The Lighthouse Keeper's Wife, and Other

The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife, and other stories

and

Ceremony for Ground: Narrative, Landscape, Myth

Barbara Temperton

This thesis is presented for the degree of Master of Arts (Creative Writing) of The University of Western Australia

English and Cultural Studies

2006

Abstract

The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife, and other stories and “Ceremony for Ground: Narrative, landscape, Myth”

The focus of this project is on poetry, narrative, landscape and myth, and the palimpsest and/or hybridisation created when these four areas overlay each other. Our local communities’ engagement with myth-making activity provides a golden opportunity for contemporary poets to continue the practice long established by our forebears of utilising folklore and legendary material as sources for poetry. Keeping in mind the words of M. H. Abrams who said “an integrated mythology, whether inherited or invented, is essential to literature”, I set about collecting and transforming into poetry narratives drawn from Albany and (for the third poem) from the north of Western Australia that draw on their dramatic landscapes.

The creative writing component of this project – The Lighthouse Keeper’s wife, and other stories – consists of three long, narrative poems.

1. “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife” Based on folklore surrounding the keepers of the old Point King Lighthouse and their families: a lighthouse keeper, his wife and three daughters spend their days - and nights - in a very precarious environment.

2. “The Gap” “The Gap” at Albany has a notorious reputation. So does Julz. From the moment she arrives with the shearing team, life for the farmer’s son takes a different direction.

3. “Jetty Stories” Every year the bird woman follows migrating flocks from the rim of the Arctic Circle south to the tidal flats of the Kimberley and then, at the right time, she follows them north again. When tragedy strikes, the bird woman’s haunted lover finds himself travelling further south.

The dissertation – “Ceremony for Ground: Narrative, Landscape, Myth” – succinctly examines the theory and history of narrative; contemporary narrative poetry and its techniques; landscape naming practices, and folkloric myths (including ghost stories). The folklore component also contains the elaboration and analysis of several local narratives: “Reddin’s Ghost”, “Fisherman’s Ghost”, “The Gap” and “Tidal Flats”. (Appendix 4 contains other local legends) The dissertation concludes with a section on sidebars (or marginalia) offering a solution to the problem of the dominance of contemporary narrative poetry by narrative itself.

Contents

Acknowledgements

The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife, and other stories 1

The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife 2

The Gap 29

Jetty Stories 57

“Ceremony for Ground: Narrative, Landscape, Myth” 91

Bibliography 147

Appendices: 1. Publications 159

2. Workshop 165

3. “Wind in the Pines” by Dave Fitzpatrick 168

4. Other Local Narratives 170

Acknowledgements

This project has taken five years. During that period many people and agencies have helped, either by providing me with local narratives, technical advice, their editorial and proofreading skills, or by supporting and nurturing me through the process. Although it is not possible to mention everyone by name, or to express fully my gratitude to them, I wish to acknowledge these people here.

The Albany History Collection, Albany Public Library and staff University of Western Australia - Albany Centre WA Museum - Albany Albany Town Hall Theatre: Stewart Gartland and Kevin Blyth The Sprung Writers’ Festival for nurturing the Story to Song Project, and my colleague, composer Rod Vervest for his outstanding musicianship and friendship. thewritersgroup@albany: Maree Dawes, Libby Corson, Dianne Wolfer, Joy Kilian, Liane Shavian, and Jackie Marsh – for all the workshops, friendship and support they have given me. Their knowledge and encouragement has been invaluable. Kathryn Trees, whose friendship and timely feedback gave me new momentum when I was struggling. My family, especially Shannon and Clifton Peter Brandt, Thunderheart My wonderful partner, John McBeath, who understands my obsession. Bill Temperton and Mary Whitty Mark Lyall, who gave me the first story Bruce Pope, technical advisor CALM Albany; Mark Roddy – Ranger, and Corinn Hine (author of the text on CALM interpretive signs at the Gap) Linda Elms – State Emergency Service, Albany

And, Adam Wolfe; Stan Austin; Dennis Wooltorton; Michelle Frantom; Sarah Drummond; Tony Smith; Peter Blyth; Dan and Dave (Snowy) the fishermen; Naomi Dann; Sally Bin Denim; Albany Port Authority; Bill Temperton Jnr; William Temperton; Dave Fitzpatrick; Barbara Black; Warren Flynn; Val Milne, Lyn Peters and Adrienne Beatty.

The anonymous storytellers, I thank you all for speaking in my presence.

This project has provided me with the opportunity to work under the supervision of Dr Dennis Haskell, whose scholarship and writing skills I have long admired. Dennis has been unfailingly patient, supportive and generous with his knowledge and skills, and a true friend. Rhonda Haskell inspires both of us.

I extend my heartfelt gratitude to the UWA Centenary Trust for Women for the provision of the 2005 CTW Scholarship. Their support meant I was able complete this thesis.

Finally, to the University of Western Australia, I thank you for making all this possible.

The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife, and other stories

1 (This page has been left blank intentionally)

The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife

3 Dawn. There’s still a bit of south in the wind.

Waves have worried the beach in two, the keeper’s wife collects driftwood, feathers.

There’s something about the air, now: a quality of light, an intensity of colour that awes her, and that place becomes an X on her map of moments with God.

Walking in the mist on the beach at dawn: whales exhale just beyond the wave line, flippers and tail flukes slow arc from the sea, leviathans rolling in the shallows.

At the high tide line, cuttlefish, shells, mounded kelp – a dead Shearwater half-cast in sand – tail feathers teased by breeze and the memory of flight, and framed by footprints of dogs and gulls. Another Shearwater, feet at point, Degas ballerina, wings splayed, eyes collapsed in their sockets. And thereafter another seven, hooked bill locked mid-cry.

The morning mist begins its skyward drift to the sun as horses, with their fierce riders, thunder through the curtain and into day, the sea silver, molten, and the air taking on something like substance, as though she could reach out and touch something solid and she feels she’s left the world, or perhaps only just stepped into it. 4

Cargo ships riding high in the water swing round on their anchor chains – like broad-hipped matrons guarding the approach to the channel.

Low tide: a pair of foxes hunt crabs and snails in rusty-lichen lipped pools formed by shallow clefts in the rock. The vixen limps.

The keeper’s wife has run away, again, and the furthest she can go and still see the lighthouse is the other Harbour on the opposite side of the Sound.

Half-way, she’d watched a sailing boat, two men fighting canvas, ropes, the wind; and the Harbour Master’s steam launch, red, butting whitecaps, getting nowhere.

Five cargo ships in the sound today. Five ships. Salmon fishermen on the beach battling nets, breakers, spray.

Beams of sunlight pierce clouds – she has heard her husband call them fingers of God. Crushed mussel shells on the rocks at her feet. Pelican suspended in the wind. Beacons. Guano smeared rocks. Evening swimmers, voices drifting to her with seaweed woven round a discarded hawser.

The Harbour Master’s launch labours into the channel, 5 wallowing toward the Harbour. Aboard, the crew stand still their gaze intent upon a tow rope astern. Five ships in the Sound. Five ships. Men’s gaze astern intent upon the tow-rope taut over tide change. Sudden rush of fish onto the hooks of fishermen. Five cargo ships.

Why, she asks herself, must she always be working towards something, why every moment must be extra-real so she’ll remember, the world often so other-worldly, separate. Why can’t she just sit? Enjoy rocks, wind, sea, because they’re rocks, wind, sea, and not be rising to her feet to watch a red launch tow an upturned sailing boat, not to see one man astern, standing apart from the crew: not to see that one man, wet, shivering.

Her bed linen was knotted when she woke, but dawn was soft:

Clouds, teased to string, evaporating. The scrub beyond the verandah was still standing, trimmed by broken branches, subsiding wind fretting with battered leaves.

Now, the sky is clearing, but the keeper’s wife conjured a storm in her sleeping, 6 it funnelled out into the night through her open window, scattered whirlwinds like confetti across the Sound, wreckage onto the rocks.

On her way back to the lighthouse she stops to watch the keeper swimming in the channel, joins the black dog sitting on the rocks, waits for her husband to come ashore. Two years, he’d said. Three daughters and twelve years later, the keeper’s wife’s sense of another season turning over is as sharp as the thorns on Prickly Moses.

Not an ordinary lighthouse, her home on the hillside above the channel. Not an ordinary lighthouse: a cottage with a double-ridged roof, south wall bisected by a weather-boarded tower squared and copper-capped, three keeper-lengths high.

Not an ordinary cottage, walls as thick as her husband’s chest. the tower-light a May-pole the keeper’s wife and daughters skip around west-east, east-west. Once, she saw a ghost, grey as possibility, drip salt water along the passageway mount the ladders to the tower, some long-drowned former tenant drawn back to trim the twin wicks, combined bright light visible for miles.

Not an ordinary garden, 7 she’s cultivating granite where the lighthouse stands. Not an ordinary garden, she’s cultivating wind to harass the keeper’s tough-stuff, stolen slips from flower beds in town – Agapanthus, Ivy, Morning Glory – growing stunted in kero drums, through soils he’s backpacked in flourbags. The woman nurtures native rush-grasses in fault lines, a reclining Melaleuca in the fertile gap between two boulders, bright lichens as a border between the land and sea. Not a connoisseur of silence, she’s cultivating noise the sea is never silent here, the nights are never dark.

At breakfast, her three girls eating porridge, cat, intended for rats, drags a limp bandicoot along the passage, snail trail smearing polished boards. She cannot keep them shining, the boards. Rain beats through the door at every opportunity. Wind deposits leaf litter and sand in the corners, a winter’s day creating windrows of peppermint leaves. The cat halts by the tower ladder, hunches over its catch.

The keeper’s wife is not hungry. Bull ants semaphore a chain of dashes across the kitchen floor, melt into the shadow under the ill-fitting pantry door. Without looking she knows which shelf they’re inhabiting, which containers they’ve targeted, which they’ve missed. Can see in her mind’s eye the viscid syrup tin, sequined honey spoon, the ant-free flour crawling with spinning-moth maggots. Weevils in the oats. She shakes her apron, breaks the Spinning-moth webs woven overnight between its folds, brushes the cocoons into a small, sticky bundle, consigns them to the fire. 8 Outside, the channel welcomes a ship into its arms, its wake surging up the rocks, through the crevasse.

Her ring is silver, its band inscribed by Celtic runes. One she thought she recognised might mean joy. As much as she struggled to remember she couldn’t translate it … something something joy ... her own mother’s message inscribed on the ring and already its whole meaning’s lost to her. She runs her thumb over the characters as though she could divine their meaning by osmosis. It smells like old coins left to oxidise in a jar, to be tipped out in moments of penury for counting and circulation. Her fingers hold the smell, transfer the scent to her tongue. The taste of money. What good is it? her mother used to say unless you can eat it, drink it or wear it. Then she’d take out her jewellery jar, tip her collection of rings onto the tabletop.

And the girl who became the woman watched her mother thread this rune-scored, silver ring onto a strand of cotton, suspend it motionless, the ends of the thread clasped between her fingers. Show me a yes, her mother had whispered. Movement was imperceptible, at first, but it became more pronounced, agitated, spinning in a taut circle, yes. One day, the girl who became the woman knew, this ring would be hers.

From the light tower the kero drums, performing 9 their daily cycle of expansion and shrinkage, toll dully. She knows the smell of kerosene as well as she knows her own distilled essence, the scent of her children’s hair, the keeper’s salty presence. Kerosene smudges everything with its hazy-blue skin: is the lighthouse’s other tenant, always present, never seen, a bitter layer on the lips after she’s kissed her husband’s hand.

Kerosene and the light, like night-calling birds, call at night call the night

Kerosene knows the sensuality of waves, spindrift and spume, whales, tails braided together: the white of their bellies iridescent beneath the bows of boats. Kero knows the slick ecstasy of giants, their rites: mating, birthing in soup of spray, breaching in breathless displays. Don’t say “leviathan”, the Keeper says. It’s a ponderous word – doesn’t do justice to the event.

They’ve hiked across the heath to the Cove The beach there is empty. The girls discard their clothes in immodest heaps, run naked to the sea, dive in and surface shrieking, swim out into a darker blue. All three are borne back in the belly of a wave. 10

Their mother undresses slowly, folds her clothes. Would she know if someone watches? The sea breeze touches her body, but she’s still hot.

She is at the edge. I won’t say anything to them, she thinks, about God and waves, or of how the sun-fired dazzle of the sea threatens to blind her, bind her. How they, too, sew her, her daughters, double-stitch her to home and hearth. Catching her breath, she closes her eyes and likewise rushes in, immerses herself, every cell of her skin newborn with the novelty.

When she surfaces, low in the cup between swells, water blots out the horizon. Her world shrinks back into the space in which she floats, eyes smarting from salt and sunlight, blinking up at the sky. Pelicans spiral in the thermals. A wave buoys her up.

Flying, she thinks, this must be what flying feels like, calm weightlessness.

She doesn’t want to be in the sea this morning wants to be on it, flying with the muse of ships, one hand on the tiller and the mainsheet in the other, being careful not to spill the wind, 11 to be a figurehead on the cutwater of a ship her feet dipping in and out of the sea, have the spray fly to her breast and cheeks, her colour high, breathe the Southern Ocean air, and go water walking in gales amongst the waves’ ragged tops, to be borne down, bottom out and surface through the swell gasping for air and salvation.

She floats, mind soaring across the Sound in a hissing, bounding rush up-swell down-swell. Caught in the open, too much sail, woman at the tiller, yacht laying over, angles so steep only the traveller will bring the yacht upright again. Waves frothing braids within inches of her face – she screams into the wind.

She floats. Her daughters run laughing along the beach. A warm current from the shallows swirls around her. There is something out there, coiled in the heart of the sea, a spring awaiting release. Something here, too, its ears pricked, waiting to raise its wings for flight – on the horizon, the islands.

The remarkable moon – she watched it rise from the lighthouse – huge above the Sound. Then as she walked to town the mountain hid it. Later, she stood on the steps of the Town Hall and watched it re-emerge over the mountain. 12

The moon, tonight, she thinks, looks like an egg cradling an embryo inside a shell-cloud.

And a tall man in a dark shirt, one of the Harbour Master’s crewmen, smokes the last of his cigarette, casts the butt down the grey, slate steps. I’ve seen the moon rise twice, tonight, he says. And it’s not yet dark. In the channel between Harbour and Sound waves labour at their encroachment of the rocks. In the lighthouse, in rooms eroded by sterile conversation, the rift has widened. The tide’s turning, she replies.

The moon will wax before it wanes, land might resist the breakers, but in the harbour, the wreck is tormented by wind and sea. From their vantage point in twilight its remains confuse some visitors, they remark on it. Then she sees their thought-furrowed brows distance, size – how big is that … Swan? Then their amusement when they’re told. It’s more visible at low tide. She’d like to walk to the wreck. Quicksand? Cobblers? Tide change catching her? What other hazards have made their way to the bottom of the harbour since colonisation? What wreckage other than the bones of a burned out coal hulk? Kingfisher, the sailor says. A bright and beautiful name 13 for a nest of rusting iron.

He has swum to the wreck at night, Moonlight trimming just the fringes of the waves, suggesting that below the ocean’s frothing mouth is a mind not wanting illumination, exposure.

She begs leave to stop her universe spinning once more. The crown of her head calmed by the silence of water before her, the Harbour and Sound echoing with the two-filled her, the doubled her. She feels impermanent, empty of her old hauled-in blankness, and blind to blood and form unlike the past’s division lingering near. Desiring clean, quick nightmares, sharp and angry as the feral jetty cat’s belling tongue, its teeth sinking into the back of her hand. She recalls an alien song, with strange yet familiar syllables, she floats in his words framed by nature and empty of argument.

