region near Bairnsdale and a house of mud brick and galvanised iron occupied by her mother Tosie and her younger brother Kyowa.

Inevitably, when Tosie sees Kyowa playing with Polly, she smiles dreamily and says, “They will grow up to be lovers”. Her tone… sounding not like a prediction… but a natural truth…


In recent years, the Rainbow Lorikeet has become common in my zone and I am continually surprised by the beauty of its plumage. But I had forgotten that the Eastern Rosella can be equally as striking - and there were plenty of these at Tosie’s, perched along the barbed wire fences, coats plumped up in the cold. They are tremendously beautiful birds.


Also, there were Welcome Swallows, darting and weaving over the bracken and the long dry grass, snatching up insects on the wing. Such is the manner of its flight, it is almost impossible to get a decent look before the bird spirals, dives or immelmanns in precisely the least expected direction. They flutter more than fly, like supercharged butterflies.

[If it isn’t obvious by now, I’m engaged in a bird obsession. I can tell you that in the wetlands adjoining the Grey Creek there are Purple Swamphens, Eurasian Coots, Pacific Black Ducks, Chestnut Teals and Dusky Moorhens. In the habitat at the end of the street I’ve seen Australian Wood Ducks, Laughing Kookaburras and Crested Pigeons. In our yard, somewhere high in a huge peppermint gum, there is a Tawny Frogmouth and in a park not two kilometres distant, so it is said, there resides a Powerful Owl.]

Walking through the fields surrounding Tosie’s property, we encountered the deep workings of dour wombats, the skeleton of a cow and the freshly dismembered carcass of a wallaby; [on the end of one bloody, discarded leg, there was a talon worthy of a velociraptor].

By a remote near-empty dam, we discovered two turtle shells, not far from each other. Each was about six inches in length. Desiccated leather curled away to reveal sutured white bone. Little white stumps extruded where the legs and head had been. Naturally, we brought them back home.


“Oh, you found those guys,” was Tosie’s reaction.

It transpired that the turtles had a history.

Emely had been first to discover them, shortly after their demise. Tosie had passed by their remains more recently.

Now, the important thing about Tosie is her deep affinity with Nature. She is in league with it, coiled within it, witness to its cryptic secrets. When she speaks, she sometimes sounds like a flaked out hippy, but her understanding of the bush and its underlying principles is profound. One would be foolish to discount her opinions on the subject.

I asked if the turtles - akin to some testudinal Burke & Wills - had almost made it to the dam, only to perish on the brink. Or had they died shortly after departure?

Drought in the region, Tosie explained, had caused the few remaining bodies of water to become overcrowded. With turtles. Conditions in the dam would have been very poor. Few resources. High levels of disease, toxicity. Our two ill-fated specimens would have been asked to leave by the others. To find somewhere else, or die. To sacrifice themselves for the survival of the community.

“Do turtles mate for life?” asked my wife, characteristically.

“I don’t know,” answered Tosie.


“What language did the turtles use?” I asked.

“The language of the forest,” answered Tosie.

Immediately, I thought of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening. And of The Swarm by Frank Schätzing.

I accept that it is within the realm of possibility for the forest to have a language, and certainly I would like it to have one …

Subtle chemical signals in the currents of the air, passed from leaf to caterpillar, from wombat bolus to dung beetle and thence to the blind nuzzling head of the earthworm …from gnarled parrot beak to witchetty grub … from pollen cloud to the tarsal combs of the bee … from diatom to rotifer to amoeba … from water-skimming spider to - at last - the murky consciousness of the turtles.

“Honourable citizen of the terrestrial biome. It has fallen to you [and your husband] to make the ultimate sacrifice.”

A signal, a demand, an imperative to which all creatures submit, which every organism, sentient or not, may interpret. To actually term it a language may be a superposition of our own thought patterns over something very different. Anthropomorphism may be the applicable word. Perhaps, the turtles were subject to something more simply described as the law of nature, red in tooth and claw.


The following week, Polly took one of the turtle shells to school for show-and-tell. Doing her best to explain ‘the language of the forest’, my wife penned a short explanatory note for Mrs Hobson to read aloud. I sealed the shell in plastic, predicting a possible violation of Education Department hygiene strictures. Indeed, it was redolent with ongoing decay and I didn’t want to unnecessarily put the children off turtles. Perhaps forever …

ps: Tessie, the little dog in the picture of the dam, was run over and killed a week after we left. She had gotten herself under the wheels of Tosie's car as it backed out the driveway. Tessie was one of the sweetest dogs I think I've ever met.

~ a glance from a silver gull

~ he and eve

Erin and Henrik were married in a blustering wind on a beetling ocean cliff. Behind them the sky was a startling unreal blue, streaked with long clouds which were beginning to glow orange with the coming sunset. On the shore beneath, waves beat themselves to a chaos of spume on dark jagged rocks. With only a fragile wire fence between the swooning couple and certain bloody death on the murderous crags below, one could be forgiven for mistaking the ceremony for a suicide pact - if it wasn’t for all that love in the air. And this particular agglomeration of freaks - at least one of whom was in a mouse costume - were plainly no run-of-the-mill Death Cult.

