by John Clarke
And the Aunts. Always the Aunts. In the kitchen on the black-and-white photographed beach of the past, playing out the rope to a shared childhood, caught in the undertow and drifting.
And some numerous Uncles, wondering sometimes why they weren’t each other, coming around the letterbox to an attacking field in the Test match and being driven handsomely by some middle-order nephew, skipping down the vowelflattening pitch and putting the ball into the tent-flaps on the first bounce of puberty.
Robert Bowell
Bowell’s family owned Queensland, New South Wales and the part of Victoria north of Tasmania. He was not mad. Even a bit. At all. Really.
BURY MY HEAD AT WOUNDED KNEE
This damned debate I have, it slows
Me down, immobilises me,
Am I a Robert or a Bowell?
Is it me who’s making me
Important? Or the trick’s finessed
Perhaps by who I am. Because
I feel that when I do something
That’s genuinely me, unique
To me, outlandish, mad, so Robert,
That the reason I am doing
It is purely that I’m ME;
That maybe it is something that
The Bowells always do. It’s genes.
My parents. Did they do it? Is
It locked on to the DNA?
Would it be easier to do
Or not to do it? That’s the question,
Arm the sea of troubles and
Opposing by the end they take.
America, I doubt thee, let
Me weigh the Counts, there’s Burroughs, and
There’s me. We’re mad, we’re rich, we’re very
Dangerous, we’ve killed some women,
He his wife, I Jean, perhaps
Elizabeth but hey! we had
Some laughs though? Didn’t we? Why sure
We did. Barkeep, just hit me with
A shot of wry from time to time,
I won’t be long, this is important.
Didn’t we though? Some laughs? Oh maybe
Not in the mornings, sure, and not
The nights we went to hell but tell
Me sometimes, in the afternoon
Didn’t the little boy inside me
Smile at some impression that
Was recognised with pleasure by
The memory that I was trying to drown?
Larry Parkin
Larry, a crumpled and charming deep-voiced man who had normally just got off a train, was a member of ‘The Outfit’, a group which dominated postwar Australian verse. He had sex in 1963, before many of you were born.
MR PEACOCK
‘This was Mr Peacock’s room. He dwelt
In deepest fantasy, you never knew
Exactly who he was or how he felt,
As leader or with bullet-hole in shoe.
He might be someone else, de Gaulle, St John,
It changed so often we became confused,
He’d plan to win a prize, embark thereon,
Then have it offered to him and refuse.
This is where he slept, just over here,
Though what he did at night, you’d never know,
The sunlamps just provided a veneer,
Long haul, he thought embalming was the go.
The chair is where he’d leave his favourite book,
Was most particular it not be moved,
We heard it rumoured once he took a look,
But unsubstantiated; can’t be proved.
The night he did the deed he got back late,
He told us, around 3.30, maybe 4,
“The lads and I have just farewelled a mate.
Farewelled him from the 42nd floor.”
He’s gone from here of course, but he’ll be back,
We’ll be asked if we can house an ageing turk,
He’s smart enough to give himself the sack,
If it looks as if he’ll have to do some work.’
THIS BE THE CHORUS
They piss you off, your kids, I guess
They’re got at by these Freudian shits,
As if it’s our fault they’re a mess.
After all I’ve done for tits.
Vern Scanlon
Very big in the local RSL in Mackay, Vern has long been concerned with the major themes of twentieth-century writing: violence, the RSL and Mackay.
STANDING ORDERS
Some nights, after lights out,
I slip round to Bluey Nesbitt’s,
And after a few snifters,
We turn back the German advance.
Pulling the pins from six bread-rolls
With our teeth, we hurl them
Into the shed where moonlight assures us
A crack Panzer Division Victa Utility
Has been moved up on to our flank.
It’s dirty work
But someone’s got to do it.
DREAM
All those women who have not got
Beautiful breasts and great legs
And lovely soft sweet-smelling hair
One pace forward Betty Grable where the bloody hell do you think you’re going?
Miloslab Holden
Inventor, epidemiologist and poet. Originally from Geelong, Miloslab's family settled in Adelaide and became very prominent in linoleum. Miloslab studied medicine at Adelaide University and is a world authority on germs.
PATHOLOGY REPORT
The patient presented with a vague melancholy
Accompanied by some slight echolalia and lassitude.