The next day, she’s absconded. Apron tossed across the back of a chair. Her daughters, at the kitchen table, sharing usually forbidden treats – warm scones, Golden Syrup, melted butter sliding down their chins. Their mother’s sailing, soaring across the Sound in a hissing, bounding rush up-swell down-swell, angles so steep only the traveller can bring the yacht upright again. Gone to sea with Knute from the Harbour Master’s crew who was always inviting, sideways-glancing at her husband, always asking, Knute struggling to reef the main. 14 They’re caught in the open, too much sail, the keeper’s wife at the tiller, yacht laying over, plunging through the sea.

There is something in the heart of the sea, something here, its ears pricked, raising its wings for flight. Waves frothing braids within inches of her face – the keeper’s wife screaming into the wind.

Noon, on Isthmus Hill, they walk into a veldt of wild grasses, together, but as taut as mainsheets, humming in the wind. And the lighthouse keeper’s wife pauses, drinks water pooled in the comfort of a rock. Her legs tremble – undermined, by her new lover’s presence, by the effort of her ascent. Looking back over her shoulder at the Peninsula slipping south behind her, she sees the eye – shadow cast by broken granite – whale plunging into the Southern Ocean pausing to glance over one mighty shoulder. A beast is looking back at her.

Ship, a comma hanging halfway along the horizon-line.

The fisherman tastes the woman’s salty, sand-cloaked skin, his tongue tracing the track of a bluebottle sting along the white coastline of her thigh.

Bright beam of firelight highlights foam upon the breakers. Venus and an orange quarter-moon – 15 fractured by cloud – paint pathways on the dream-dark sea.

Buoys blink between cataract waves.

The beach is sequinned by watch fires of fishermen, torch eyes dance will-o-the-wisp.

The salmon are running.

Bodies speak, kiss and fold together then open and he out of her licking as he kneels, not mute-watered like a wave – a rough rider, dark like clay underfoot tumbling – pushing noise and desire and loud, calm ignorance. Love alone will not do. She imagines outside. There’s nothing sanity can choose as a focus other than a water snake making ribbon-like miles through kelp in some other ocean she has known, tropical waters. Too cold here, she thinks. She sings the water inside.

She lies awake, rain sleeting against the portholes, air cold on her exposed shoulders, unwilling to draw the sail-cover higher, to rest, remembering herself as a child calling into the dark, calling uncovered and chilled boneless, unable to cover herself.

Her body is suspended between waking and satiation, her legs tremble, and her heart-pain catches her like a green distress flare coursing through the night.

16 He sings inside of her.

Vanishing is as quiet as a sleeping child’s breath, as slippery as the black lichen slick rocks, as fast as the swoop of the Peregrine bellying out on the wind.

The vanishing is her youngest calling up to the sitting room window, Look at me, Ma! I’m a mermaid! She reclines on one elbow, legs scissored shut, feet splaying in fish-tail on a grey mound of granite in the sun, sea churning in the channel behind her.

The vanishing is the sound of the Keeper outside banging on the rainwater tanks. One returning satisfying dull thuds, the other drumming its emptiness through the house. The vanishing is the Harbour Master’s launch at the jetty, the keeper’s wife at the sitting room window waving to the mermaid-girl laughing at the black dog dancing round her.

The vanishing is Knute behind her in the shade of the room, one hand moving to cup her shoulder and her own moving to meet it, and him turning her, waltzing her to the sibilant music of wave wash. Vanishing is the unusually distant thunder of a seventh wave in the crevasse, 17 the keeper’s wife’s heartbeat quickening, rope-roughened hands beneath her blouse. Vanishing is the rushing-in hush of water outside, then the drawn-back breath of the sea as it retreats. The dog barking.

A big one ... nearly got me! The Keeper running across the verandah lovers parting as he enters the passageway. Dog barking. Then, all three of them at the window: the launch adrift, bumping along the channel rocks. Knute and the Keeper running from the room. Woman motionless at the window. The wet rocks. The black dog paddling in a circle, barking.

Knute swims for the boat, the Keeper the dog.

The sea is emerald-green over the sandbars to blue and darkest blue in the deep, the submerged rocks brown smudges. The keeper’s wife stares down into the water. When they’re fishing, if they’re not quick enough to bring up their catch, hooked fish retreat beneath a shelf the fishers cannot see, but legend says is there. All they can do is wait – sensing every twitch and calculated manoeuvre through the filament connecting them – wait for the fish to tire, then reel it in.

18 The Keeper, shivering bone deep, stands apart, studies the Sound. Knute on the jetty, launch restored to its mooring, grips the dog by the scruff of its neck. It is hoarse, yet barks still, blood oozing from its barnacle-savaged feet and legs.

Down the path from the Cove, the two older girls dragging wet towels, their faces and shoulders sunburned. The eldest carries a small bucket brimming with sand.

To every thing there is a season, Reverend Katt had said. The lighthouse keeper’s wife sits on the channel rocks, her feet shoeless, skin ivory, white skin scalloped by the tears in her stockings. She shivers in her best summer dress trimmed with lace from her wedding chest, hope chest. The barnacles have cut her feet, have halted her progress to the water’s edge. She sits. To everything there is a season, Reverend Katt had said. The keeper’s wife stares blindly at the water raised in choppy waves. From town, the Town Hall clock, out of sync with time, chimes ten times for 1pm.

Night observation: for the first time the keeper’s wife notices that even on this, the darkest of nights, sand caught in depressions glows, makes bright snail trails 19 When she closes her eyes and then opens them, some sea-wraith, a night-star birthed in the black waters of the Sound, rushes at her in such a torrent of motion that she cannot pause to catch a breath before the terrible weight of the star-filled but intensely dark night submerges her.

Outside, now, she finds chance has scattered debris wide and slow as haunted coal hulks slipping into the troughs between post-storm swells. Rock is her destination. She forgets the moon like an egg, the cold calm of chips flaking off a stone tool, the rear view of whale chasers steaming out to sea.

If she does something she won’t feel it. It was noontime when she walked down the path stopped halfway, cloak-less, cold.

The lighthouse’s exterior is bright, flaring. Where has time gone? Sunset glow permeates the world with an otherworldly air.

The Keeper is in his chair in the sitting room, so tired he’s drunk, dizzy. He‘s tired of grief, with the tending of the light and the children, of his distant, distraught wife. He’s tired of his shepherding of the sea, the effort of keeping currents running in the right direction at the right time, the unpredictability of the supposedly predictable tide. Tonight, he knows the whitecaps 20 are being shredded into rags by the wind. He can hear them tearing above the gusts thudding against the seaward cottage walls.

The light is temperamental in big winds, the wick subject to secret draughts in the tower, but he’s so tired the room is spinning round him. Just before the world is painted black by sleep, he sees his second child climb a stool before the window.

One by one the second child unbolts the shutters, opening them, against the weight of the wind, onto the dark of the moon. She swings her legs over the sill, knows that below her the rock’s bulk slopes down to water. The sea roars in the crevasse, spewing foam. The tower light cuts through the night. On the horizon, embedded in ink, their sister lighthouse – Breaksea – two flashes a second apart, pauses for three seconds then repeats two flashes a second apart.

The Keeper sleeps.

The curtains resist their starched pleats as the wind, in a slight change of direction – the Keeper sleeps – sucks them out into the night, into billows around the child’s face. She pushes them down and away, a white glow rushing out of the dark toward her, an after-image imprinted on her retina, a ghost.

21 The Keeper sleeps.

She can’t see the wall she feels beneath her hand. Where in the room is she? Where’s the bed? Where’s the door? She’s turned around too many times, she doesn’t know where she is.

A child cries out from another room.

The keeper’s wife feels along the wall one hand testing the space in front of her. Shiver. Mummy’s coming! Even the window has melted into the black. Find the light! Find the door! Falls. On the floor on her hands and knees she feels the lamp’s shattered mantle glass. Kerosene. She realises, the lighthouse light is out.

The clear glass winter has healed summer’s footprints to well formed pad marks filled by rain. The keeper’s wife walks uphill, through Spindle Heath, strides out of herself, glides as a boat over slow water.

Her submarine grace, unlike an odd, disrespectful numeral, counts abrasions, her aching womb. 22 For the first time she wishes she’d died and everything else with her. She doesn’t feel like a mother any more. Lost, a new scar on the hillside wreathed in Smokebush, she walks on tracks that don’t cross, obeys signs with no words, there is nothing valuable enough to hang onto, except rope.

This morning, she had not recognised her face in the mirror She had not recognised herself in the mirror hung on her sea-cool bedroom wall, her skin and the looking glass crosshatched by lines, her younger woman’s face replaced, flesh under her jaw beginning a soft fall into folds, lines deepening at the corners of her mouth. She is losing her colour, lashes faded at the tips, grey in her brows, flecks in her hair.

She dismantles the cubby in the heath, tears down the tattered sheet that the girls had raised to roof from its canopy of Ti-tree. Bundled it up with the rags, dolls, cups ... Dried, crushed leaves of Peppermint scenting the grove, trunks split, splintered into sand made featureless by wind.

The second of the three: her handmade books distorted like the memory of her face, covers bursting with the dewfall then dried, corrugated, by the sun. Ants swarm over Sticky Tail flowers, the water above the channel glitters, 23 daytime dazzle.

The keeper’s wife gathers up the girls’ tea-set, stacking the small cups, piling plates into tidy stands. Tiny sugar bowl stuffed with Pelargonium petals, the plants escaping containment in the lighthouse garden. Blue Agapanthus flowing in flowing out with the wind willed by tide and moon cycle.

Private room in the bush where sometimes the lovers would lie in a room walled by Spindle Heath and Prickly Moses, where girls acted out mock-adult rituals, played with matches, where sometimes the keeper’s wife removed her blouse and sat bare-breasted, sunning.

She enters intently into the mirror of the day seeks an echo to undo her most familiar imperfections – her inability to daydream – stumbles through the Ti-tree and into town. As she approaches, her reflection’s captured in the window of Mr Miller’s shop. She recognises the face as hers, but not the body. As though at some point on the track between the channel and the shop her spine has slipped into a sensuous “s” her left arm twisted, her right fixed into a rigid angle. Four fingers to her cheek fail to raise a response from her nerves. Her flesh is stone-like though soft. Her foot hesitates at lifting for the step 24 into the shop’s half-moon light, its dusky womb-like welcome warm and blared forth from the pot-bellied, cast-iron stove. One leg hesitates, but the other pulls her in and, getting tangled around her hesitancy, tilts her forward to the floor.

The floor is earth-scented, gritty yet coolly immaculate against her so familiar face. Stillness becomes her, as stillness becomes the ocean at the moment between one wave and the next, at the moment when the water hesitates at its maximum point of infiltration, only to be sucked back into the Sound sucked into the substance of the next swelling wave, as she is sucked back into the hot air of Mr Miller’s Shop and the shopkeeper bending over her, breathing onions, fingers fretting at her shoulder as though to touch her would burn.

In the lighthouse’s smokey kitchen, the keeper’s wife hushes her eldest clattering cutlery in the washing up bowl. There it is again. The girl is still, watching her mother’s face, hopes that this time she won’t run outside in response to calls only she can hear.

25 Working against the Keeper is like embroidery and every time her sense of duty hems her in the keeper’s wife dwells on the night the light went out, her second daughter’s fall into a vanishing in her father’s sea, and her own night-blindness, blundering around on the rock in her nightdress in the dark and knowing the storm was tearing the whitecaps from the waves, and she was two-times bereaved.

Working against the Keeper is not unlike embroidery. With every pass of his magician’s needle through the fabric of the sea, she has a counter-pass with thread: stem stitch becomes herringbone, blanket stitch chain, a temporary tack an oversew, and she resets the hoop daily, straining the weave until the grain is warped. And she rehearses tangles, French Knots, Lattice Stitch, keeps her needles shining, her scissor blades sharp.

And just when she thinks she has her husband where she wants him, she stands at the counter in Mr Miller’s shop, comparing cottons, sizing thimbles, tape’s capacity to gauge her blackness. When from this vantage point she detects the Keeper shepherding the channel current east, she turns it west, when he reroutes the cove rips north, she turns them south, when he guides a freighter cautiously toward the harbour she gouges its hull out on a hitherto unknown shoal.

Then, she catches sight of Knute a toddler cradled on his hip a woman her belly bulging beneath her dress has her arm through his. Knute hasn’t seen her, but he will, 26 when he’s trapped in a shrinking air pocket in the hull of the Harbour Master’s capsized launch slowly sinking south of Breaksea.

The third wave comes from the deepest parts of the world – a shift in the Earth’s crust raising a ripple over the Continental Shelf. With every rising metre, it accumulates fish that see in the dark, relics of drowned ships, winged bones of the spines of lost voices, it makes a mountain.

Near Breaksea, mulie boats are downed, and, with the Harbour Master’s launch, are dragged across the miles-long backbone of the Sound to stranding at wave-edge, hulls ballooning like jellyfish at the high tide line.

The first daughter’s skin-tone echoes the colours of the wave that took her. The water tanks – swathed in crumpled nets of chicken wire, all that remains of the fence, and bristling with star pickets – return her riding like Venus arising from a caul of blood in her craft of shells. Her father swimming out.

The keeper’s wife stands in the shallows singing, casts her mother’s ring into the sea. Show me a yes, she says. Then takes the child the Keeper brings her, resisting the current, the caving-in 27 of the sand-shelf beneath her feet in a back-wash sieving sand and weed,

Ska’s teeth, barnacles, have sliced her first girl’s flesh the deepest wounds two inches deep, flesh blossoming through parted skin on her thighs two deep depressions on one hip where flesh, excised in chunks, has fed the fish. Barnacle fragments working their way out like shrapnel from war wounds. will make scars on her face bulging tight and white their edges embroidered with catgut. Just below her wrist the skin bulging coils of severed tendon, two fingers hanging useless.

From the light tower the kero drums, performing their daily cycle of expansion and shrinkage, toll dully. The woman knows the smell of kerosene as well as she knows her own distilled essence, the scent of her children’s hair, the Keeper’s salty presence. Kerosene smudges everything with its hazy-blue skin: is the lighthouse’s other tenant, always present, never seen, a bitter layer on the lips after she’s kissed her husband’s hand. And remembering her second daughters’ dog barking until its voice was gone she wonders how long she could scream before she would not make another sound.

The Gap

29 (This page has been left blank intentionally)

The Devil’s Gap is a great cleft in the cliffs fronting the Southern Ocean. The walls are sheer, almost as though deliberately plumbed, and are about one hundred feet in height. The entrance of the Gap is possibly thirty yards wide, but the cleft narrows considerably to its inner end, and forms a kind of blind funnel, into which great waves roll endlessly. The Gap is always floored with a smother of turbulent white water, churned to froth by the conflict between the forces of nature. (Albany Advertiser 11/11/35)

He learned at his father’s side the farmer’s craft, how to create a paddock from bush; to organise – with a plough – a field of stones; to mules sheep; tame a horse; plant seed, harvest a crop, how to slaughter a beast.

I started gutting roos for dog meat, moved on to sheep for the shearers, then to a beast for our kitchen table. My father’s hand was over mine: forefinger over my finger on the trigger when we shot the cow between the eyes; around the knife which slit the membranes of the hind-shanks and the gambol-bar hooked behind the tendons to take its weight. We bent our bodies to the chain-block of the tripod, raised the carcass up. He showed me how to skin it; to split the abdomen open, to have a tangle of intestines tumble from the cavity subside at the feet of Julz, the town girl, as she descended unsteadily from the cabin of the shearers' truck.