To be brief, it was by far the wildest wedding I’ve seen. At one point, to my bewilderment, I found myself getting quite weepy. There were origami envelopes with messages of love, communal gospel singing and, I’m told, a streaker - a large dark skinned man whom I believe was aiming to cause a ruckus. Instead, Lynne gave him a couple of dinner plates to use as nipple protectors. Others nodded in greeting before he scaled the back fence and evaporated into the darkness.

As the light faded the scene grew ever more Gothic. The shadows lengthened, the sea raged and the wind grew piercing. Stark against the brute elements, Heathcliff and Catherine stood hand in hand … but Heathcliff was wearing a top hat so lofty it resembled a chimney and Cathy could not resist flaunting her arterial red vinyl hotpants. What cool vibes there were. I loved how Erin just kept kissing Henrik the whole way through. ‘Nobody told me I was limited to one kiss’, she said.

Erin and Henrik, like are rusted-on arty types they are, turned their wedding into a three day carnival on the Mornington Peninsula and christened it The Love Fest. Polly and I travelled down on the Friday, just prior to the wedding itself, with the carless Lynne in tow. We pitched our tent and erred off the edge of the world for two dreamy sparkling days.

Almost immediately, Polly found a friend – Pepita – the daughter of some organic farmers from New Zealand, and somehow, after all that time in the sun, in a triumph of parenting, her cheeks were the only part of her the slightest bit burnt. On the Sunday, she was brave enough to spend eight minutes on a yacht before freaking out over its sloshing movements …

I had promised to do a reading of my egg poem [the ovist] but things were so bleached out and hyper-real that I couldn’t imagine actually doing it. After all, I only knew a handful of the people there and I was somewhat monged out and Erin’s father was doling out quantities of his excellent Buckley’s Beer … Yet I held to my word and it proved to be a pretty good performance. Raving, gibbering absurdity on an idyllic Australian beach … I’d hoped to use an emu egg as a prop, but had to settle for normal one … probably funnier in the end … I’m going to do another performance of it at Lynne’s Snatches show at RMIT.

The whole crowd was dressed in white that day and at one point we clustered together while Henrik took a series of 3D lenticular photos. I had unearthed a Najee suit direct from the Eighties and could easily have been mistaken for Simon Le Bon.

Such a fabulous weekend. Children dragging huge flaccid branches of kelp. Mirror ball helmets. Lou Lou, a circus girl from Cologne. Tierra del Fuego plagued by black and white rabbits, their rivers clogged by feral beavers from fur farms of long ago. A man who took too much viagra and could only see the colour blue. Rich kids in the Mediterranean getting themselves microchipped so they can be scanned as they enter clubs. Great permanent piles of frozen penguin shit in the Antarctic with a tart, fishy smell.

Lynne told us there are several categories of children at kindergarten: pushers, biters, pinchers, scratchers and Chinese burners. She asked Polly, ‘which are you?’ ‘All of them,” Polly replied.

~ the smiling ghosts

My regular visits to Queensland began during the early 1980s when my band began touring. The first thing I found there was Nikki Lambert. She worked for CBS records, decorating record shop windows with posters and album artwork - though she also painted beautiful lavish canvases of her pets, and led a secret life of crime.

She was older than me, but looked sixteen. She was tan and lithe and spirited, and spoke with the broadest strine I had ever heard from a woman. She became my window into the outlandish northern regions, and remains so twenty-five years later.

Her house in Mullet St, Kenmore was a tumbledown queenslander, haunted by lazy, smiling ghosts and held together with pink-flowering bougainvillea. You could lie in bed there and watch the coming and goings of paper wasps from their nest in the ruin of the ceiling. Downstairs there was a gargantuan children’s python in the bathroom walls. Called Clancy [of The Overflow], sections of it were always visible, here and there, among wires and pipes and beams, but never its head. The toilet cistern had a broken lid and in it lived green tree frogs - sometimes, on entering, you would see as many as three lined along the front, forelegs hooked over the rim, their sweet eyes delving.

Mullet St was an idyll, but it’s all suburban now. It evaporated with the inexorable expansion of Brisbane.

Nikki became a solid friend and occasional lover. In time, she was to descend into various hells, but ultimately floated to the surface on Stradbroke Island with her daughter Sidonie. In the years I’ve known her, I have never seen her less than enthusiastic about anything - except drudgery - and she is a genuine seer through of projects. Nikki will almost always ignore a person’s given name and replace it with one of her own devising. In her company I have met Dead Tom, Snapper, Kaptain Kronk, Graderhead, Twenny, Brasso, Lizard, ad infinitum … As you enter her universe, you are renamed, as Adam did the beasts.

Nikki is also the author of one of my favourite quotes - “There’s something deeply relaxing about chickens, don‘t you think?”

As I write, in her yard on the island, there are at least four full-grown hens with a dozen chicks scrabbling in the mulch, clucking peaceably to themselves. Nikki will never be without chickens - or, indeed, a menagerie of dogs, cats, horses, birds, guinea pigs… In that past she has told me she judges people by their interactions with animals.

I have a lovely table beneath a blazing poinsettia tree at which to work. The drums of doom are fading already, the fear abates, the paranoia withers into the breeze. I just hope I have enough time here to really reset my spirit … before I lurch once more into the breach.