narratorAUSTRALIA Volume Two

by narrator AUSTRALIA

  ~~~

  In the fading light of the evening, June, Nigel and a few other intrigued guests sat on garden chairs listening with amused indulgence to Gary and Rakka reminiscing about their boyhood in Kookaburra Flat. An esky full of stubbies sat by their feet. Fliss stood nearby pretending not to listen. Her face held a stunned look.

  ‘Rakka’s olds owned the little corner shop, Lamb’s Grocery Store, and he was supposed to sweep out the storeroom after school. But, remember, Rakka, you used to skive off and meet me down at the river to smoke.’

  Rakka’s unlined face held a beatific expression. He nodded.

  Gary grinned. ‘Remember the time your old man got pissed …’ He glanced apologetically at Nigel. ‘Sorry, I mean got blind as a welder’s dog. He’d had a win at the trots and came back to the shop and was giving all this stuff away. There was a line of people all the way down the street that afternoon when word got out.’

  Chortling, Rakka shook his head. ‘Mum was that cranky with him. He had to sleep on the couch for a week.’

  Nigel came over and sat on his father’s lap. ‘Did you sell lollies in your shop, dad?’

  ‘Yep, we sure did, Nige. Clinkers, freckles, musk sticks, choo choo bars.’

  ‘And green frogs,’ added Gary, giving June a gloomy look.

  ‘Can we go there, dad?’

  Rakka looked across at Fliss and raised his eyebrows. She moved towards him, smiling slightly. He took her hand.

  ‘Yeah, Nige,’ he said, ‘I reckon it’s about time we all took a trip to Kookaburra Flat and met the rest of the Lamb family.’

  Gary raised his beer. His face was flushed and solemn.

  ‘Here’s to the old town. And to good mates.’

  Sunday 21 April 2013

  The Swing

  Connie Howell

  Wentworth Falls, NSW

  I looked at the garden through my kitchen window. Little finches darted here and there from branch to branch on the tree outside. Next came the parrots dressed in their colourful uniforms revelling in the bountiful crop of edible flowers and daintily picking up the sweet fragrant meal in their claws, expertly eating the flowers and discarding the leaves. A carpet of green lay on the ground below. I watched for a while then my attention turned to the big old willow down the back. There hanging from its strongest bough was the swing.

  Ropes tied with a knot led down to the wooden seat which hung low. Both the tree and the swing were old like me. We’d seen a lot of changes over the years and now as I looked at them my thoughts turned back the clock and I could see myself happily pushing the ground with my feet until I gained enough momentum to raise us both higher and higher. This was my escape from the world and I loved the freedom and the feeling of strength in my body.

  That strength was no longer there, my legs and body frail with the passage of time and my days were spent gazing through the looking glass into a world I seemed no longer part of. My memories were my constant companion keeping me warm at night and occupied during the long drawn out days.

  As I looked at my swing, it seemed as forlorn and desolate as I. It hung silent and still, the only movement occurring when a strong breeze blew and I wondered how much longer we could endure.

  I felt a stirring inside me and with much determination and effort I slipped on my overcoat as my body was unable to stay warm by itself. With halting steps I opened the door and with my stick as support I ventured down to the willow and my old friend the swing, and I managed to sit and I managed to push and together we soared toward Heaven.

  Sunday 21 April 2013 4 pm

  Discriminating Cupids

  Ariette Singer

  Canberra, ACT

  I’ve made a most disturbing observation –

  Apparently cute Cupids avoid shooting arrows

  Into the lonely hearts of the older generation!

  It is quite obvious, Cupids discriminate unfairly –

  stop ‘Love deliveries’ to older singles too early!

  When, whimsically, into a senior’s heart they shoot,

  It is because they do it purely just to have a hoot,

  or by mistake, as they are aiming with little care.

  That’s why love stories of the ageing population

  Make big news – because they are extremely rare!

  Should we forgive cute Cupids their utter ignorance

  about the humanity’s capacity to love – at any age?

  No! These immature Cupids should be well taught

  That love can be felt deeply by both young and old!

  The education for Cupids must no longer be delayed!

  But where do we lodge our complaint and this demand?

  And who – to give such lessons, will be most qualified?

  Where? When? How? Urgent answers must be found!

  Monday 22 April 2013

  The Feather

  Deborah Stanbridge

  Douglas Park, NSW

  As an adult I stare at a feather

  Like my life it is speckled

  It is so delicate

  So light almost weightless

  Not enough friction to tie it to the earth

  But enough that it gently falls down

  Plunging, plummeting, collapsing

  Falling, descending, dropping softly

  Slowly dawdling down

  You can’t hear it land on the ground

  I don’t know when I got here

  Like I watched the feather falling

  But can’t tell exactly when it landed

  People watched me falling through adolescence

  But can’t tell exactly when I landed.