A week later, Julz was making sheeting 31 from wheatsack-hessian for our nest, she called it. She kept no part of her body from me, but distrusted me with her locks, they alone were untouched. All men, except you, I hate, she said. But her hardness was finite, sometimes I would catch her incomplete, being soft with me. Night in the moon-bright yard, the old Morris mounted on blocks, we two on the back seat. The new farmyard queen – slim, pale arms and tattooed veins – her hands between my thighs, had me overjoyed.

Another night, Julz tolled an iron heartbeat across the corrugations of the machine shed wall. Accompaniment for dream-songs, the afterlife of angels, she whispered, mouth warm on my throat. When she gave me back to myself and I lay mute, gazing out at the high star-city through the gap that once held a skylight, I was no longer a man but a child curled into a question mark and breathing.

Julz bought me at cost price from my parents, paying them in the coin of grief she paid her own, for our absences from the shearing, our couplings in iron out-buildings, in stacks of hay. After my rebirth in the machine shed with combines, headers, tractors, scarifiers, ploughs, my father drove out alone to check the fences: his raggedy kelpie-cross playing dodge-ems with the roll of ring-lock careering

32 round the back of the ute. I kept my own counsel.

He understands now how a woman can have all the aspects of a child. Julz cared nothing for his parents’ smallness, their clear-pale eyes or stories inscribed in the palimpsest of their faces.

Julz said I had large bones and the complexion of another country, but I joked about changelings and cuckoos – some folk tale I’d heard at school – and sang the old songs in the kitchen with my mother, while on the verandah Julz wove spells into grass baskets. She was changing, becoming silent. I began waking with empty arms.

He watches: Julz on her knees outside the shearing shed, vomiting, hands clenched against her belly, hair curtaining her sweating face. Something I ate, she says, gagging. Fever-days, Julz cocooned, shivering in army-surplus blankets. He sees dreams colonize her tortured limbs. When sleep releases her – and a flood of shit down her legs – her face is the blue-grey shade of the clay on the bank of the west paddock dam, pupils eclipsed by moons, breath impressed with bile. Vivere è morire, she says. To live is to die. Julz lived, a pale seam of flesh-fringed bones, fragile at the edges and as elusive as mercury. 33

One day in the old car, Julz found a box of matches in the ashtray. Facing each other, cross-legged in the hayshed, Julz meditating, balancing her chakras. My eyes were closed – I longed to see what she saw – I heard the head of the first match crumble. The next offered a short-lived spark, and the next, and the next. The fifth scored a hole in the back of my hand. The sixth struck clean, burned.

Without you in my life, I lose. I told her. Julz peeled oranges, pressed juicy segments between my lips. Forced peanuts from their shells for the firemen their tired smiles white in sooty faces.

We went freely into the world, Julz and me, driving behind the fire brigade truck. in my fire-engine red FJ panel van packed to the hilt with my life and hers. My parents, standing by the blackened tripod, not seeing the two of us travelling together, just me leaving. Behind them, hay stacks smouldering – ashen as lead-flashing on old town roofs. Forget them, she said, forget the oldies. Sunset that day was draped by remnants of bushfire haze.

He came south with Julz, broke the band on his father’s watch, his farewell gift, the first time Julz took him fishing at the Gap.

34 Welcome to the edge of Antarctica The continents of Australia and Antarctica were bound together along this rugged coastline, forming part of the super-continent Gondwana. The ancient continents were formed mainly of gneiss (sounds like “nice”), a rock created deep in the Earth’s crust. Look for bands and folds of dark rock. Pressure and friction at the base of the two caused rock to melt and slowly rise up through the gneiss. Think of a lava lamp. This molten rock slowly cooled hardening into granite and helping to cement the continents together. (Sign at the Gap)

The first thing you see is a blue band of water, the flush of infection in the tracks tattooing Julz’s arms, then shoals, the lighthouse at Cave Point, a sign pointing toward Cable Beach, Eclipse Island. The Gap parking area an arena braceletted by granite slabs, clusters of broken boulders. Day overcast, patches of blue showing through breaks in the clouds. Damp, windswept people, voices tight, returning to their cars. A child crying. Offshore: sea foaming around Bald Island, Green Islands, and the beacon-crowned goanna-island, Eclipse. The Gap cups sea at cold-boiling point.

1967 The Gap Girls: their car abandoned in the car park. Cloth lodged in crevice. A decade later, bones are found cemented in coral. Sea beasts? Girls?

The Natural Bridge: granite arch over an eroded basin walled by fractured gneiss, open to sudden Southern Ocean rages, span supporting constellations of stones huddled like potential jumpers.

35 Coast Risk Area: DANGER • Keep well clear of the sea • Watch for freak waves and swells • Be wary of strong winds and slippery rocks • Please stay on path where provided. • Do not explore alone. (Sign at the Gap)

Radio playing loud. Julz considering her reflection in the van’s rear-view mirror, one finger tracing her jaw line, lip-synching g.l.o.r.i.a. body marking time with the beat. She’s preparing herself for the night. Twin windscreen mirrors seat’s split stitching; it gapes between us. The floor at my feet flaking rust. Julz adjusts the mirror, sings Gloria g.l.o.r.i.a. Gloria g.l.o.r.i.a. her left hand negotiating the confusion of pill containers in the yawning glove box.

He follows Julz. Spray billows from the Gap. They go left, up a smooth granite slope cross-hatched by cooling-cracks and gneiss, she flitting ahead like a phantom, he lagging, taking each step with care on the slick, domed stones.

I want to fly in her footsteps, instead – I cling to cracks like a crab, give my attention to the rock, to the stunted paperbarks mantling fault-lines. We crown a hollow struck black by lightning, descend slab-cluttered terraces, meet the southern edge. Fear is a ledge above the sea and a crevasse,

36 me on one side, on the other Julz yelling Jump! Barnacles spangling the sea-level blocks sieving the high tide, Black-backed Albatross, wave exploding. Fear is the sea. I reach for her hand. Jump. Surf thunders into the Gap. Our backs against the cliff face, wind billowing our shirts, Julz names the islands: Green, Eclipse; the walls: Sea Wolf; Horrie Cometh; the climbing routes on Land’s End: “Ivory Tower”, “White Horses”, “Vee-Wheeze”. Fear is the wind, the ocean swelling, vertigo, I’m on all fours crabbing into the comfort of an overhang, and though I know it can’t be true rock heaves beneath me. Fear is the edge.

We’re newlyweds shopping in Coles, Julz’s got the munchies, we have our New-Start and a trolley full of food. There’s a woman in the laundry-aisle crooning in a voice hoarse and low. Her face is young, but dense grey streaks divide the whole of her dark, dark hair into parts. packets of dolly pegs in her hands. Julie, Julie, Julie. Julz turns away, dropped sugar bag bursts on the floor, the woman seizes her from behind, arms around her waist. La notte scorsa ho sognato che navigavi sul mare blu, Last night I dreamed you were sailing on the blue sea, alzante gli ochi al cielo blu, cantante looking up at the blue sky, singing la gloria la gloria la gloria. 37 glory, glory, glory.

Guilietta! A man, small, and dark like Julz, from the end of the aisle advances words pouring out of him like a river: Giulietta, dove sei stata? Where have you been? Ho pensato che sei stata morte nel deserto. I thought you were dead in the desert. Vieni a casa, Giulietta, vieni a casa. Come home, Julietta, come home.

Julz runs – we run – piercing the check-out queue like a presidential cavalcade, but I don’t catch up until she stops at the FJ in the car park, struggling with the locked door, frantic, gasping. Vieni a casa? Vieni a casa? She sees me, says, Take me away from here.

The FJ’s tail gate gapes open. I’m ready, but Julz is still robing for the fishing rock, applying synthetic skins over her flesh-starved bones: Checked flannel shirt over thermal T, jeans over thermal leggings, wet weather gear, Beanie, gloves. Slicks her lips with Vaseline. The tackle box rattles to the ground, Burley, bait box follows. Torch. Gaffe. A red bucket, Julz’s fishing knife, pliers.

I didn’t know how to thread bait on a hook. 38 Country boy, I knew nothing about fishing. Julz’s lessons: Stay off the black rocks; never turn your back on the sea; what draws you in doesn’t always send you back. That’s how it starts, she told me, it starts with an absence. Don’t go down to the water’s edge to untangle lines, reclaim snagged rigs, or coax your catch ashore. Don’t go down to the water’s edge, or be tempted into swimming after wind-snatched hats, Don’t sit and watch the clouds – always watch the sea. The Block 107. “Rainbow Warrior” An excellent and improbable looking climb with a thought provoking crux and good gear. Start at the right end of the huge boulder, 20m right of “Atolls Away”, below a small hanging crack – just left of the hideous looking off width crack. Up the small hanging crack and then move leftwards along under clings. Hard moves lead up and left to a good jug. Follow the line of holds up leftwards. Move back right and then straight up to finish. (South Coast Rock)

Yellowtail. Julz holds the small fish firmly in her left hand removes the hook with her right. Left thumb and forefinger force the mouth open, right forefinger slips in, thumb comes down, she jerks the head upward, snapping the fish’s spine with fluid economy, and chucks it into the bucket with the bait.

Later, after I’ve mastered the art

39 of getting them off the hook without killing them, I throw yellowtail back.

64. “I am the Walrus” 15m 18** A very enjoyable route. Abseil to the small ledge below obvious corner. Climb the corner for 2m, then move left on to face and up crack to top. (South Coast Rock)

On the eastern lip of the Gap: we two are braced against the face of the boulder crowning the fishing rock, 50 metres below us the sea smashes against the cliff, all our effort focused on releasing a near-on 20 kilo and frantic glistening blue-groper from the embrace of the flying gaffe and a fierce tangle of heavy-gauge fishing line.

It begins with an awareness, a trembling of hair along his spine, and he turns as something metallic chimes against stone. The rock climber, a long-limbed slender man, is already upright on the fishing rock, looping rope around the length of his forearm. The fish, freed, jerks out of Julz’s hands and over the edge. The climber stops spooling rope. Rock witch, he says, Fancy meeting you … on this wall. Julz bares the palms of hands beaded with blood. “I’m the walrus?” A flush climbs her throat. Her voice is harsh. Call that a wall? Bouldering is all you’re good for, Lizard. She turns her back, drops to her knees before the disembowelled tackle box. The rock climber reels in the rest of his rope, collects a fistful of metal, leaves them there on the fishing rock: the farmer’s son watching him progress up over the outcrop and out of sight, Julz kneeling, rescuing hooks, sinkers, leaders, knife.

40 *

The lighthouse perched on Cave Point, sea roaring offside south. Julz heads toward the Amphitheatre, she’s climbing today. The farm boy lingers where water emerges from an ancient coral outcrop on the hillside – and at the small pool into which the stream flows. He is entranced by the novelty.

Farm water spent more time sinking into the ground than rising from it. Two taps in the farmhouse kitchen rainwater for drinking. bore water for washing Windmill tank: shady side on the hottest day, I’d lean against it, corrugated sides banded cool against my cheek, imagining the water inside, beetles skating over the surface, mosquito larvae clinging to the meniscus. Remember floating, day a bright circle at the top of the tank and the silver blades of the windmill spinning against the blonde summer-bleached sky, gears creaking, bore pipes – plumbing the earth – tolling. My mother planted my placenta in the soil alongside the leaking concrete trough, placed a willow over it. The willow survived fifteen years, three droughts, thriving when other homestead trees died, like me growing long limbed and strong. In our sixteenth year, an easterly gale brought it down. My father wouldn’t blame the wind. Do you rail against the sun for rising? The earth was too loose, too damp, too forgiving, to hold the tree forever. 41

The pool, so pretty, so clear, framed by sundews, moss. I see the pebbles on the bottom each grain of clean, yellow sand. Julz drops to her knees on the other side. Can you drink it? I ask her. Tasty. Julz dips her cupped hands, watches them fill. She brings the leaking chalice of her hands to my lips This is my blood.

His mouth is fouled by a musk of soil and salt every bit as brackish as bore water. Julz sits back on her heels watching him spit, her face expressionless.

In the Amphitheatre: Julz tempts bait-crabs from their clefts, going for groper tonight. Climbers form a cluster above Beginners’ Wall. Tools clanking on the rock. A tall man coiling, uncoiling rope: Lizard. Julz hands me her bucket. Knots in a rope, she says, weaken it. She sends me east, with instructions to find the high ground. Starting at the right end of The Block, just left of the off-width crack, she addresses the wall. Julz climbs the arête, camming hands into cracks, crimping fingers to work the laybacks, the line of right trending underclings, shifting from one foot to the other crossing one arm over to latch on to a jug, then back stepping to a nubbin – bringing hip to the wall – she tilts her head, surveys the crux of the route. 42

He’s followed her instructions, has taken the long way to the top, the footpath, crawls away from the edge, looks to Eclipse slumbering off-shore.

Julz rests in cold arms of granite. Amphitheatre: chasm a stage halfway between Gap and Bridge, another page in the evolution of stone. Blue is the primary colour here – sky, sea, and Julz’s eyes. Yellow is sand in a rip, dead fish belly-up. Red is lichen, the colour of her lips, her blood. Not the colour of lust but the colour of wine. Not the colour of go but the colour of stop.

Julz mantles onto the red-speckled granite. Beneath the transparency of her skin her muscles are pumped, sinews are taut, like they remember how to work. She rolls onto her back beside me, gasping. Climbing brings you closer to God, she says.

Valentine’s Day: Julz is flaked out in the public toilets behind the Town Hall. She’s pale, but there’s a pulse beneath the scar etched across her wrist.

She rouses as the ambulance arrives. Won’t go to Casualty She’s fine really! 43 Has been fainting a lot lately, is anaemic. And Morphine – just this once, she says, Methadone program, plus some thing to help her sleep.

She’s busting, got to go. She’s locked in a cubicle – with ambulance officers outside – when they hear the lid unscrewing from a bottle and the toilet flushes.

Nothing goes in to something, says Julz. We were fishing at the Gap. Nothing goes into something under earth, during nights when we’re clouded in silence. I’m distant, destitute, the bluntness of my tongue an internal affliction. But Julz stalls departure. Even when I’m not fishing, I’m fishing, she says. 1959 Jimmy Newhill’s Harbour Night: police and volunteers, for forty minutes, struggle to carry a corpse four hundred feet up a steep, pinched path. Life’s a raft, I want to disembark, because I’m seasick, but land, too,

44 sometimes swells up beneath my feet. I’m a dead end overdue on a shore I can’t see. Departure should be mooring ropes unwound from jetty bollards and curled into wet serpents on deck; moon rising behind the jetty lights tracking like hours across the sky behind clouds whipped into prayer flags by the jet stream. The spotlight effect: bright scallops pooling on the sea, and in water spilling ringlets from the cutwater of my ship.

Losing sight of Julz behind a block, a corner, a right-trending wall, I scramble down the tumbled-rock stair into the gully. I track her smothered voice, and I’m looking down a chimney that’s nine feet deep, the bottom a circle of sand, and arising from it Julz, climbing like a spider, face turning to each new handhold in the wall. Come, she says, emerging. I’ll show you how. Beneath me, Julz guides my foot onto a shelf. Even as I surrender to her cajoling, no sooner have I eased myself feet first into the opening, supporting my weight on the hooks of my hands – the rock is cold and salt-sand gritty – and a boulder bulging into the chimney blocks my way. My jeans tear, my skin tears, knees jammed against the boulder, shoulders braced against the wall behind me, I cannot bend, I cannot give myself to the ground, and with one instinctual thrust I am outside again, my drumming heartbeat louder in my ears 45 than the waves swamping the sea-level ledges.

