the dark and disappearing under trees, and he understands them as fellow spirits, outside theories and paradigms, as souls sifting their priorities in gifted splendour. Then he feels it is safe to get down. It is wonderful in the park at night walking through smells of dampness and hearing nightbirds splash in the ponds and shriek in the paperbark trees. Burton feels his footfalls rippling out through this fresh new world. A kind of rumbling border surrounds the acreageâthe whole of the city generating conflict and interplay, burning electricity oblivious to the meaning of waste. Meantime from inside the park a bubble of peace rises into the clear, cool sky.
Burton is happy naming simple things as they make grabs for his attention. Leaf. Dog. Possum. Rat. Euphorically he dances on the damp asphalt until he reaches the Woollahra gates. There he turns back and looks in under the trees and smiles to himself remembering the contents of his pack. The book of Leonard Cohen lyrics, all old half-grasped feeling and melody. Nibbles of nuts. Keys. Money. Credit cards. He barely understands their function any more, except that by forfeiting them to the night he makes a bargain, and he is no longer ours.
âI started reciting âDeep Wellâ, the lines where spirit
trees writhed in cool white limbs and budgerigar â¦â
I SEE the fettlersâ train snaking through the sandhills. The iron tracks straighten, the train gathers speed entrancing a man who hangs from the rattling window frame going farther with each jump of the rails into his dream of Australia, with a sense of always returning.
He canât let go adjectives from his mindâthe red-purpled land, the blood-deep desertâthe red fire beetles winking from the firebox as day goes down and the train goes racing for the dark mountains across the desert floor.
Bearded figures, Italian prisoners of war, stand up from the rails and get out of the way. Ranked beside the train they call out greetings. The man leans out shouting, Come sta! And the blurred faces call back, Bene! Bene! And he looks back at them receding, filled with emotion at their shared exile and the way the desert receives them.
He leaves the railway camp making emotional farewells to the boozers and brawlers sharing his lonelinessâgetting away early in cold starlight, out to the road which recedes in perspective, and where the looped wires of the overland telegraphline are highlighted before the burnt-red coming day. His heart is raked by the cry of black cockatoos. He longs for words of barbarous beauty equivalent to the bird calls. A tall, strong-shouldered man with a mop of Shelleyan hair, eyes rolling like a confused stallionâs, with a swaying gait, he was trained to the saddle in stock camps since boyhood and in boyhood was taken by the ringers in those camps and thrown on a blanket and raped.
Far north, he wakes in a shack on the banks of the Roper River, props himself on an elbow and lets morning light fill his head through gaps in the walls. Flame of blossom strikes him, crimson flowers of mistletoe falling like a womanâs hairâbut he asks, was ever woman as beautiful as this gum, standing with smooth white limbs against the pure opal sky?
At night the tree is a dark cloud and he listens to cicadas drumming. She is the girl of a scattered tribe, the dark cloud holding a secret of the land. She is one of the people he sees, and humbly bows to, his mortal vision so intense it would drag him into another state of being if he wasnât a human being and thus held like a spirit in a rock.
They are tall, long-haired visitors in their own country standing off and holding spears. He sees them from the windows of the workersâ train; sees them in a wrecked homestead where they providentially find shelter from the wind, their campfire burning like a star at rest among ruins of the fallen stone. He wants to find his own country as they do when they come in
Burton is happy naming simple things as they make grabs for his attention. Leaf. Dog. Possum. Rat. Euphorically he dances on the damp asphalt until he reaches the Woollahra gates. There he turns back and looks in under the trees and smiles to himself remembering the contents of his pack. The book of Leonard Cohen lyrics, all old half-grasped feeling and melody. Nibbles of nuts. Keys. Money. Credit cards. He barely understands their function any more, except that by forfeiting them to the night he makes a bargain, and he is no longer ours.
âI started reciting âDeep Wellâ, the lines where spirit
trees writhed in cool white limbs and budgerigar â¦â
I SEE the fettlersâ train snaking through the sandhills. The iron tracks straighten, the train gathers speed entrancing a man who hangs from the rattling window frame going farther with each jump of the rails into his dream of Australia, with a sense of always returning.
He canât let go adjectives from his mindâthe red-purpled land, the blood-deep desertâthe red fire beetles winking from the firebox as day goes down and the train goes racing for the dark mountains across the desert floor.
Bearded figures, Italian prisoners of war, stand up from the rails and get out of the way. Ranked beside the train they call out greetings. The man leans out shouting, Come sta! And the blurred faces call back, Bene! Bene! And he looks back at them receding, filled with emotion at their shared exile and the way the desert receives them.
He leaves the railway camp making emotional farewells to the boozers and brawlers sharing his lonelinessâgetting away early in cold starlight, out to the road which recedes in perspective, and where the looped wires of the overland telegraphline are highlighted before the burnt-red coming day. His heart is raked by the cry of black cockatoos. He longs for words of barbarous beauty equivalent to the bird calls. A tall, strong-shouldered man with a mop of Shelleyan hair, eyes rolling like a confused stallionâs, with a swaying gait, he was trained to the saddle in stock camps since boyhood and in boyhood was taken by the ringers in those camps and thrown on a blanket and raped.
Far north, he wakes in a shack on the banks of the Roper River, props himself on an elbow and lets morning light fill his head through gaps in the walls. Flame of blossom strikes him, crimson flowers of mistletoe falling like a womanâs hairâbut he asks, was ever woman as beautiful as this gum, standing with smooth white limbs against the pure opal sky?
At night the tree is a dark cloud and he listens to cicadas drumming. She is the girl of a scattered tribe, the dark cloud holding a secret of the land. She is one of the people he sees, and humbly bows to, his mortal vision so intense it would drag him into another state of being if he wasnât a human being and thus held like a spirit in a rock.
They are tall, long-haired visitors in their own country standing off and holding spears. He sees them from the windows of the workersâ train; sees them in a wrecked homestead where they providentially find shelter from the wind, their campfire burning like a star at rest among ruins of the fallen stone. He wants to find his own country as they do when they come in
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