by Les Murray
What lasts is the voyage of families down their name.
Houses pass into Paradise continually,
voices, loved fields, all wearing away into Heaven.
As the cornplanter sings out to the rising month
bush-hidden creeks in the rabbit country wash
like a clear stone in my mind, the heavenly faculty.
Hiles’ paddock leans on its three-strand fence in the dark
bending the road a little with its history.
Our lives are refined by remotest generations.
Months late, I catch up with your wedding once again,
the candles laughter chicken-legs speeches champagne
I pass with a wave (lifting a friend from the wheeltracks)
and full of a lasting complicity, old henchman,
about the life of this world, strike home over grass.
For your wedding, I wish you the frequent image of farms.
LAMENT FOR THE COUNTRY SOLDIERS
The king of honour, louder than of England,
cried on the young men to a gallant day
and ate the hearts of those who would not go
for the gathering ranks were the Chosen Company
that each man in his lifetime seeks, and finds,
some for an hour, some beyond recall.
When to prove their life, they set their lives at risk
and in the ruins of horizons died
one out of four, in the spreading rose of their honour
they didn’t see the badge upon their hat
was the ancient sword that points in all directions.
The symbol hacked the homesteads even so.
The static farms withstood it to the end,
the galloping telegrams ceasing, the exchanges
ringing no more in the night of the stunned violin,
and in the morning of insult, the equal remember
ribaldry, madness, the wire jerking with friends,
ironic salutes for the claimants of the fox-hunt
as, camped under tin like rabbiters in death’s gully,
they stemmed the endless weather of grey men and steel
and, first of all armies, stormed into great fields.
But it was a weight beyond speech, the proven nation,
on beasts and boys. Newborn experiment withered.
Dull horror rotting miles wide in the memory of green.
Touching money, the white feather crumpled to ash,
cold lies grew quickly in the rank decades
as, far away, the ascendant conquered courage,
as we debauched the faith we were to keep
with the childless singing on the morning track,
the Sportsmen’s Thousand leaping on the mountains,
now growing remote, beneath their crumbling farms,
in the district light, their fading companies
with the king of honour, deeper than of England
though the stones of increase glitter with their names.
THE CONQUEST
Phillip was a kindly, rational man:
Friendship and Trust will win the natives, Sir.
Such was the deck the Governor walked upon.
One deck below, lieutenants hawked and spat.
One level lower, and dank nightmares grew.
Small floating Englands where our world began.
o
And what was trust when the harsh dead swarmed ashore
and warriors, trembling, watched the utterly strange
hard clouds, dawn beings, down there where time began,
so alien the eye could barely fix
blue parrot-figures wrecking the light with change,
man-shapes digging where no yam roots were?
o
The Governor proffers cloth and English words,
the tribesmen defy him in good Dhuruwal.
Marines stand firm, known warriors bite their beards.
Glass beads are scattered in that gulf of style
but pickpockets squeal, clubbed in imagination,
as naked Indians circle them like birds.
o
They won’t Respond. They threaten us. Drive them off.
In genuine grief, the Governor turns away.
Blowflies form trinkets for a harsher grief.
As the sickness of the earth bites into flesh
trees moan like women, striplings collapse like trees –
fever of Portsmouth hulks, the Deptford cough.
o
It makes dogs furtive, what they find to eat
but the noonday forest will not feed white men.
Capture some Natives, quick. Much may be learned
indeed, on both Sides. Sir! And Phillip smiles.
Two live to tell the back lanes of his smile
and the food ships come, and the barracks rise as planned.
o
And once again the Governor goes around
with his Amity. The yeasts of reason work,
triangle screams confirm the widening ground.
No one records what month the first striped men
mounted a clawing child, then slit her throat
but the spear hits Phillip with a desperate sound.
o
The thoughtful savage with Athenian flanks
fades from the old books here. The sketchers draw
pipe-smoking cretins jigging on thin shanks
poor for the first time, learning the Crown Lands tune.
The age of unnoticed languages begins
and Phillip, recovering, gives a nodded thanks.
o
McEntire speared! My personal Huntsman, speared!
Ten Heads for this, and two alive to hang!
A brave lieutenant cools it, bid by bid,
to a decent six. The punitive squads march off
without result, but this quandong of wrath
ferments in slaughters for a hundred years.
o
They couldn’t tell us how to farm their skin.
They camped with dogs in the rift glens of our mind
till their old men mumbled who the stars had been.
They had the noon trees’ spiritual walk.