Julz re-emerges. There’s another way. She crab-crawls down the next inclined slab. On all fours, flattening her thin frame against the granite, she slithers beneath an overhang, is gone into the cliff, reappears at the bottom of the chimney. Come on! she calls. I turn on my torch and creep into the labyrinth, under slabs: losing skin protecting the ridges of my spine – the weight of the world above me – over rough shelves: palms abraded, breath sawing into my lungs. I catch sight of a suggestion of Julz disappearing around the turns ahead. The fissure opens into a corridor where I can stand, corridor into a cave as big as the shed behind our house. I stumble across the potholed floor and into Julz’s arms.

Afterward, they lie together on the floor-slab. Julz lifts her head from his chest presses her ear to the ground. Listen, she says, hear the land’s heart beat!

When I wake, I’m alone, the bones in my skull ache with cold. Sunlight streams through an opening in the roof. I find my torch in the pool of sunlight with crushed cans, bottles, old shopping bags, home-made bongs, candle stubs, syringes melted into the remains of a fire. The ceiling is smoke-black, overlain by graffiti: Dallas 1974, 1976, 1983, 46 Mic, Jack, Jody, Rabbit, Spider, Storm, Guilietta, Juliet, Julie, Ju-li, Jewel luvs Lizard 4ever stick figures, love hearts, token penis and balls, Jools, Juls, Julz.

I missed my father’s watch. If there is no way of measuring time, has it passed? Time, my mother said, should be a man’s servant and work to his will and his ways. Time, my father responded, has a fool for its master.

I waited for Julz, 4ever it seemed, The sun went and came again to the opening in the roof. then I found my own way out. And there was a strength in me as new, as urgent as thirst, in the way I scorned the rabbit warren tunnels and climbed up the chimney toward the light.

When Julz’s hand reached down to draw him out he scorned it met the day with the strength of his own fingers.

Vriksha-asana, Julz doing yoga on the fishing rock, balancing on one leg, arms raised over her head. I measure the length and breadth of swell cross-hatched by foam and weed. Offshore: a pod of dolphins appearing/disappearing, school of salmon painting an agitated circle on the surface.

Breaking Up Australia and Antarctica separated about 45 million years ago when the last sections of the super- continent broke apart. The rocks where you now stand were left behind when the continents parted. Today, rock formations on Australia’s southern coast can still be matched to identical rocks on the northern coast of Antarctica near the Windmill Islands. Still drifting to the north, Australia is 5 centimetres further away from Antarctica than it was one year ago today. (Sign at the Gap) Laden with gear and rods he comes into view from the east: a fisherman who pauses to negotiate his centre of balance, a step certain one moment on these wet rocks is uncertain the next.

There’s a big swell today, spume spirals out of the Gap. In the car park, tourists turn on wipers smear white swathes of salt across their windscreens.

A young couple, exploring landscapes located under multiple layers of clothing, have fogged up the windows of their car.

Are they deaf, Julz? The glass too smooth a barrier for your rock-witch’s craft? I should take your fishing knife in hand and make music, like the hot chime of steel on car roof, pick-axe on concrete slab. Hide from me. Pick the lock of life’s back door with something from your box of soothsayer’s tools: a revelation, a dream, visions with teeth.

The driver’s side window is wound down a little, blue eyes under a fringe of blonde hair and a woollen cap.

48 Help me, the fisherman tells the eyes. I can’t find my wife!

Park Ranger: Where? When?

To the West: dune, slit open like a fish, is being gutted by the wind.

Police: Where? When? Hitched a ride? Gone home? Depressed? Pregnant? Suicidal?

In the basin under the Natural Bridge: mechanical crab, blue-shelled, scuttling dumb around moss-green puddle’s salt-scummed skin.

Mobile Command Post: Japanese tourists, their backs to the Gap, photograph the cluster of vans and emergency vehicles.

I open the tailgate, the stink of rotting bait and hot, imprisoned air billows out. Ranger steps back. I take my gear from him, load it in. These jewels remain in the tackle box: a bouquet of orange rind Julz tucked into the tray; my father’s broken watch band; a sun-dried white-bait; peanut shells; fishing line, filament and leaders dulled with salt; sand; rose-quartz, a spoon. Toy car – salvaged from litter trapped in the crevice of a rock

49 below the Natural Bridge, plastic pitted like citrus skin – she found it one day, she was taking care of business to the west, while I was fishing east of the Gap.

Crossing the car park, I am snagged in a snarl of discarded fishing line. Knots resist untying. Police Officer unclips pocket knife from her belt, offers it to me. Her belt: baton, handcuffs, gun. 1973 Natural Bridge Man falls. Falls seventy feet to ledge where he’s overwhelmed by water. Weeks later, tourists walking Cable Beach find a Paper Nautilus brought to land and a man’s body at the high tide line.

i.d. emblazoned across their backs: Police, SES in a huddle with rangers, Sea Search and Rescue, under a canopy around a table over a map. Glimpses of a line denoting Torndirrup coast Start at the last known point. The fishing rock. A ruler traces the arc of coast east from Cave Point to Black Rock. Put a team on the beach.

The policeman stumbles. The Gap behind us – wave explodes out of The Pop-Up spray hangs like a shade in the air – Cave Point ahead: track mined by rocks, roots of scrappy Banksias. Bronzewings burst from a tangle of Sedge Grass, Pig-face, Smoke Bush. In the canopies of wind-dwarfed shrubs, White-tailed Black-cockatoos, secateur-beaks splitting Banksia cones, squabble. A reliable indicator of rain, Ranger says.

50 Ironstone outcrop leaching pindan-orange pigments: Julz’s hemp shawl, the weave ragged with snags, found jammed between two boulders. Earth spongy underfoot, then slippery-wet, confused footprints impressed in the clay banks of slime-coated puddles. Moss-slicked rocks, limestone-flow in a suspended, jagged sprawl toward The Amphitheatre: box-pleat, patched by boulders, stitched into the ragged coast.

Found in the Amphitheatre: Rubber thong in the eastern gully, snapped-strap ringlet, webbed foot-print.

Searched all night for a woman, once – she’d left a note – fucking froze my nuts off. She hid out here all fucking night watching the torches hearing us calling. Fucking nutcase. Fucking desperate, I reckon.

Torndirrup, moth-eaten limestone shawl over granite shoulders, search teams spread out across the cliff tops.

On a terrace below the Bridge: flotsam midden gutted bait bags, black film canister, bleached sea weed.

Man with binoculars on Gorilla Head reports a sighting: something resembling clothing being borne out to sea on the muscular back of a rip.

To the East, tourists report hearing a woman singing, they couldn’t decipher the words of her song but they heard her voice surfacing in air erupting from blowholes: rock-trachea bellowsing breath.

Sea-sigh: dread-locked Melaleucas inclined away from the wind. 1960 Blowholes Gutted fish in fish bag. The fishing spot bare. Big swell. Little wind. Friends of the missing man say he liked to watch the Tree Martins hem the seams of the cliff-wind. The full moon making snail trails of sand stranded in the crevices of rocks; foam stitched across the crest of a wave; the lighthouse at Cave Point semaphoring into the Southern Ocean night, the light on Eclipse responding. Lights – blue and red flashing, flashing on Police, SES vehicles – white light flickering behind van doors. Ambulance parked, dark, encircled by witches’ hats. Headlights illuminate the rocks, pan over parked cars, The Gap is calm tonight, but the wind is as cold as kindness when they tell him they haven’t found his wife.

Woman shrugs a coil of rope onto her shoulder: A lot people think it’s easy, she says. Jump in, dive in, fall in … swim to shore. Forget the wind can blow them onto rocks, barnacles. First survive the fall, then survive the water.

52 A man in orange overalls: Sometimes they’re not found, undertow takes them God knows where. If she’s alive in the caves … unlucky, there isn’t any light down there. He sees me listening, flushes, turns away.

Seven to ten days, a fisherman says. God made the world in six and rested on the Sabbath. It takes longer for a body to float.

At Cable Beach, at the fringe of an eastward current, white sand is churned up, imprinted with tyre tracks, boats still linger offshore. Sometime in the future … The Gap will widen and disappear The Natural Bridge will collapse and Become a new Gap The Blowholes will cave in and Create a new Natural Bridge TORNDIRRUP NATIONAL PARK Powerful forces at work. (Sign at the Gap) Back yard: the shed, doors drawn open for sunlight. The soil, newly turned, yet spiders’ webs have already annexed the intervals between clods. Demolition sale 4b4 for stumps; 4b3 for bearers, 4b2 for joists, nails – bullet heads, hammer, saw.

My father keeps his tools well oiled, mine are scored with rust, but they still meet the task of forming a grid-work of stumps. Positioning each one perfectly upright, I focus all of my attention on the bubble in the spirit level, the backs of my hands freckled with wet cement.

53 My father phones. Is she found? The dams are dry, he’s going to cross-bred lambs for meat, and pigs for a while as a sideline, feeding them the seconds. Jock from next-door hovers, offers, Dig some of those holes for ya? I take the shovel from his hands as quickly as he had grasped it, and turn my back, checking the line level, building a wall of busy silence. I’d still be out there, Jock mutters. I know he’s gone when I hear his screen door slam. Jarrah: sapling wood is pink, older dark. The fence posts on the farm were jarrah, Termites won’t touch it, the old man reckoned. Working quickly, I set the bearers up, joists follow. My father despised chipboard, cheap by nature, and fickle – soaking up water like a sponge then warping into leaves of chips and sawdust. I cherish it, lay each resin-bonded piece with the precision of a surgeon placing stitches, edge butted to edge, drilled exactly, screws countersunk. Just before I lower the last perfectly measured piece into the last perfectly measured gap, I look down into the airspace. It is dark there now, but I know the soil is well worked over by the regular transit of my boots and shovel.

No one else remembers the needle tracks. Outside, I still look the same.

54 Every day this week I have seen Julz’s married-to-me self in the picture on the mantel. There is nothing she will not do again that pains me more than smile, tap the windchimes, or lean on the back fence, admire Jock’s hens, orange tree heavy with fruit. Or go missing for a day when she was looking to score. She will not comment on the colour of fertile yolks spluttering in the pan, or silence the kettle’s shrieking on winter-dark mornings, she will not pause to listen to magpies carolling the summer down. She will not savour oysters, clam cradled in the cup of her fingers. Or draw my breath into her own. I wake to my sleep, sleep till I wake. My dreams do not shrink from the knowledge of her death.

The police come, go. The house is empty of evidence, the truth, the living. There is no proof in this mundane day, no body other than the echo of her presence: sarong sprawled across the table; native bluebells in a jam jar; strands of hair in the bathroom basin. When I close my eyes, Julz is in her kitchen-cave burning incense, eating cubes from the sugar bowl; spooning tea leaves into the pot; washing three days worth of dishes in one hit and making a mountain in the drainer, setting up her factory on the table: lighter, spoon, outfit, balloon.

Three fingers above her elbow, tourniquet tight, daring vein to roll, needle angle-side-up pierces the skin. It’s just like playing pool, Julz releases the tie, 55 flushing, pulling back, the rig filling with blood, flushing. Booting brings you closer to God, she says, pulling back.

Julz and me in the FJ driving to the Gap: driving without headlights on a night when the glow of the full moon is so bright the trees have shadows. Julz and me, our bodies spooned and loose from lovemaking. Some sweet things, like the sugar cubes that belie the sting of sand billowing up from the blow out: my pulse an unrelenting noise, sea-beat, sea-beat, southern ocean swelling in undersea caves, waves exploding up the cliffs. Julz and me, and the silence in the kitchen when she broke. Not a drop of blood. One too many times she trusted. 2003 Salmon Holes Blue water, green in marbled shallows, postcard perfect. Someone’s missing: white sand, grey rocks and sudden silent swells.

Back yard: in the shed, doors closed against sunlight, he cleaves a fissure through the chipboard with his axe.

The earth is moist, loose, smells like coastal heath after rain.

The window of the sky opens.

Jetty Stories

57 (This page has been left blank intentionally)

58 Part 1: The Traveller’s Tale

The traveller knows her intimately: scientist in a red sarong, herself a migratory bird a long way from home, white-haired witch from the Arctic rim, after her last day tagging juvenile Red Knots, sits on a battered esky in the stretched shadow of a ghost-gum clinging to the face of an eroding dune. Behind her, hermit crabs spill down the guttered slope to scavenge on the beach. She drinks beer from a large brown bottle, burrows her naked toes into pindan-red sand and shell grit. The tide is out. The traveller watches the bird woman watching the mangal: mangrove maze trimmed by seaweed, bisected by a corridor leading out to the intertidal flats, an avenue of bottles and cans racked between periscope-roots, empties corked by pale clay-mud, labels gnawed by foraging snails in pointed shells, the vintage tidal. Finches claim the canopy, swarming from racket to roost, racket to roost, to racket. He knows her intimately, knows the slope of her suntanned shoulders, knows her body beneath the sarong is lightly freckled, breasts marbled by veins, fine blonde body-hair almost invisible against her skin. He knows her: knows her body is like new bark on a Grey Mangrove, a palette of soft shades: pinks, whites, blue-green, beige.

Twilight in the mangal: a Great Egret, dazzlingly white, poised over its reflection in a water and silt-filled bomb-hole bursts into flight. 59 Taken by surprise, the bird’s all ungainly wings and trailing plumes, its flailing legs dislodging the stick-stitched seaweed-thatch of a Kite’s nest from the canopy of a Grey Mangrove, tipping grass, feathers, eggshells, shit and fish heads into the water, curls of belly-down float like bubbles through the branches.

When his eyes open to blackness, he is naked, fallen asleep facedown on coarse, hard-packed sand. The bird woman’s juices, and his own, have dried on his mouth. He is stale with beer, bile and salt, bones aching, skin stinging, resting half in-half out of water warm as blood. The tide is coming in and he curls out of its embrace to higher ground, returns to the dark behind his eyelids. Dreams sunset on the tidal flats, the new moon, narrow crescent rising, setting. He has been set upon by a banshee. Now ahead of him, staggering toward the sea – silver band far distant – nude, slicked with mud, bird-woman taking flight, wings whacking the air, following the sun, the burn. He’ll miss her. Mister! Belly down, cheek on sand. Wake up! Thirst. You’re burned! Hot skin taut across his shoulders, buttocks, the backs of his legs. One side of his face is midday fire, the other a smear of spew, grit. Dazzled, surrounded by kids in baggy shorts gripping gidgees and buckets. A girl giggles, fists a hand over her mouth, looks away. Boy offers a towel. 60 Sea-water milky-green against the ochre tinted shore: receding tide buoying the lidless esky, escorted by two rocking bottles, along the avenue to the bay. Wet-red sarong laced through the roots of a Stilt Mangrove. The mangal has left its brand on him, limbs crosshatched by scratches, feet bruised by roots, chest-skin scored by nails, on his right breast the imprint of a human bite. He takes the towel offered, and turning – kids chattering like finches behind him – climbs the dune to motel, and motel room, and motel bed.