  Monday 22 April 2013 4 pm

  Ode To Life – Prologue

  Sonia Ursus Satori

  Medlow Bath, NSW

  dawn – devined – ancient

  sea

  stood cracked open

  once

  sense of extinct wonder

  look

  beneath the surface of

  3.8 billion years

  of time

  a-na-e-ro-bic existence

  before

  cy-a-no-bacteria is oxygenating

  earth’s atmosphere

  fossilised memory survives

  bouts of catastrophic extinctions

  and bursts of evolutionary boom

  100 million years (!)

  squeezed in between

  recrystalisation

  petrification

  saturation

  carbonisation

  casting – moulding – impressing

  traces

  death – burial – decay

  original features

  of earliest life forms remain preserved

  reappearance emerging

  before our eyes

  today

  and for all times to come

  therefore I am

  gunflintia –

  proterozoic microscopic life

  first oxygen-producing cy-a-no-bacteria

  glorious 5 microns

  therefore I breathe

  gunflintia – first fossil in our earth rock record

  oh canada – ah australia

  oh how I love thee

  bangiomorpha of the rho-do-phy-ceae

  stacking multicellular filaments

  in your bust of 20 microns

  sunlight beckoned your release from

  the depths of ocean mud and

  magnetised your frenzy of

  sexual reproduction

  my cell ancestry – my ode to the beginning of life

  Tuesday 23 April 2013

  And Out Of The Darkness Comes – Limbo

  Paris Portingale

  Mt Victoria, NSW

  Limbo. How long since any of us have thought about limbo? Latin: Limbus, meaning on the edge, in this case, on the edge of hell. One of the outer suburbs. An earthly equivalent would be our Rooty Hill, or Penrith.

  In limbo it’s all old corrugated-iron
humpies and unsafe, rickety furniture and the corner convenience store has no refrigerator so the drinks are warm, and the packaged goods are past their expiry date and there’s white fur growing over the two oranges that make up the fruit and vegetable selection, and Larry, the little rat-fuck who’s always behind the counter, will rip you off as surely as he hasn’t showered or changed his shitty white t-shirt since 1927 when he first opened.

  In limbo all the condoms break as you put them on and the prostitutes have no teeth and the TV reception is barely watchable and just old episodes of The Bill anyway, and the buses are full and people fart clouds of black death, and when the police do drive around they drive around with tinted windows up and the doors locked and look straight ahead and the mayor sleeps every night in his own sour, fetid vomit because all the crack-cocaine and heroin and ecstasy and Tijuana-skunk is laced with rat poison.

  And the prime minister and cabinet are on PCP so all the windows are smashed and the furniture piled up in corners, and it’s always night time and the street lights are old truck tyres burning on the corners and all the bookshops have been smashed and looted and burned for selling:

  Fanny Hill, renamed Vagina Hill in a stupid piece of political correctness that backfired

  Animal Farm, which has talking pigs and goats

  Satanic Verses, for misrepresenting Satan as a nancy poet by a critic who, like the rest of the world, had never read the book

  Nineteen Eighty-Four, for being so old and out of date now

  The Diary Of Anne Frank, because of the Jewish question

  Moby Dick, for its obscene title

  Cock Robin, for the same reason

  A Tale Of Two Cities, for its indecisive and vacillating opening line, It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

  and a book on peanut growing, by Jimmy Carter, for stupidly mixing agriculture and politics and for being boring.

  In limbo it’s always 9.50 pm, too late to do anything, too early to go to bed, and the beer’s been watered and has no head, and the gin will send you blind, and inflation runs at 1,000 per cent a second and your accountant is always having a well-earned break in the Bahamas or the Caymans or the Maldives or the Aspen ski-fields – in any case, he’s never there when you ring and his secretary is infuriatingly vague or stupid or on drugs or any combination of the three. And no matter how many times you move, your mother-in-law is always living next door and the people on the other side will belong to an outlawed motorcycle gang and the phones don’t work properly so you always get your ex-girlfriend who despises you with a poisonous hatred that has soured her and dried her to her very person so she is one large, walking, talking, venom-filled fang, ready to strike.

  And the music’s out of tune and the trombone player’s always high and the radio crackles and the announcer stutters and the news reader is profoundly retarded. The street signs are all ‘No Standing’ and you always come back to a ticket and, just for good measure, or maybe to salt the wound a little, your car’s been robbed, stripped, smashed and burned by laughing kids too young to prosecute.

  And the garbage in limbo is never collected and everyone has cancer and the only hospital, hopelessly overcrowded, and staffed by medicine’s rejects, is a blaring disco at night with the patients and their beds and drip-stands and beeping monitors all pushed to one side, and where, by day, amputations are done without anaesthetic because a cock-up on day one ensured there is not now, never has been and never will be any form of anaesthetic for any procedure whatsoever, great or small.