Over the period of observation, being two or three hours
Patient developed full-blown regrets and ingested several
Tinctures of The Mixture, taken swiftly without ice or water.
Onset of coprolalia noticeable as elixir hit bloodstream,
Followed by some distillation of pupils and early Tourette’s,
With increased incapacity of muscular system
Culminating in attempt to perform section of ‘Danny Boy’
Beginning ‘But come ye back…’ followed by
Dysfunctional behaviour with regard to other sex,
Antiperistalsis, loss of speech, partial paralysis
And sleep on floor of wardrobe with mop on face.
Patient is aged forty-four, married, with three children.
Tests reveal no abnormality although subject
Could possibly do with singing lesson.
Patient has intermittent inflammation of the past.
Condition not uncommon in patient’s age-group.
No known cure at this stage although sufferers
Often experience only a chronic benign longing
And do not develop secondary infections. These are
Sometimes fatal and should be nipped in the bud.
Patient should avoid remembering whenever possible.
Anne Bonkford
Bonkford studied with Bowell and wasn’t mad either. At all. Her concerns are those of the self in daily life, particularly that of the east coast between Eden and Merimbula.
WHERE WAS JFK WHEN HE HEARD THAT I WAS SHOT?
One morning in 1962,
A beautiful woman, husky-voiced,
Married but not completely satisfied within three months
Fell in love with God in the supermarket
While she was looking at some sunglasses.
He was the one, she knew. That face.
Those eyes. This was it. She was gone.
She would have given her life for him.
‘Who are you?’ she asked.
‘I am Yahweh,’ he said.
‘What do you do?’ she said.
‘I am a creator,’ he said.
‘A creator?’ she said, ‘Really?
I’ve never seen you at the meetings.’
‘I am everywhere,’ he said.
‘I am a bit all over the place myself,’ she said.
‘I am the
light and the way,’ he said.
‘I’ll bet you are,’ she said. ‘Is there a Mrs Yahweh?’
‘No,’ he said with a smile which surpassed all understanding.
‘You’re single?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he answered, ‘I am three.’
‘I understand,’ she said, ‘I’m in exactly the same position.’
Ted Cruise
Married a prominent fellow-artiste. It has been argued, perhaps persuasively, that his work may in some respects have been overshadowed by the fact that she was so much better at it than he was. He nevertheless continued to dominate his own work with a crushing domination.
IS EVERYBODY HAPPY?
My father, should it please the court, will represent himself,
An experienced and dedicated expert in the field,
Whenever there was trouble somewhere deep in the interior,
He’d send himself outside to say that everything was fine.
When his nerves were badly burnt in an atmospheric storm
And his emotions had been torn apart by lightning,
And he’d been very badly burnt fighting fire with Johnnie Walker,
He confided to the press he'd had the flu.
When TV showed the family home exploding after lift-off
Caused by heating in the O Rings, leaks, or just a bit of hatred,
He stepped forward, cleared his throat and issued forth a little statement;
‘Go to sleep,’ he said. ‘It’s natural. It happens all the time.’
For twenty years he fell apart, providing what he thought
Was moral leadership; inspiring what he told himself was confidence,
The qualities he most admired in Churchill and himself
And the things to watch in riffraff such as anybody else.
When he was eighty-four and small and frightened of his God
And of ours and of none and of the prospect of all three,
He kept himself at work, his little airbrush and his history
Ensuring that there be no thought that anything was wrong.
All his life he calmed the troops down, without apparent
Knowledge that the troops knew very well who’d calmed them up.
It became a bond among them; brought them close and kept them sane,
Made them love each other. That was good. He liked that. He was proud,
They were lucky to be part of it, this thing that he’d created,
It was almost like a family, a spokesman nearly said.
Derek Benaud
Man of the Series at the 1992 World Literature Awards. His work reflects a deep concern for his country’s uncertain future and captures beautifully the rhythm of the local patois and the prospect of perhaps a light shower later in the day.
THE CENTRAL COMMENTARY POSITION
The devil is coming in off the long run
And I am batting. Last man in and four hundred years to win back
The first one going down leg side I stand up
And pull it round the corner, get on to it nicely
And loft it into the number three stand. The crowd goes mad.
The devil is coming down the pitch with the hands
On the hips, looking at me with the stare, the evil stare.