He is woken by the steady drip of dew from the eaves and the movement of a flat, black tick over the hot skin of his arm, returns to the oblivion of sleep the bird woman resting half-in half-out of a shallow pool, gills working. He is with converging Kite-Hawks, climbing the thermals until the tidal flats are darkened by wave after wave of birds wheeling on wide, drooped wings under water, wet-slippery body of mudskipper-woman slides around him, glides over his face. His hands skid on her, a sudden lurch into consciousness fleeing dark suffocation, and a sudden, uncontainable outpouring of energy, his heart hammering against his rib cage. The tick has burrowed its head beneath his skin. His sheets are damp.

Another day dawning outside – he blinks – his room is bathed in the glow of street lights. 61

Thirst hauls him, trembling, from belly-down on bed to the bathroom where – immersed in the stinging stream of the shower – he alternatively drinks and vomits, pulse hammering the inside of his skull.

Outside the bathroom window, midday, humid, Brahminy Kite – perched on the edge of the fence – fluffs its feathers to capture breeze. In another room a phone rings. The traveller shivers, skin of a blister parts and a rivulet of fluid trickles down his back. The phone rings out. Yellow White-Eye trapezes onto a hanging basket, stuffs its beak with coconut fibre as vigorous, as wiry, as pubic hair. The traveller fingers feel out skin burned purple on his face, tiny blisters colonising his cheek, his split lip.

In the province of tenderness, his lover cups his throbbing feet in her claws, traces the ridges of metatarsals with the side of the same beak that days before articulated a point of law in the mangal, to the Grey Mangroves, to the Buttressed, to the Club, the Knee Root, negotiating safe passage through pneumatophores, grey mud coating her skin, the jury, the accused, her tongue between his toes.

Behind her, the rising tide tinkles over the flats, 62 town lights trim the shore ahead. Bare feet flinching from dead shells, stones, she strides over the wave-rippled back of a sandbar then she’s ankle-deep waist-deep in a gully of fluid mud, momentum driving her further, up to her armpits in the suck.

And then the tide: sea flowing around her shoulders, ears, mouth. She – hyperventilating, swallowing the salty stuff, coughing, disbelieving, is engulfed – holding only half a breath as ripples wing across her face. She won’t follow the birds north this year. Pain invades the casket of her chest. She ceases struggling against the sludge, darkness closing in as her airway gate opens, water inundates her lungs. She tries to think but can’t, hands clawing at the air above the surface as she drowns rooted in the earth. Her heart slows its panicked pace to a lazy lope and stumble a pause, a pulse … And he wakes sitting bolt upright on his bed, brain screaming for oxygen, chest stilled, struggling to his feet in the night, colliding with the wall hands flailing toward the door 63 to unlock the exhausted air closeted in his lungs, but darkness king-hits him before breath arrives.

And then he is shivering on the floor, night a pale square on one wall, he breathes, lips and hands electric.

Michael Adam SELLEN

STATES

1. I am 35 years old and live at Room 5 of the Peninsula Motel on the corner of First Street and Second Avenue, Broome.

2. My occupation was survey assistant to Dr Johanna de Vriess on the Northern/Southern Hemispheres Bird Migration Study. Those duties included driving and maintaining the project’s vehicle and other equipment, and provisioning field trips.

3. I have had a personal relationship with Dr de Vriess for the last three (3) years. In that time our relationship has been good without any violence or domestic disputes.

4. On Tuesday 25th July 2006 from 4pm to 6pm I helped Dr de Vriess to unload the project vehicle and to pack some items for transport to The Netherlands.

5. Dr de Vriess was scheduled to fly out of Broome the next morning Wednesday 26th July 2006 at 7am to go back to The Netherlands.

6. When we finished packing Dr de Vriess said she was going to take some beer down to the beach to celebrate the end of the project.

7. I didn’t go with Dr de Vriess because I had to do some work on the vehicle and I had to pack my own things as I work the wet season caretaking the tourist village at Pindan Bay.

8. I also wasn’t feeling well as I was sunstruck from our last day out with the birds, so I didn’t go with her.

64 9. I got sicker and have been in my room at the Peninsula Motel for the last week.

10. While I was sick I heard knocking at my door several times. I don’t know who it was. I was too sick to get up.

11. The Police got the Motel Manager to unlock the door of my room. They asked me about Dr de Vriess, but I didn’t know where she was and I was too sick to help with the search.

12. I have had no contact with Dr de Vriess since her disappearance.

13. I declare this statement is true to the best of my knowledge and belief and that I have made this statement knowing that if it is tendered in evidence I will be guilty of a crime if I have wilfully included in this statement anything which I know to be false or that I do not believe to be true.

Willy-willy, whip of wind, lashes the Toyota: leaves, sticks, gravel-buckshot.

Sign: Road subject to flooding.

Blue-bottle drifting across a violet sky laced by tentacles: always a fire burning somewhere in the Kimberley. Acacias – smothered by bridal creeper – morph into seagulls, Waragan, Eaglehawk Djaringgalong. Monster Bird (Nyigina/Paddy Roe)

Driving: noon on the Roebuck Plains, he’s distracted by a weather balloon descending against a backdrop of flickering mirages, trees, vehicles, snaps back to himself:

65 a large, Black Swan on a collision course a sick thud fractures the windscreen into a sharp rain of glass inflowing the giant bird slumped broken-necked hissing its last breath against his chest and the Land Cruiser slews sideways on the gravel verge rolls, rolls again, comes to a rest back on its wheels horn blaring, the caved-in cab clouded with dust, feathers. He is wrapped in his seat-belt, winded, straining for a lungful of the pindan-shrouded air, holding the dead Swan in his arms, ears ringing, dark closing in.

The Road Inspector, Bardi man, wields his iron crooks precisely, relocating road-kill from bitumen to gravel, tosses his tools onto the flat-bed of his Toyota with the traveller’s swag and backpack, resumes the driver’s seat. His passenger, preoccupied by prickling skin, fossicks amongst folds of clothing for glass splinters, Spinifex spines, ticks. It’s a slow trip to Sandfire, the Road Inspector’s plastic mermaid swinging from the rear-view mirror, carrion-cairns marking out his circuit.

Refusing the Inspector’s invitation north, the traveller buys a Valiant Charger and a pack of No-Doze at the Sandfire Roadhouse. The Charger’s former owner, a skinny-hipped kid – Jackaroo, he says, wearing stove-pipe jeans, laughing-sided riding boots, 66 and a fine line of hair on his upper lip – pockets $500 and straps the traveller’s watch around his sinewy wrist, tapping the glass. Reckon I could fix this, he says.

Monitor lizard saluting the sun like a yogi-mystic, the Charger passes over it. In the rear-view mirror, nothing, then the car launches off the road, is borne on the back of a crocodile-dragon striding through bending dimensions overtaking a road-train slewing down the double white line dividing the highway, heading for the coastal dunes, salt stockpiles like icebergs on the horizon, speeding past the lightning struck wastelands, fires burning east.

Turn around. A flurry of wings: Brahminy Kite balances on the window-sill at his shoulder, hooked beak just inches from his face. The bird folds in its red-backed black-tipped wings, upper-tail coverts, adjusts the lay of feathers along its back. The traveller meets its gaze long enough to know that before the ocean flowed into the cavities of her lungs, the bird woman cursed him. Ahead, the image of a vehicle reversed in a mirage, a real vehicles’ reflection is an optical illusion, 67 driver gives a Pilbara wave as they pass.

The traveller jerks awake in his swag on hard ground alongside the Charger, sound of ore train passing the caravan park is almost smothered by the roar of the shop’s refrigeration unit. Air brakes on road train hissing. Tourists making love in their tent. Over by the ablution blocks, pay day drunks abuse their neighbours, play music louder.

On the side of the road: Kunji Bush, termite mounds amongst flowering spinifex, a flock of Budgerigars flow green ribbon-like around the wreck of a burned-out Kingswood.

In a post No-Doze induced stupor, the traveller guides the Charger – in a slow crawl – onto the bridge over Munjina Gorge. Snapping to as the far-side wheels lurch up and over something, draws to a gravel crunching halt on the verge. So drowsy he stumbles onto a road encrusted with blood, the double white line overlapped by arterial sprays. Nearby, an object like a cow’s head, mince, entrails. Just behind, in the middle of the lane, a larger piece of the carcass heaves, separates, and consolidates into the form of a Wedge-tailed Eagle staggering toward him, one great wing stretched out wide, detail so clear, he can see underwing a line of white down the other – partially dismembered, fractured humerus 68 spearing out like a mutant feather – dragging uselessly alongside. Gathering speed, its talons scrabbling over the bitumen, the pale, hooked beak opening – its lower mandible severed – the Eagle screams, and screams.

The traveller rests on the steering wheel, observing the sun’s slow progress across the sky. He has closed the door, wound up the window, to shut out the shuffle of claws on gravel, the pant, and every now and then a feeble, high-pitched cry from outside. A company of Wedge-tails skirmish high in the thermals over the ranges.

The Bird woman catalogues bones, naming them out loud: tibiotarsus, tarsometatarsus, furcula, sternum, rib.

On the other side of the gorge, bony cattle wander aimlessly amongst Spinifex, purple Mulla Mulla, pink Wild Hops. They are panicked by a stock transport spraying dung and piss over cars and caravans traffic-jammed behind. The cavalcade rocks the Charger on its springs as it passes.

The Eagle is on the road, a mess of brown-black feathers and bone.

Night is a blur of Wild Turkeys, Owls launching into the beams of headlights, roos, donkeys, cattle, near Kumarina a camel. He nurses an open bottle of whiskey between his thighs,

69 plays static on the radio loud enough to wake the dead. Deep inland, the night too bright, too cold to spend shivering on the back seat while ice forms on the windscreen, he drives until the road morphs into brick walls, and then he drives through them.

Near dawn he’s in a lay-by outside a town, but sleep’s moved on by the stench of a fire extinguished with water and something dead in the bushes. Sign: Floodway

A Roadhouse – microcosm of eccentricity – another planet. He fuels up, paying a bored waitress for cigarettes and No-Doze, food he can’t eat, warm carton of beer. He picks up a cocky feather and a flattened origami star from the driveway by the bowsers; while on the verge, a flock of Little Corellas gossip and graze amongst Northern Bluebells, on Buffle-grass heavy with seed.

Blades of windmills skip over the surface of the land like flat stones over water. Oncoming traffic flashing headlights.

Sign: Straying Stock. Unfenced road.

Further south: in a patch of bright yellow flowers, two glossy brown Emus foraging 70 below the canopies of umbrella-capped trees.

Bird woman singing “Chiming Wedgebill”: You’re late home. Why did you get drunk?

Mid-morning near Mount Magnet: he slows for wild goats overflowing fields of everlastings, country wild with colour. An Emu erupts from shrubs, is in front of him faster than he can brake but at the last minute it spurs, slides away down the passenger-side flank. The traveller watches the bird from the roadside flouncing around the scrub, ruffled, but unscathed.

Five minutes later, the Charger cruising down the highway a burst of shaggy plumage, bare-skin yellow-eye, and the Emu marks him measure for measure powerful legs pounding out distance and time, distance and time, its voice a thudding drum telling the story of the road, the thrill, the race, distance and time, distance and time, the woodlands, the inland, arid plains, the fence. The traveller plants his foot, but the Emu surges away speeding across the country, dust billowing in its wake.

The chop of motorbikes, headlights bright orbs in day- light drifting.

Near the rabbit proof fence, he passes through a small town cloaked in fog, main street lined by haloed lights. Flowering Canola buttering

71 slices of country.

On a southern slope of the Darling Range: sleep deprived eyes see a woman sitting on the shoulder of the road with a child leaning against her side resolving into a white cross garlanded by plastic flowers.

Giraffe-windmill, forelegs splayed, drinks from a dam. She-oaks and stunted Paperbarks semaphore from mirages, streams of traffic surfacing in the liquid distance. A flock of sheep flow into a tunnel under the road. On the other side they fan out in patient order, dogged by a black and white flash of Border Collie. Twenty-eights fossicking on the verges. Small cross at the base of a slender gum: “SAM” In a gully, Arum Lilies skirt a winter-stripped fig.

On either side of the road south fields nurture granite outcrops and dams gouged out of clay. One moment it’s fences, twisted trees, farmhouses, wetlands, barbwire-starred rushes. White lines broken unbroken. Machine sheds, shearing sheds, combine harvesters. Horses, milkers and beef cattle up to their knees in grass. Towns, gates, 72 mailboxes, heaped mallee roots. Baled hay. Silos. Railway sidings. Magpie-Lark skates across the bonnet. Next moment it’s forest, sunset strobing through branches, the road a flickering crosswalk. Go back! Kite-Hawk perching on the driver’s sill stripping fur and flesh from the carcass of a maggot-struck fox.

Road vibration humming against the sole of his boot. Woman collecting morning wood from under dieback infected banksias, then salt, and dead trees gesturing like the hands of giants consumed by bog. Jarrah trees on their sides, decaying roots still cradling clay. Sign flares through the dusk. Form one lane

High beam. Silver sedan overtaking. Police car at intersection, dust clouds curling in the beams of its headlights.

Blue Gums glow in a tangerine sunset. Ten k’s from the coast: the traveller pulls into a truck bay. Spends the night, most of the next day, jerking into consciousness, to sweat and tremors, planes, passing traffic, commuters’ pauses.

73 In the late afternoon, body aching, he approaches the southern edge. I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in, the night you died, I felt your eardrums crack, And the short agony, the longer dream, The Nothing that was neither long nor short… (Kenneth Slessor “Five Bells”)

The day is a warm window in winter, the air stupefied, flat, clouds stalled in a blue traffic jam at the intersection of land and sky. Blacktop corrugated by mirage, white line broken into the dot-dash of Morse Code S-O-S-ing before the car.

Charger grumbles into town, down the ramp-like main street threatening to launch traffic into the harbour, bottoming out on speed humps, attracting the attention of pedestrians, workers fleeing offices, late shoppers, to its insect-encrusted windscreen; the wing of a Western Red Rosella wedged beneath a wiper blade; roo-bar caked with mud, blood, fur.

The Charger skates to a halt in a spray of gravel and dust in the jetty car-park. Driver-side door opens. The traveller wears the skin of another country, has been in these clothes so long he feels like he’s growing scales.

Pelican, pigeon-toed flower girl, leads him: waddles, limps, waddles, limps,

74 trailing ribbon-ringlets of fishing line, one leg ugly, bulging round its nylon garter.

75 Part II: The Jetty

The traveller knows this jetty, this harbour haunted by history, this bowl of peninsula: its sandbars, wrecks, seagrass beds, the broad sweep of its deeps, its pale shallows, its secrets, some of its ghosts. In a bottle picked up on the beach was a scrap of an envelope on which was written in pencil:- February 1893. Foundering off Cape Leeuwin.1

He knows which shadows the salmon seek when the channel seals prowl. And where the harbour waters meet the sound’s. Sailing ship Newfoundland. Only one boat. 11 hands. Provisions for nine days.2

The shore is lined by long grass thatched with rubbish, seaweed, feathers. The carcass of an Black-browed Albatross has been abandoned on the boat ramp. A launch, moored offshore, is a white seesaw on the darkening sea. There is no sailing ship in Lloyd’s shipping list called “Newfoundland.”3

This is no homecoming. His world’s too greatly changed. Sandbars have shifted, the channel’s deeper, sea grass groves retreated to the eastern rim. The handwriting of the message seems too steady for it to have been written on a foundering ship.4

The jetty’s facelift matches the glossy catamarans

1 Albany Advertiser, 27 October, 1893. (3C). 2 ibid 3 ibid. 4 ibid. 76 moored in the boat pens. Parts of it have gone, replaced by new appendages: a lookout tower here, a spur there, at the end a water-level landing. Birds still colonise the jetty, pylons iced with guano. The old shed has had a coat of paint somewhere beneath which is carved his name. This is no homecoming: he is here now only because this harbour lies at the end of the road he’s taken. He can drive no further. Grasshopper grief: occurs when you least expect it, like a sun-shower (Mary Whitty) When the harbour’s swell rocks the jetty on its piles, it is no lullaby it sings. The slop of water almost drowns out other sounds. Jetty sleepers, worn down by generations of wheels and feet – permeated by berley, blood and scales, salt, sinkers, engine oil – sometimes get a sound in edgeways – a groan, a thud, or creak.