  In limbo your spouse hates you more than ever, and every day in limbo you find out something even more horrible about yourself, and all the people who have ever loved you, one by one, prove they never really did. In limbo it’s perpetually Friday the thirteenth and April Fool’s Day combined, and the tap water’s always rusted and the pipes bang and the rent’s forever due and you know with an honest clarity and a white-hot, blinding certainty that your life was nothing more than an arid wasteland and every day you lived was squandered and every page of your personal folder has ‘FAILURE’ stamped across in red, or some other crushing epithet, usually prefixed with the word ‘ABJECT’.

  In limbo the roads are jammed by a senseless jumble of derailed trams and burning buses, on their sides, exits jammed and women with babies still at the breast, shrieking and clawing at the glass while the thieving driver, laughing and oblivious, steals the spilling coins from the money tray.

  Who goes to limbo? Little rat-fucks like Jimmy McCarthy from year six who’d never share, and Lynette Johnson who showed everyone my love poem and the note where I misspelled ‘syphilis’. And the little fuck from the garage whose limp and glass eye justify all the ripping-off he can muster, and the slut whore-bitch at the mini-mart who imbecilically checks my signature each and every time. The thin-lipped, pious legislators who deny the dying a timely death by their own hand, who deny the relief of the heroin for the agonies of a bone-rotting cancer, who deny sanctuary to the lost and the disenfranchised and those seeking of refuge, who deny women the simple sanctities and government of their own bodies, who force the raped to come to term, who use the idea of God as a club to beat and punish, and the whole construct of religion as a chain to guilt and ignorance. And John Wall, who kicked the total crap out of me because I caught him masturbating. Phil someone-or-other, a little rat-fuck who I think fucked my first wife in the toilet at a party once, and my wife, for fucking Phil rat-fuck in the toilet.

  Limbo, by the hand of God almighty, is a place for the rat-fucks and bastards, the inconstant and unfaithful, the idiots and morons who subscribe to faith without consideration, the rat-fucked self-serving Caesars and Fuhrers and Generalissimos and Presidents-For-Life. The pinch-nosed rat-fuckers who tread further on the already downtrodden, the stealers from the already have-nots, the conscienceless usurers to the already-can’t pays, the little people put in charge, the buffoons somehow found with power. The Idi Amins and the Pol Pots and the Augusto Pinochets. The Stalins and Husseins and Milosevics and Nixons, and at the other end of the scale the little rat-fucking killers of the world’s Lennons and Kennedys and Luther Kings and Ghandis.

  But more often than not it’s for the inconsequential bastards and rat-fucks whose little evils are kept behind doors so the men quietly beat their spouses and diddle their children and the spouses don’t shop for a week, not with an eye like that, and for the children, sex is forever warped and reviled and the sins of the father are continued by the son in a solid and unwavering family line all the way from the roots to the tender new tips of the family tree. There are only so many Hitlers and Gengis Kahns but we’re producing rat-fucks at a rate of thousands a second. They’re coming in a gusher. It’s like a hundred thousand fire hoses at full pressure, gushing rat-fuck sperm and embryos and seminal fluid and wet vaginas and blood and mucus and all the viscous slimes the human body can produce, and it all comes together in the little rat-fuck, wife beating, daughter molesting, hero killing, mass murdering, rat-fucky, limbo-bound arseholes we call humanity. That’s who goes to limbo.

  Now, hell, on the other hand, is a whole other kettle of fish.

  Wednesday 24 April 2013

  To Australia

  Athena Zaknic

  West Beach, SA

  Olive groves and the blue Aegean,

  but the rocky Peloponnesian soil

  could not sustain us.

  Politics prompted some,

  desire others.

  On my calendar it was only one month.

  Survival food. Endless water,

  we tasted the salt of three oceans.

  Only seagulls welcomed us to this land

  in the midst of an alien cobalt sea.

  The children would play anywhere

  although miles away from home,

  they settled in from the first day,

  made friends spontaneously.

  The older ones could glimpse

  opportunities for their children

&n
bsp; and set upon their dreams

  coupled with personal sacrifice,

  as they clutched their first pay.

  In hindsight my family was lucky.

  Our future turned out okay.

  Others, my aunt Voula among them

  never recovered from the shock

  of cultural displacement.

  They had knitted their lives

  with their country’s wool.

  Unable to pick up new wool,

  frustrated and confused,

  they returned home.

  Wednesday 24 April 2013 4 pm

  The Anzac March – A Decuain

  Irina Dimitric

  Mosman, NSW

  My Muse, oh please help me write a poem

  In thoughts I see the bloody battlefields

  Anzac Marchers proud and very solemn

  The battling soldier heartfelt prayer shields

  He fights against the wicked, never yields

  Returns per chance a hero, shell-shocked, maimed

  Or killed, the stuff that always wartime wields

  Blood and tears are shed, victor is proclaimed

  See the medals, hear the bagpipe’s rhythm

  Cheers to all who fought for sacred freedom

  Irina says that the decuain (pronounced deck won) is a 10-line rhyming form in iambic pentameter created by Shelley A. Cephas. The rhyming pattern in this decuain is: ababbcbcaa.

  Thursday 25 April 2013

  Blood And Men

  Emma-Lee Scott

  Callaghan, NSW