Pathetic with sores, they could be suddenly not,
the low horizon strangely concealing them.
o
A few still hunt way out beyond philosophy
where nothing is sacred till it is your flesh
and the leaves, the creeks shine through their poverty
or so we hope. We make our conquests, too.
The ruins at our feet are hard to see.
For all the generous Governor tried to do
the planet he had touched began to melt
though he used much Reason, and foreshadowed more
before he recoiled into his century.
THE BALLAD OF JIMMY GOVERNOR
H.M. PRISON, DARLINGHURST, 18TH JANUARY 1901
You can send for my breakfast now, Governor.
The colt from Black Velvet’s awake
and the ladies all down from the country
are gathered outside for my sake.
Soon be all finished, the running.
No tracks of mine lead out of here.
Today, I take that big step
on the bottom rung of the air
and be in Heaven for dinner.
Might be the first jimbera there.
The Old People don’t go to Heaven,
good thing. My mother might meet
that stockman feller her father
and him cut her dead in the street.
Mother, today I’ll be dancing
your way and his way on numb feet.
But a man’s not a rag to wipe snot on,
I got that much into their heads,
them hard white sunbonnet ladies
that turned up their short lips and said
my wife had a slut’s eye for colour.
/> I got that into their head
and the cow-cockies’ kids plant up chimneys
they got horse soldiers out with the Law
after Joe and lame Jack and tan Jimmy –
but who learnt us how to make war
on women, old men, babies?
It ain’t all one way any more.
The papers, they call us bushrangers:
that would be our style, I daresay,
bushrangers on foot with our axes.
It sweetens the truth, anyway.
They don’t like us killing their women.
Their women kill us every day.
And the squatters are peeing their moleskins,
that’s more than a calf in the wheat,
it’s Jimmy the fencer, running
along the top rail in the night,
it’s the Breelong mob crossing the ranges
with rabbitskins soft on their feet.
But now Jack in his Empire brickyard
has already give back his shoes
and entered the cleanliness kingdom,
the Commonwealth drums through the walls
and I’m weary of news.
I’m sorry, old Jack, I discharged you,
you might have enjoyed running free
of plonk and wet cornbags and colour
with us pair of outlaws. But see,
you can’t trust even half a whitefeller.
You died of White Lady through me.
They tried me once running, once standing:
one time ought to do for the drop.
It’s more trial than you got, I hear, Joe,
your tommyhawk’s chipped her last chop.
I hope you don’t mind I got lazy
when the leaks in my back made me stop.
If any gin stands in my print
I’ll give her womb sorrow and dread,
if a buck finds our shape in the tussocks
I’ll whiten the hair in his head,
but a man’s not a rag to wipe boots on
and I got that wrote up, bright red,
where even fine ladies can read it
who never look at the ground
for a man that ain’t fit to breed from
may make a terrible bound
before the knacker’s knife gets him.
Good night to you, father. Sleep sound.
Fetch in my breakfast, Governor,
I have my journey to make
and the ladies all down from the country
are howling outside for my sake.
SMLE
1
January, heat. Raw saplings stand like cattle
in the distance of farms. Cornfields out there decaying
to slatternly paper in the blacksnake days …
Perched in this tree against the eastern sun
I am watching the shallows where my cousins toss
slow-sinking bait, small things that try to swim.
The river burns my face. Islands of wind –
my shot surrounds me, flooding upward, knocking
birds by the hundreds from the swamp-oak fringe
to cry and escape the wave that fades and fades.
Yelling Three! my cousins, wading out, Four!
and I skither down barefeet-first where flung-out mullet
almost move. The utter weight that annulled them
will not stop. It burns them hugely with grass
in the numb dimension, gill-furrows ravaged by specks
their fins fibrillate. They are swimming away in their muscles
but what has remained of the universe won’t give –
we strip a swamp-oak branch to thread them on
and revert to farmers. I eject a spent shell,
a tang of brass, a seed that will not grow
2
except in solitude. My Lee Enfield goes home
slung athwart my shoulder, heavy as talent.
Neither a musket, the weapon of masses by rank,
nor a machine-gun, guardian of statistics,
it points at country where it is roughly at home
in obsolescence. Pity the road-signs that lead
into that legend of billy tea, post-and-rail fence
and jackaroo, pulped in the wired slough at Pozières,
the acceptable shillings. Bayonet-lug to butt-plate,
impassive as the true touchstone, you gleam, old rifle,
tall as my hip. I almost followed you once.
I have new masters now, though. They are rewriting the world.