Pursued by shrieking children, a newly landed octopus, red-brown, defiant, is heading for the jetty’s edge when it’s impaled, held high on the blade of a carving knife wielded by a boy, his forearm evening-gloved by ink, braceleted by legs.

On the underside of the decking in a cavity lined with guano and feathers, a Bronzewing pigeon incubates a clutch of eggs. A metre below her something thrashes

77 beneath the surface of the sea, subsides. On the coal hulk, Zephyr, beached at Little Grove, men engaged in repairs leave off work.5

The jetty rocks in response to the monotonous waves, swell worrying at a storm-snapped sleeper: the savaged timber thumping dully, slow techno-drumbeat through wood. One of their number is missing.6

Barnacles compete for space at the waterline with long-haired moss, rust, discarded bait bags, a sodden paper sampan disintegrating. William Baldry, last seen tween decks, tween decks consisting of beams, the planks having been taken up.7

Sun wraps its setting rays around the jetty shelter. Inside, shadows are dense, so dark the traveller doesn’t see the woman till he sits – fumbling for the pack of No-Doze tucked into his sleeve – finds her at his side shrouded in a cloud of unwashed-body odour, stale hair, old clothes, old skin, decayed seaweed, salt-saturated timber, dried bait. She’s small, huddled into the lapels of a man’s wool dressing gown: fiery hair sprouting from white regrowth, eyes in her upturned face as liquid as the waters below, blue-irises swimming in a green-grey sea. Emerging like a polyp from coral, her lips, rosebuds crowning whiskery chin-folds, jowls, part: Tide turning. The pack of No-Doze is empty.

5 paraphrased/quoted from articles from the Albany Advertiser, 20 August (3G) and 23 August 1898 (3G). 6 ibid. 7 ibid. 78 His coal bucket hanging from a rope attached to the deck, hatchway opened just enough to admit a man.8

A little girl, her long hair kinked where someone’s tried to brush braids out, kneels alongside a bench, lays empty bait bags, defrosting mulies, prawns, in neat rows, then is intent on making a sinuous octopus leg be still. 10 foot below the hatchway a beam, below the beam, floating on the dust-slicked dark water in the hull, a hat.9

A bottle buoys over a wave. Harbour-wind puffs air through the gaps between the sleepers, waves licking at pylons, old wounds.

William Baldry leaves a wife, eleven children.10

Sundown. Pelican settles itself between its wings, rests its great beak upon its chest. A boy – ten, maybe – coated in freckles, is bumping a bucket laden with fishing gear, over the uneven jetty decking, an arthritic Kelpie limping at heel. The kid stares at the shelter, as though he can’t see them, but somehow knows they’re there. He settles at jetty’s edge, alongside a cluster of fishers. A fat man grown bored with standing, subsides onto a bench. He rearranges his bulky form, leans over the line

8 ibid. 9 ibid. 10 ibid. 79 treasured between his fingers, sensing every gust of wind, every wave’s impact upon it, and the sinker dragging across the bottom. A woman in a pink coat, faux fur trimmed, half-reclines, her legs crossed, beside him. Cigarette holder in one hand, champagne glass in the other. Tourist family group with handlines reel in fish after fish – Trumpeters, Skippy, – bottom feeders and hunters – all undersize, consign them, flapping and bleeding, back to the water, hook them again. Cormorant sulking on pole. Junkie curled into a question mark, sweating. Bones in the traveller’s face ache with cold. The kid baits his crab net with octopus, lowers it into the harbour.

Between the twin arms of the jetty, a school of whiting in a zig-zag race with the wind, the tide, drifting boater trimmed with daisies and a piece of red paper on a raft of drifting kelp.

Instructions for an origami boat. Begin with a square of paper, encourage a hull shape to emerge.

The kid pauses mid-fold, then curls back into himself, chin clamping paper to chest, resumes with a mid-line crease. When the boat has emerged from the paper, the kid, on his belly, hangs over the edge of the jetty, and – taking a moment to gauge wind speed and direction – launches his paper boat down a humid ramp of air.

80 Two seamen set out in a whale boat. They had their dinner, a good anchor and twelve fathoms of rope.11

It lands upright in a wave trough, bobs, spins end to end, lays over, taking water, sinks slowly out of range of the jetty lights. The fat man lurches to his feet to clear a snag, twanging and relaxing the line, the heavy flesh on his arms trembling with effort.

The Point King light keeper saw the missing seamen before a heavy squall came on. After the squall passed over, nothing more was seen.12

The traveller steps forward, toward the edge and an umbrella abandoned there: peels a strip of dead skin from his cheek flicks it onto a passing slope of breeze. He took a wrong turn. Turned right at the intersection of south and east instead of steering straight ahead. Blamed the policeman’s unreadable expression when he passed the statement to him after signing: the bird woman’s passport open face-up on the station counter, her plane ticket, his. He didn’t know anything about that second ticket. Had never said he’d go.

From under the bench, behind the old woman’s legs, the Kelpie growls softly, hackles rising. The traveller investigates the scabs on the backs of his hands.

11 paraphrased/quoted from articles on the “Meta” incident from the Albany Advertiser, 5th, 14th, 17th & 21st June, 1890. 12 ibid. 81 Kid takes a piece of paper from his tackle box.

Out on the tidal flats – in the dark of the departed new moon, after desperate, drunken, edgy sex, his head ringing from booze, mull, and the slap that followed It’s over – he can’t hold on to the bird woman. They’re both naked. She’s slippery with mud, but gains purchase on him with her nails. Two weeks later, two and a half thousand kilometres away, his throat thickened by memory, his fingers travel over the skin on his chest as though he can read the imprint of her bite like Braille. The bottom of the boat being dull red, the search party thought, till they came alongside, it was the end of the reef cropping out of the water.13

The full moon glows over the cold, calm ocean. From the glittering middle distance comes the explosive sigh of a whale. Something’s shifted. The boat was nine miles east, drifting in toward the rocks bottom upwards with its oars and sail.14

Before him, shrouded in an overcoat, captain’s hat hiding eyes, lighthouse keeper pointing with a pipe towards the channel beacons flashing red, flashing green, and candlelight a dull semaphore from the portholes of coal hulks at anchor offshore resolving into a cloud of white-haired, white-bearded fisherman float-trimmed net a-shoulder, tilly-lamp in hand, walking up off the water onto the jetty in sodden boots,

13 ibid. 14 ibid. 82 coat dripping. The salmon are running, he says, passing the traveller by. A great many sharks were about.15

Gulls, bats swarm in the coronas of gaslights: the jetty morphs, bristles with masts, rods. Sailors run up the landing, talking loudly, laughing. The traveller has stepped into the stream of history, wades deeper. Carpenter shrugs off a heavy tool belt, axe, leans against the shelter’s corrugated wall, steel as grey as silence at his back. The traveller feels them flowing round him. Sailmaker unfurling canvas. Sealer, straddling the gap between whaleboat and fender, unloading harpoons, ropes. Noongar woman in salt-encrusted roo-skin cape and woollen skirt, eyes downcast, stacks pelts, blue-eyed child at heel. Convicts shuffling past in chains. Carpenter – grunting with the effort of retrieval – hacks into the decking with his axe. Wood chips fly to ripples. Cabin boy nude, grubby, legs buckling under the weight of sea-grass twinned to his back, folds over mutilated sleepers, crawls into the half-dark behind the shelter, hunchbacked like some ancient sea-creature risen from the depths to spawn. Black dog swimming in a circle in the water, barking. The traveller’s distracted by dinghy departing yacht for shore: drone of an outboard slipping in and out of his hearing, kite-tail of wake phosphorescent against the dark.

15 ibid. 83 The old woman is on her knees scaling fish, scales sequinning the sleeves of her robe. Tide turning. Beneath the surface, a moon a face a woman singing water into her lungs, melody scored by bubbles soaring from her, mouth a wide “o” of surprise, eyes wide.16

The kid, the hair on the crown of his head flaring into a cocky-tail, bony shins barked by wood, bends down to pull the crab net.

The origami kid, gentle lover of paper, comes down the jetty bumping his bucket across the boards. His eyes are as liquid-silver as the harbour is under the full moon. His kelpie limps behind.

Black and white dog drifts by in a boat. A baby surfaces then sinks. Yellowtail. Old woman holds the small fish firmly with her left hand, unhooks it with her right, pinches its snout between forefinger, thumb, she jerks upward, snaps its neck. Chucks it into the bucket with the bait. Recovered from the surf: a log reel and line, a long steering oar, a boat hook and sprit, an object for the dead-house.17

16 Paraphrased/quoted from an untitled article from the Albany Advertiser, 24 February, 1898. (3A). 17 Paraphrased/quoted from articles on the “Meta” incident from the Albany Advertiser, 5th, 14th, 17th & 21st June, 1890.

He understands now the sea is a continent flowing by, that land rises and there’s no living sargassum in these cold waters, what he sees is the dull skin of uprooted seagrass dying, and time. He is impotent, deaf to the hiss of Pelicans spurred from their pylon roosts by dripping shades crawling up from the slime of the harbour bottom, wings beating.

Bumping against the piles of the jetty. In the water five days: semi-naked. Skull bloated, whitish, partly fleshed.

Across the harbour, blue beacons melt into the white confusion of yacht club lights, yacht club lights melt into the confusion of houselights, masthead lights of night-harbour traffic, a Bight-weary catamaran, trawler late in from the Southern Ocean loaded to the waterline with Patagonian Toothfish, coal-hulks emerging, dissembling into night.

Some sort of fish parasite, worms, colonising the face. Eyes were there, but not there. A few wisps of hair.

A small launch putters, stutters into the distance.

When we turned the body over, parts of it were loose.

Somewhere out of sight someone labours over a stubborn, flooded outboard.

85 She was wearing a coat of some kind, and when we turned her over it seemed it was the only thing holding her arms on. Police Officer

Swimmers call to each other. The fat man changes his rig, removes the sinkers. Fly fishes to relieve the monotony of a night where fish did not throw themselves onto hooks. He trolls a lure across the surface. Something strikes, misses. Up to the present, the only tangible evidence of efforts to make the sea give up its dead was the fishing up with the drag and hooks of some portion of a man’s shirt the neckband, front, part of the left arm. A dog barks. In the button-hole was an 18-carat stud. It can hardly, therefore, be part of a cast-off shirt.

The kid bumps his bucket over the jetty boards.

There were teeth marks on the shirting the shape and size of a shark’s jaw, and the arm had the appearance of having been gnawed off, not torn.

No sand bubbler, a crab scuttles across the landing. From the far reaches of the night the squawk of a Kite, like that of a newborn, followed by a flutter of wings.

He remembers their last trip out with the birds. Brahminy Kites, a pair: one perched motionless, for hours, on the branch of a Boab swept seaward from the centre.

86 While the bird woman watched, photographing, taking notes, the traveller occupied himself setting up fishing lines, making flies, leaders. Unmoving except for simple adjustments in perching posture, the female was still there at sunset. Around her, flying in circles, calling in peevish trills, mews and squeals18 its mate, soaring upward on rounded wings, yet returning, returning, returning.

Before dawn, the next day, the bird woman left the traveller in their swag, but he wasn’t far behind her by the time she reached the blind, took up her binoculars.

The Boab was submerged by high tide, the male bird circling. They were there when we were one, when we were wearing our skin.

Bucket in hand, rod on her shoulder, belt on her gown looped into something resembling a reef-knot, the old woman descends the boat ramp. The last sign of her is the tip of her rod sliding beneath the surface. The jetty lights go out. A paper sampan spins in the backward swing of the falling tide.

18 Pizzey, Graham and Frank Knight. The Field Guide to Birds of Australia. 7th Ed. Ed. Peter Menkhorst. HarperCollins: Sydney, N.S.W., 1997. 126. 87 Underneath the jetty, in her guano cave, the Bronzewing wakes to tapping inside eggshell. The buzzing in the traveller’s ears becomes mosquitoes biting through his clothes. Long moan of train: brakes squealing, wagons clanking. To the east, two freighters at the deepwater wharf, the port still lit like a Christmas tree. Pigeons swarming around grain silos. A raft of vagrant Shearwaters gossiping offshore on inky water tinted apricot by sunrise. Smoke from a fire across the harbour is drifting east. The breeze light, cold. The traveller shivers.

He understands about returning now, that the sea is a fluid continent flowing by, that land rises like the tide, that there are no mangals in these cold waters, no living sargassum, what he sees passing is the molten skin of time dimpled by uprooted seagrass, bait bags. Solute in solution: the cells of the water-dead dispersed in ocean.

Red Knots congregate in the shallows, feeding. Silver Gulls roosting in the car park grizzle at the disturbance, but move aside. The car, pebbled with dew, is where he left it.

As the traveller turns the Charger into the main street – a large, red-backed bird, white-mantled breast flaring in the new light, 88 launches into flight ahead of him. He follows it north.

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Ceremony for Ground: Narrative, Landscape, Myth

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92 Introduction

A man [sic] is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. (Jean-Paul Sartre Nausea 56)

The focus of this dissertation is on poetry, narrative, landscape and myth, and the palimpsest and/or hybridisation created when these four areas overlay each other. The creative writing component of this project – The Lighthouse

Keeper’s Wife, and other stories – further explores these topics, the final outcome being the transformation of local folklore into fictional narrative poems.

M.H. Abrams acknowledged “many … writers have deliberately woven their modern materials on the pattern of ancient myths”. He asserted that “an integrative mythology, whether inherited or invented, is essential to literature”. Abrams’ description of Yeats and Blake’s methods, in particular, of “fusing hereditary myths and biblical history and prophecy” with their “own intuitions and visions” came close to approximating what I also hoped to achieve whilst using local narratives as my source material. (Abrams 112) Ceremony for Ground prioritises newly collected local narratives. Several feature folklore about northern tidal flats, some are linked to iconic locations on the South coast, and others to local legends and ghost stories.

Narrative, in the simple sense of story, permeates human culture in all its forms. It saturates our daily lives, including our literature, our myths and legends, our imaginations. Narrative poetry, from its beginnings as spells and incantations19,

19 Albert B. Lord attributes the advent of narrative poetry as beginning with incantations, in “the chanting of myth relating to ritual… Vestiges of this earlier mythic connection of narrative poetry can be seen in: (a) the very fact that the story is told in verse, not in prose; 93 and as a vehicle for myth, legend and folklore, has played a part in the perpetuation of story on a global, historical scale and on a local, folk-oriented level.

Today, our local communities continue to be engaged in myth-making activity. This provides a golden opportunity for contemporary poets to continue the practice long established by their forebears of utilising folklore and legendary material as a resource.

Story has been conveyed in poetic form since the early days of spoken language, leading to the development of oral narrative poems such as the epic and the ballad. What Rhys Carpenter called the “literature of unwritten speech” is mostly lost to us (1-2). Any attempt to recreate it relies on what remains of its milieu in the historical record, and then on educated assumptions and speculation.