The next one straight at my head, I lean away and flick it
Over the slips cordon to the boundary. This time he’s really angry.
He’s a red man now the devil. Is there a Mrs Devil I wonder,
Does she have to put up with this sort of crap every time
She expresses herself?
All right for him but a different rule for the natives.
That’s the way. I bet that’s the way.
That’s the way it always works, well come on Mr Devil,
Let’s see what you’ve got, and the next one looking to york me but
I come down the wicket and make a full toss of it and he watches
It go over his head and into the sightscreen and the crowd is
Dancing and banging the lids together and laughing and the man
At the non-striker’s end is coming down and talking to me.
Calm down he says, don’t be too hot-headed, this man, he’s good.
Good? I say. He’s no good. He’s bad.
This is rubbish he’s bowling. We can take him apart.
Better not, he says, prodding the pitch
With the toe of his Stuart Surridge.
Why not? I say.
He buys eighty-seven per cent of our sugar, he says.
The ball is there to be hit, I say
As drinks come on to the ground
And we return you now to the studio.
Sylvia Blath
Born in Mosman, Sylvia wrote about illness and death. She sometimes did it ironically but always, behind all the fun, were illness and death. She called it a day in 1963.
SELF DEFENCE
You do no soft, you do no soft,
No more the old soft shoe,
In which I once delighted when you
Danced upon my cradle, as I
Annexed the Sedatenland.
I clapped my partly German hand,
On my partly Polish one,
Just like in real life,
And when you came home, achtung!
You wiped your boots on my face.
In the shadows you ordered away the lives
Of all of us black Jewish Poles,
Your daughter you condemned
To the oven, subtle in leather,
Der Ofen! Schnell!
Pig brute fatso bastard,
Shit bugger bum fuck poos,
Daddy Daddy I’m through, Hello?
Germaine I can hardly hear you,
This is a very bad line.
Henry Adrian
One of the ‘Parramatta Poets’, so popular in Sydney during the 1960s. They believed poetry should describe the experience of ordinary people and that it should be performed in their voice.
HERE ARE THE NEWS
Once upon a fair old cow of a night
In the four corners of The Empire, the
Bar and Grill upon which the sun never
Set menu number twenty-five was taking a caning from
Nipper Yarwood and self with two
Unidentified young female friends.
‘I don’t like yours much,’ said Nipper,
On account of being very witty, when we first
Saw them at high noon in Jarvis Street
Them in the boots and cigarettes of the period.
This of course was his way of saying
He had fallen in lust with the other one.
If I’d known then what I know now
I’d have been completely confused but
It seemed to me at the time they
Were made for each other, she to share his
Clapped-out green Hillman and he to have Maureen
Tattooed on a big red heart across his right arse.
If anyone had told me then, that
By the age of forty-seven, he’d be fat and useless
And a drunken ugly mad and lonely shit and
She’d have left him twenty years ago and
The State would have the children, what I’d have said was
‘Hang on a minute. What are the other one and I going to do now?’
John Platten
Another of the ‘Parramatta Poets’ and perennial Hawthorn rover. The image of Platten streaming away from the pack bouncing the stitched icon on his own bow-wave carries with it the picture four seconds later of Jason Dunstall surfing through the rich loam with a mark on his chest and the opposing fullback pleading insanity.
ARE WE THERE YET?
My father and I would sometimes go out,
Looking for ideas,
Now and again we’d bag one,
But most of them
Would get away.
You have to come at them downwind,
A mile away.
He never talked about ideas,
He told stories,
Which would sometimes illustrate an idea.
The idea they would sometimes illustrate
Was that he didn’t talk
About ideas.
Nob Dylan
Nob came originally from Charade, a small town near Piffle, New South Wales. His real name was Ern Zimmermalley and his work turned out to have been an elaborate joke concocted by other poets, notably James Dean and Woody Guthrie.
RAIN PAIN TRAIN SONG NUMBER 407B
Lyric reprinted from The Genius of Nob Dylan by Nob Dylan. By kind permission of the publishers, Zimmerdrivel Productions.
There’s a martyr standing laughing on the dark side of the road
There’s a crimson coloured fire across the land
And Iscariots in every house hold tightly to their dream
With their thirty silver reasons in their hand
Their graven image worshipping their horn of stolen plenty
Singing songs that make the river want to cry