They make me homesick for honour, that terrible country
the poor still believe in. But let’s evade the modernities,
mechanical recoil, furious cycle of gas.
Much that you taught me I have slowly learned,
the way you could contain insupportable pressure
just long enough is still germane to my shoulder
like the line of your sights on a plane above your stock
and the burned steel light in your barrel, a rational abyss –
3
I think it is under the Pyrenees, that city.
A gunsmith is shaping a spiral tube from flat steel;
Homage, murmur the killed, to Catalonia
and the Prussian needles are witching the peasants to clay
but Copernicus’ wheel is cutting the grooves that expelled us
to whistle up nations in deep glades of the world.
Not by the plough alone did the grain cities come.
Landtaker’s title I sing, and its fulminate seal.
At Bunker Hill, though, on a bright day, the wind in the lanes
is freezing squire and scullion clean through their jack.
The men on the hillside are enjoying their skill
as much as their principles. But all servility reels
from the shock of that day. There is almost a moment,
a longbow time of voices speaking equality
and candid with weapons. Oh where will the poor gibbet hide?
They’ll sentence me next time, growls Ben Hall. So I’ll earn it.
The man with the rifle reversed and black-powder beard
has the air of one looking farther into republics.
Thanks for the arms, Colonel. We’ll know when to salute
and the delegates saying We’ll have no earlier gods.
These things were the New World. It lasted as long as the wilds.
Now the addicts of wheels, dug in out of sight beneath boredom,
are hiding their children for safety among the ascendancies.
The New World erodes through plastic and joins the dark stream.
The children are way ahead with their mullet emblem.
Forward, the Murrays! In the mountain country
above the farms, I could hold out, eat birds –
I smile away the small madness of preparation,
replacing the bolt. Less easy to smile away man-sized
kangaroos spurting, downed statesmen kicking like deer
in the poisonous ruin of courage we have achieved.
The moon-shot loose in my pocket, I walk among trees.
4
Unlocking, they rise in me, the deep-stacked rifles,
Mauser, Garand, Carcano, Dreyse, Lebel,
straight pull and falling block, Mannlicher’s clip …
rifles, at such attention all their days,
what else could come out of them but death?
And there is no machine unquestioned by their oiled
and summary grace. Your rod and staff, old Cain,
have battered us human. How few can stand even that.
Only boys argue, or cheer, hearing weapons condemned:
the invocation shines clearly enough between cries.
How many are there could bear the vision of history,
let alone Nature? Grooved turn-bolt receiver, tongued sear.
For many boys, it is the first
pressure of history,
not to say power, a rifle slapped in their hands
whose steel eye calibrates the windage of politics
as that other eye is said to measure love
by wise adolescents in a belt-fed epoch.
The aimed jets whining, the boys facing front on new grass
glory in the green vortex that whirls them away.
The spirit of ultimate ground on the wreckage of green
is metal and wood, as ever, in two bloody hands.
Of those who shoot, some few are riflemen.
Cold claimants mine their Versailles from the fat of the rest.
I would pay many gold teeth for a softer conviction.
5
There are humans truly unwarlike. They live well guarded.
They are protected by everything on earth.
It is the far rim of things their chimneys sustain
from the warrior pent among soldiers, the corporal suddenly
leading his company, the naked youth trap-shooting Turks.
There are also wolves in sheep country who recommend grass
and salvations so avid that blood squeezes out between verbs.
The nation-states examine their entrails in fear.
War is wasted, the General cries, on civilians
but I saw a black angel dancing in war-surplus
shouting Let wars break out of the circle of war!
The man of foresight, quiet beneath bricks, rewarding
human exposure, smiles. His fingers select
a mint brass clip, the nails of Christ and two spares.
So honour’s abolished – and we are still in the world.
There will be cover for him in the leafless centuries.
I part the grass very gently, I hide among towns
and Browning, Tokarev, Vetterli, Mondragón
consider the works of their fingers. One checks an alignment,
one fits a return-spring. Absorbed as the stainers of glass.
6
Rolling straight over my Enfield’s human dimensions
under the farmer’s barbed wire into the road
where tractors are passing, I scale a ripe scree of melons
and wave to the driver good-day! My rifle lies down,
a sudden lurch half-buries it under rotundities.
And perhaps indeed it will be as easy as that,
perhaps the mountains will strip off their rocks and cry Kiss me!
or the grocer turned spirit unravel his gut without pain.
If not, the rocket will have to lie down with the lamb.
I wave at the wings to the right and left of mankind:
only the politics come out either end, boys!
The farmer smiles, imagines I’m swatting something.