Nevertheless, Gilgamesh, the Iliad and Odyssey – along with Beowulf – provide us with some of the earliest written examples available to us of the ancient epic tradition20. From that tradition evolved a range of narrative and poetic devices and techniques of composition that remain in common usage to this day.

In The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics (1993), Leonard

Nathan traces the peaks and lows of narrative practice in poetry from the time of

Homer to the present day. Rather than locating a continuity of a particular mode (or modes) of narrative poetry, Nathan finds instead a continuous tradition of narrative in poetry. This tradition is peppered with works in forms, some hybrids of those for the rhythms of verse are associated with “magic” effectiveness … (b) the pervasiveness of alliterative and assonantal techniques in epic, which are also associated with incantation; (c) the structure of the commonest stories, which coincides with the structure of myths; (d) the association of the singing of epic with religious festivals; and (e) the tradition that the bard is a seer.” (Princeton 542) 20 “Epic poems are made in cultures that do not distinguish between myth and history.” (Scholes and Kellogg 57-58). “A true epic is an oral-formulaic narrative, amalgamating mythic, mimetic, and historical materials in a fictional form.” (70).

94 resurrected from ancient times, that were perceived as being avant-garde at the time of their emergence and have since become classic (blank verse and free verse, for example). In recent times, this evolutionary process has included not only a blending of some poetic forms with other poetic forms, but also a blending of poetry with other genres – prose poetry and the verse novel being cases in point.

(814)

Prose poetry emerged as a genre in its own right in the 1800s in France, arising out of conflict created by the rigid language rules of French neoclassicism and its emphasis on the strict separation of genres. Its founders included Aloysius

Bertrand (Gaspard de la Nuit) (1842), Charles Baudelaire (Petits Poèmes en prose) (1855-69), Arthur Rimbaud (Illuminations) (1872-76) and Stephane

Mallarmé (Divagations) (1864-97). (Princeton 1993 978) The prose poem possesses all the features of poetry with the exception that – lacking foreshortened lines – it has a visual resemblance to prose. It is usually practised as a short form ranging from several lines to up to three or four pages. For example:

Today my grandmother is restless. She has brought forth a creature from her journey into sleep. It is dark and it squats between her shoulder-blades. She is silent… (Morgan Yasbincek “Canada Poems”)

Longer related forms do exist, however, as is demonstrated by the French surrealist novels Chants de Maldoror (Lautreamont 1868-1890) and Zarathustra

(Nietzsche); and by Dylan Thomas’ dramatic play for voices Under Milk Wood

(1953). (The New Princeton 1993 977-979)

Leonard Nathan explains: “The concept of interpenetration of modes suggests yet another category of narrative poems that consciously exploit a sort of hybridisation, namely verse novels” (The New Princeton 1993 814-815). Such

95 hybridisation seems almost inevitable when one considers that for the last three centuries the novel has dominated narrative literature (Scholes & Kellog 3). This has amounted to the genre-blending interpenetration to which Nathan refers, and a resurgence of interest amongst writers in the verse novel and also in poems that utilise the structure of the novella or short story.

Poetry and sustained narrative have experienced something of a renaissance in Western literature in recent years. It must be acknowledged that some contemporary verse novels, such as Les Murray’s picaresque Fredy

Neptune, make more than just an ironic nod in the direction of the ancient epic tradition. Murray’s title character is a globetrotting rogue cum superman, who –

Odysseus-like – always seems to triumph over whatever adversity life sets before him. Some authors of verse novels, such as Murray (and of shorter narrative poems, for example, Robert Frost’s “Death of the Hired Man”), opt to compose in blank verse. Blank verse has been associated with narrative poems in English since it was developed by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517 – 1547). Examples of classic poems composed in blank verse include the epics of Milton (Paradise

Lost, Paradise Found), the poems of Tennyson (“Idylls of the King”, “Ulysses”) and

Robert Browning (The Ring and the Book). (The New Princeton 137-140) When the metrically precise, non-rhyming stanzas of blank verse are coupled with narrative, colloquial language and dialogue as per the strategies of Murray and his peers, the outcomes are works which wear the robes of the novel but speak the language of poetry.

Of course, some verse novels are more successful poems than others.

Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate is a good recent example of the form, consisting of

96 highly crafted Pushkin sonnets21, yet having the conventional plot structure and characterisation of the novel, therefore succeeding on both fronts. In strong contrast, the majority of Alan Wearne’s The Lovemakers, novel-length and chaptered, is written in free verse made remarkable by an absence of a standard plot, mimicking more experimental forms of the novel. Wearne borrows from other genres – a magpie-style of composition sometimes encountered in post- modernism. He uses elements of playwriting, including script-style cues and summaries, into the sub-titles of a sequence of poems, cast lists and dialogue, whilst also incorporating shorter poetic forms – such as villanelles, sonnets, and limericks – into the body of the work. (McCooey 52)

Although a type of free verse appears in early literatures – in medieval alliterative verse, in biblical verse (“Psalms”) and in some of Milton’s works

(“Lycidas”, “Samson Agonistes”) – the main innovators of the form are considered to be Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892) and Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1889)

(Cuddon 28, 280; Oxford 270). Free verse – vers libre22 – was embraced by poets of the modernist era. Modernism itself

revealed a breaking away from established rules, traditions and conventions, fresh ways of looking at man’s position and function in the universe and many (in some cases remarkable) experiments in forms and style. (Cuddon 399)

Free verse is still an extremely popular form. Its attraction is explained by Donald

Wesling and Eniko Bollabas in The New Princeton Encyclopedia:

All poetry restructures direct experience … all poetry has attributes of a naturalizing and an artificializing rhetoric. However, more explicitly than the metrical poetry of the period from Chaucer to Tennyson, from Pushkin to

21 The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) developed this specialised form of the sonnet for his novel in verse Eugenii Onegin (Concise Oxford 476) 22 A term coined by the French poet Gustave Kahn in the late 1880s (The New Princeton 425) 97 Tsvetaeva, free verse claims and thematizes a proximity to lived experience. It does this by trying to replicate, project, or represent perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and imaginative processes. (425-427)

Free verse is a common choice for authors of verse novels. In addition to the advantages of the form (above), the poet can choose to concentrate more on narrative structure as opposed to the poetic grid on which the narrative is to be suspended. Yet, free verse can and does enhance sustained narratives, being dense with imagery, simile, and metaphor reinforced by the use of sound patterning techniques such as rhythm, intermittent rhyme, alliteration, repetition, assonance, and consonance.

Dorothy Porter in her verse novels: Akhenaten, The Monkey’s Mask, What a Piece of Work, and Wild Surmise uses a series-poem structure, consisting of sequences of free-verse, lyric poems. Porter’s style is minimalist, her language often colloquial. Porter situates each work in a different genre. For example: historical fiction cum documentary-drama for Akhenatan, crime fiction for The

Monkey’s Mask, love story for Wild Surmise. Added to this contemporary mix,

Porter makes challenging choices for narrators: an incestuous and murderous pharaoh; a manipulative, repellent psychiatrist; an inept (and compromised) female private investigator.

Paul Hetherington chose metrically precise series-poems for Blood and Old

Belief, a documentary-style structure to convey the rural Australian (read Aussie- battler) theme, and multiple points-of-view to represent the perspectives of the three main characters. Landscape, too, plays a large part in establishing character and generational and environmental conflict. Father and daughter, Jack and

Katherine, are identifiably Australian. They are at home in the Australian

98 landscape, but wife and mother Cecilia, an Italian migrant, is perceived to be speaking a different language.

In addition to writing in the vernacular, the language of a particular place, the intermittent use of colloquialisms and unusual syntax are points of commonality shared by many narrative poems, especially in dialogue. For example:

“Hold off! unhand me, graybeard loon!” Eftsoons his hand dropped he. (Coleridge “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”)

He says they two will make a team for work: Between them they will lay this farm as smooth! (Frost “The Death of the Hired Man”)

Today we’ll muster Middle Top Tomorrow there’s that fence at Scrubby (Page The Scarring)

Narrative often employs dialogue to service the plot, in the guise of establishing characterisation, exposition, and/or conflict. Colloquial language is unconstrained, informal, and often appropriate to its context, sometimes expressing vulgarity or taboo subjects (Macquarie 217). The use of the vernacular and the colloquial is in itself a form of experimentation because it bypasses the accepted, more conventional structures of language. It creates new opportunities for metaphor, transformation and verisimilitude. Several factors seem to influence the decision of poets to utilise the vernacular: the desire for clear communication, accessibility, and relevance for themselves and, perhaps, a wide representation of the reading audience.

Dorothy Hewett described Jordie Albiston’s verse novel The Hanging of

Jean Lee as a “verse documentary” (Hewett May 1999 30). Drawing on the life and death (1951) of Jean Lee, the last woman hanged in Pentridge Gaol, the work is a 99 textual-montage of newspaper headlines and articles, historical records, and the condemned woman’s interior monologue as imagined by the poet. Some examples of narrative verse, (for example, Geoff Page’s The Scarring and Freehold), initially resemble prose more than poetry, but a closer examination determines that the mechanisms of poetry – like metre and sound patterning – are still present, just more subtly employed. The difficulty with less well-managed examples of this type of long narrative are that they can descend into blandness in much the same manner that some long rhymed works can develop a metronome quality (which is why blank verse appealed so strongly to its early exponents who discovered that

“verse without rhyme is especially suited to long works” (The New Princeton 138)).

Other examples of the verse novel, such as The Lovemakers, are less user- friendly, prioritising the narrative (or an absence of narrative) over the poetry to the point where the poetry is so deeply embedded in prose as to be all but unrecognisable except to another poet or an equally highly informed reader.

Benny, watching or blow it up! So the hiatus over, during Benny’s lunch next day Barb had called him. Benny was such a solid friend, she wanted to say thanks and although they hadn’t seen each other really much she hoped to meet him one day. That night Neil truly, bluntly said ‘She won’t be coming round, not here, not for a while. Barb has officially returned to Rog.” (Wearne The Lovemakers 302)

What about writers of poetic prose novels, such as E. Annie Proulx and

Vikram Seth, in whose prose one encounters lines worthy of inclusion in any poem for their masterful use of simile, metaphor, and other poetic patterning techniques?

For example:

In the hands of an artist, even this gut and this skin can be made to sing. (Vikram Seth A Suitable Boy 116)

100 and

On the horizon, icebergs like white prisons. The immense blue fabric of the sea, rumpled and creased. (E. Annie Proulx The Shipping News 36)

Likewise, for example, the first sentence of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel Rebecca which stands out because of its recognisably poetic language.

Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

Not only does the line feature assonance – “dreamt”/”went”/”again”, consonance –

“last”/”night”/”dreamt”/”went”/”to”, and repetition of “I”, its meter is iambic and the line length that of hexameter (the six-foot – 12 syllable line).

Narrative is easier to identify because the elements of story – beginning, middle, end, character, conflict, resolution, moral, and so on – are introduced to us at a very early age. Recognition of narrative is rendered unconscious by the process of our enculturation. On the other hand, poetic language is consciously learned language. Understanding the language of poetry is a recognition of the presence of an accumulation of the elements of an ancient oral tradition: mnemonic devices like rhyme, rhythm, repetition and the other sound patterning strategies that make language poetic.

The onus is really on prose-poetry to make itself identifiably poetic. The only difference between prose-poetry and poetry is the absence of the foreshortened line. Even though poetic elements can and do occur in prose (as per the examples above), such occurrences do not make the work poetic in its entirety. A novel with poetic moments is still a novel. For a narrative to be recognisably a poem or a verse novel, poetic language and forms must dominate and be sustained throughout. These are the challenges encountered by poets writing extended narrative poems.

101 Dorothy Hewett decried the growing popularity of the more prosaic representations of the genre.

inevitably it seems to me that this strong narrative drive must eventually dictate the style. The result is a tendency towards a flattening of diction, a uniformity of tone, that it seems difficult in the long run to transcend… (May 1999)

Whereas Dorothy Hewett’s concern is that the verse novel has arrived at a form that prioritises narrative to the detriment of poetry, others view its narrative bias in a more positive light. Gary Simes maintains that the revival of the verse novel:

represents a reclamation of the other larger, more ambitious functions that poetry has always served, among which narrative was pre-eminent. [We cannot] resurrect the epic [therefore] our verse narrative has then to adopt the standard form of fiction, the novel. (The Australian’s Review of Books)

Jan Harry in “Narrative And Poetry: What Happened Next”, speculates:

“Though a long narrative poem can seem like an ill-fated cavalry charge of language pounding toward some ending … it doesn’t have to, nor does it always. Poets thrive on thinking of writerly ways to subvert or undermine conventions; by hitching verse to novel … there are opportunities for poets to work in new ways…” (Cordite)

Formatted

Formatted Ceremony for Ground: writers and landscape

American literary critic Harold Bloom, in his essay “The Art of Reading

Poetry”, echoes the widely accepted definition of poetry as being “figurative language, concentrated so that its form is both expressive and evocative.

Figuration is a departure from the literal…” (1). Jill Jones demonstrates, in her poem “A Ceremony for Ground” (below) how figurative language provides poets with not only an expressive language in which one is able to speak of one’s sense of place, but also a language of transformation, one which enables the “departure

102 from the literal” of which Bloom speaks, where a particular landscape, “a terrain … that is green and brown”, becomes one that “smells and sings like home.”

There must be a ceremony for ground or there needs to be, should be invented, for all the wanderers, tribeless hunters, those exiles who are losing the smell of their childhood hometown, sharpened only occasionally by memory’s knife, …

Keep talking about ground! There must be a way of rescue from the random air and fire drowning out that solid stakehold on somewhere safe and fertile, a terrain even on the highest storey, even in the fastest lane, that is green and brown, smells and sings like home. (Jill Jones “Ceremony for Ground”)

It can be difficult to pin down a specific definition of landscape – as a concept, its meaning shifts according to context and point of view – but for the purpose of this project, “landscape” is defined as being physical location or geography. “Place” (also known as “landscape”) is more ephemeral, consisting of both the representation of landscape and an individual’s response to it. Exposure to a formative landscape or components of a formative landscape often evokes an emotional response in an observer. Because an emotional response is involved, we can determine that “place” is partially internal.

The process of writing landscape comprises scrutiny, documentation, and transformation, the methodologies for which vary from the literal to the figurative, from the expressionist to the abstract, from the minimalist to the metatextual.

Like many other creative writers and teachers, Garry Disher advocates a partly-technical, partly-imaginative approach to writing landscape. On the one hand, his four main elements of setting consist of objects, people, atmospheric

103 details, and mood, and are best conveyed through the provision of sensory details: sound, smell, sight, taste and touch. This approach is widely used by writers of all types. On the other hand, Disher sees landscapes as being “part dream, part memory, part imagination, and often prompted by reality” (Writing Professionally

95). In execution, he says: “setting is not simply tacked on so that characters have somewhere to do something, setting should enhance … it may even be … a major component” (Writing Fiction 35).

Elizabeth Jolley maintained that: “To have integrity, a writer must use his landscape correctly” (1992 136). By ‘correctly” Jolley was not implying that there is a right way and a wrong way to write about landscape, but that the landscape itself should be depicted accurately, for authenticity’s sake. Working along similar lines to Garry Disher, Jolley described the role of landscape/place in her own writing as being closely allied to characterisation, suggesting it can be utilised by the writer

“to create parallels which reveal aspects of human behaviour” (Brady 49, Jolley

1992 100). “There is only one thing,” Jolley wrote in her essay “The Inward Eye”,

which makes it possible to attempt to write about the Australian landscape. This is the general recognition that landscape is not formed by geology and geography but by personal emotion. Writers and other artists create their own landscape. (1992 99, 100).

In a perfect world, an observer revisiting a formative landscape would really benefit from possessing the same clarity of vision possessed by the migrant. Jolley must have been smiling when she wrote:

Writers who have always lived here in Australia most probably laugh quietly into their sleeves while the newcomer fills pages to their very edges with heightened poetic descriptions … (Jolley 134)

Representations of landscapes in Jolley’s works are heavily informed by her own migrant experience, some places (and characters and situations) revisited time and

104 time again in work after work until Fairfields, Claremont, and Wooroloo take on a mythical Jolley status. Migration endowed her with an incredibly perceptive view of both English and Australian landscapes. As Jolley wrote in her essay, ”A Small

Fragment of Earth,” “The occupation of a small fragment of earth is known only to the person who is alone on it” (2006 184).

In “Place: Locating the Imagined,” writer and teacher Tess Brady attempts to reconcile the quandary that arises when a new world is perceived through the “old world eyes” of the explorer and migrant:

We can write of one place because we know, deep within us, another … see the two places, the one you write and the one you know, as the foreground and the shadow. Walter Nash is at pains to point out that to create a ‘here’ we also need to create its shadow, an ‘elsewhere’. The elsewhere is not present but co-exists, is co-present in the memory. (Walker 47-48)

In contrast to the technical and creative approaches adopted by Disher and Jolley,

Brady’s conclusion is that it is not necessary for a writer to employ detailed description at all in order to evoke a place for a reader, because place “is generated in the imagination” (Walker 47-18). Nowhere is Brady’s premise more clearly demonstrated than in the works of Tim Winton set in the fictional town of

Angelus (Shallows, Lockie Leonard: Human Torpedo, The Turning). Winton’s association with the real town of Albany is well known, so only minimal detail is necessary for a reader to evoke Angelus.

The West Australian wheatbelt is a life-long theme in the work of poets

Dorothy Hewett, John Kinsella and Glen Phillips. Like Tim Winton, while living and working in other locations, they consistently return to the landscape of their youth, to its images, metaphors and stories. These returns are sometimes nostalgic, sometimes not, and are inseparable from the influence of other, later landscapes.

105 The tone of European myth, legend, folklore, and poetry permeates many of

Dorothy Hewett’s poems (“Lines to the Dark Tower,” “Still Lives”, Alice in

Wormland, Rapunzel in Suburbia) but the landscapes in which the poems are situated remain identifiably Australian.

I was brought up on Tennyson and Eliot. What a double! On the yellow farm floated like The Lady down a creek, lying on my back the sun motes danced, black cockatoos massed shrieking in the sky. (“Memoirs of a Protestant Girlhood”)

The blood, guts and feathers, tell-it-like-it-is kind of truth of John Kinsella’s landscape poetry actively subverts any residual sentimentality or romance attached to the rural or “pastoral” landscape. There is no plucking the wool from sheep’s backs in a Kinsella poem. The sheep are more likely to be crudely shorn and flyblown. Travelling through the countryside is no idyll, instead it is:

A literature of driving, a reconstituting the flesh of a kangaroo so impacted by a prime mover that irony kicks in to dissemble carnage. (“Reflectors: Drive 4”)

As in the poetry of Dorothy Hewett, Kinsella’s depiction of his early landscape is influenced by his experiences of other landscapes. His poetry has been described as “counter-pastoral, a sophisticated hybridisation of the rural and the urban.” More significantly, Kinsella sees language as “another landscape, and where these two planes [language and landscape] meet is where abstraction and, I feel, enrichment, come into their own form of focus” (“Urban Edge”).

I’m interested in something I’ve called ‘international regionalism’ – finding a political and international English for poetry that allows for the specificities of regional identity. In a world of mass-communications it seems impossible to be anything but this. Occasionally the two separate and the strands redefine themselves, but you can never escape what you’ve done before, so that

106 particular process is informed by the other – to write ‘straight’ immediately becomes a metatextual act! (Mengham and Phillips 286)

In short, you can remove the poet from the landscape, but you can’t remove the place from the poet.

In a paper presented at the Third Biennial National Conference on Poetry in

1998, Glen Phillips acknowledged the influence of Aboriginal writers upon non- indigenous poets, believing they have “reinforced … the complexity and depth of the human bonding with a particular place” (61). Prominent Indigenous writers for whom bonding with place matters include Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Bill Neidje, Jack

Davis, Alf Taylor and Paddy Roe, whose works are not only strongly linked to place, expressing a powerful cultural attachment to home-country, but are also poetic in execution and language.

Phillips has been preoccupied for the last fifteen years with the study of

“sense of place” experiences, the formulation of theories of formative and acquired landscapes, and their application in creative practice. “Sense of place” experiences come about when a person returns to a formative landscape, “a region associated with their childhood and upbringing”:

the sensation can be so intense as to suggest that very basic forms – tree shapes, waterways, horizon lines, the texture itself of the landforms and local characteristics of the built or man-modified landscape – are imprinted, in some way and as deeply etched on us as is the unconscious first structure of the learned mother tongue. (60)

Glen Phillips collaborated with visual artist Judith Dinham on a project for which they devised a “Taxonomy of Landscape Attributes”. “Processes such as painting, drawing, notetaking were used for recording and acquiring information, which eventually informed [their] artistic work[s]” (Video). They based their project on the premise that we all have “formative landscapes”, the first landscape. Their

107 project involved them studying their West Australian childhood landscapes and new landscapes in Tuscany. Dinham and Phillips’ project is of great interest, because it illustrates that transformation begins with the collection of data. Instead of being literal, as one might initially suppose, data collection of this kind is actually a figurative act, because it is mediated through language and an original landscape: an observer interprets creatively in order to describe.

Glen Phillips uses the analogy of learning a foreign language to describe how we learn a new landscape. The first process being unconscious, language and landscape acquired by osmosis so to speak, whereas the second acquisition of landscape, the acquired landscape – like a second language – involves a much more concerted, conscious effort. However, in regard to landscape, there are some exceptions to this premise.

American poet John Haines (1924-) was born and raised in Norfolk, Virginia,

USA. Haines spent 25 years, from 1947, living a subsistence lifestyle in a cabin at

Richardson in central Alaska. He considers Alaska to be the place where he was born as a poet.

In his first collection of essays Living off the Country, Haines recalls that

“Writing in Alaska, and of Alaska, would be a continuous attempt to identify this place, to give it range and substance beyond mere geography and the description in travel brochures.” One of his major concerns was the loss of the place to the name, in both political and commercial senses. He maintained that the commercial push for tourism and the commodification of native Alaskan life placed residents in the position of “living with and by a cliché, the cliché of official histories, the cliché of the tourist”. If that was to become a permanent state, he lamented, “Something will have escaped us, something we need, as we need air, water and food.” Haines 108 describes his poetry as an “attempt to recover something of that native ground, the original and hardly comprehended thing under our feet: the actual historical ground, compounded of rock and slime, of animal stench and human use” (1981 3-

5). Haines’ experience demonstrates that a later landscape, one that is not the landscape of childhood, can still be formative in its influence. Speaking of his time in Alaska, Haines says:

Beyond all I write there is a landscape, partly idealized, upon which the human figure, my own or another’s, acts out a part of its life. That original place still sustains me. It gave me a way of perceiving the world that I might not have acquired otherwise, and not least, a solitude in which I could learn to listen to my own voice. (1981 13)

My own formative landscape is the Pilbara region. The Hamersley Ranges are the single most important landmark of my youth. Wittenoom Gorge, in particular, was just one big playground. My siblings and I ran wild, and came to know the area intimately. From the top of Mount Watkins, facing north, one overlooks an enormous vista of red earth, eucalypts and lavender-coloured mulla mulla stretching from eastern horizon to western horizon – and across the

Fortescue Flats, straddling the northern horizon, the Chichester mountain range is purple in the far distance. Unfolding behind us, the soft green and gold of Spinifex, grey slate, red ochre soils, the gorges and peaks of the Hamersleys.

I left the Pilbara in 1987. Seven years later I visited Tom Price on the southern side of the Hamersleys, about one and a half hours drive from

Wittenoom. It was the same landscape, so familiar it was painful. I was frequently bought to tears by what Glen Phillips calls a “sense of place” experience: an overwhelming emotional response to a formative landscape. Mine was a kind of defacto homecoming, arising from what was both familiarity and absence, and

109 initially almost impossible to describe coherently – different towns, same mountain range, same colours, smells, quality of light, climate, birds, sounds, feel – same landscape, but not the same place! Therefore, it is not unfeasible that one might have a sense of place experience in a location one has never seen before, déjà vu, as long as sufficient similar features of landscape are present. So it is possible to have a homecoming experience in spirit but not in actuality. Glen Phillips quotes critic Gerhard Stilz who attributed the “expressive intention(s)” of contemporary

Australian poets to a “longing for identity with a difficult land: the quest for a spiritual home-coming” (qtd. in Phillips 60).

The south coast of Western Australia is my “Tuscany”. I don’t have a homeland connection there. I learned the country (and am still learning it) through observation, through language, and story. Dinham and Phillips, Hewett, Jolley and

Kinsella through their work, have demonstrated various strategies for examining, documenting and writing about formative and acquired landscapes, and have demonstrated the creative means by which to describe/transform them.

The learning process gives rise to a number of binary oppositions. What the formative landscape is, the learned landscape is not: north/south, hot/cold, dry/wet, inland/coastal, arid/lush, open/closed, light/dark, harsh/soft, life/death, and so on.

In my third narrative poem, “Jetty Stories”, the central character – the Traveller – runs away. He drives some 2,000km from Broome in the Kimberley to Albany on the south coast, a drive that I undertook myself to conduct research for writing his journey.

Western Australia is known to be vast. The journey takes one through a land of strong contrasts, through areas that have unique regional identities. The far-

North and the far-South are sufficiently different to engender the feeling of being in 110 two different countries. Travelling between them by road becomes a sustained meditation on movement. One drives and drives, arrival at journey’s end constantly deferred. The journey does not bring the two main landscapes together, but acts as a medium by which they can be juxtaposed. With the passing through of each region one is aligned to the curvature of the world: one is going down-South or up-

North. When the Traveller arrives at the southern edge, at a harbour haunted – as he is – by history, he is confronted by difference: different landforms, vegetation, climate, light and ocean. It is as though he has arrived in another dimension.

Poetry is figurative language and is the means by which Glen Phillips, John

Kinsella, Dorothy Hewett and other poets revisit, describe, and sometimes utterly transform their formative landscapes. Poetry is adequate to the task of transcending the incoherence of absence; of expressing a sense of place, and depicting landscape in a fresh and exciting way. As Harold Bloom says:

Figurations or tropes [irony, symbol, metonymy, metaphor] create meaning, which could not exist without them, and this making of meaning is largest in authentic poetry, where an excess or overflow emanates from figurative language, and brings about a condition of newness. (2)

Poetry is not only figurative, it is also is a metalanguage, language created to described another language. Its articulation brings about the “condition of newness” of which Bloom speaks. Hence, to Dorothy Hewett “history” is “like a postcard shrilling gulls” (“Holidays”); a tree, “a redwood,” observed by John

Kinsella “bends to compliment / the granitic hills” (“Pythic Small Birds”), whilst

“frost”, recollected by Glen Phillips “descends to stalk on iron talons” (Frost on the

Landscape). Or as in Anna Couani’s anthropocentric prose poem “The Map of the

World”:

111 The map of the world is felt from the inside. Rough around the coastlines and smooth over the hills and sand dunes. Warm and moist through the rivers which lead outside to the forests like long hair then sparser like shorter more bristly hair to the touch. Reading a globe of the world with its topography in relief. Reading with the fingers as though blind. Feeling it with the back, down the spine. Making contact with the nipples and nose … (Penguin 198)

Where Rocks are Other Things: anthropocentrism and landscape

A practical demonstration of anthropocentrism is to be found in the naming of prominent features of the landscape. For example: “The Sleeping Lady”, being a local name for the eastern slope of Mount Watkins in the Hamersley Ranges, describing the profile seen when approaching from the west, or “Cathedral Pool” being the name given to a rock pool in Wittenoom Gorge that lies cupped to the underbelly of an cliff, the eroded face of which evokes the ceiling vaults of a cathedral.

In the mid 1930s, The Albany Advertiser published the articles “Strange

Rock Formations” (1935, 49-50) and “Where Rocks are Other Things” (1936) in which local rock formations were described as “freaks” and in anthropocentric terms. On their list were: Dog Rock, Shark or Eagle Rock, Pulpit Rock, Helmet

Rock, Devil’s Gap, Natural Bridge, Boat Rock, Wagon Rock, Koala Rock, one described as looking like a chimpanzee, another like a snarling dog’s head.

The name of a particular feature of the landscape may be anthropocentric, but – when it comes to particular speaking positions, in terms of discourse – they can be even more specifically so. The prominence at the eastern edge of the Gap is referred to by the National Park Ranger as “Gorilla Head Rock”, whereas rock climbers call it “Sea Wolf”. The discourse of rock climbers, a vocabulary specific to

112 their activities, in which every rock face and every variation of climbing it has an individual name, also offers possibilities for poetic transformation. Rock faces are walls, wave-ledges are platforms, boulders can be blocks, protrusions, flakes. In

South Coast Rock: Guide to Rock Climbing on WA’s South Coast, author Shane

Richardson describes Climb 15 on the Natural Bridge’s “Orca Wall“:

Climb the slightly overhanging, left trending lay back crack (the stomach of the ‘diving killer whale’) to finish up the thin crack above. (23)

The naming of aspects of landscape in familiar terms renders the unknowable known, the unfamiliar familiar. Likewise, story attempts – by filling in the gaps (no pun intended) – to make the unknowable known.

The local narrative describing underwater caves at the Gap (used in my poem “The Gap”) arose from an attempt to explain how a woman could vanish completely. An alternative angle is that some local narratives are actually cautionary tales, arising not from historical events but because the contemplation of a feature of the landscape incites the viewer to imagine potentiality, the possibility for harm. Another perspective offers the possibility of redemption, she is not dead but alive in the caves from which there is the likelihood, like other women vanished into the underworld (such as Persephone and Eurydice, for example) that with some kind of upper-worldly intervention she might emerge alive.

There are many areas on the Australian coastline called the Gap. Sydney’s is notorious. In fact, most sites bearing the name, and similar names, are notorious. Dare we entertain the notion that reputation (and story, in this case) is semantic, that it could be linked more to a name than it is to a place? Fact or folklore? It is almost impossible to say.

113 These days, suicides on this area of the South Coast do not receive media coverage, and therefore most information, true or false, is related through the gossip-network, where after much repetition and elaboration stories of suicides are more legend than “truth”. In view of the mobility of urban legend, it isn’t inconceivable that these “local” legends, restricted to a degree by the requirement for certain features of the landscape to be present, might move from place to place, attaching to certain features of landscape rather than specific places.

The Gap at Albany hasn’t always been the focus of white people’s local lore.

In fact, until the construction of an adequate access road for vehicles in the 1930s

– built to encourage tourism in the Albany area – the Gap was barely accessible except by a rough walk trail. In documentation from that period, the zawn is christened “Devil’s Gap”. Compare the semantics of the name “Devil’s Gap” with that of its neighbour “Natural Bridge”. The contradictions are ironic indeed. The name “Devil’s Gap”, metaphorically loaded with Christian foreboding, is attached to the place which appears to be the most dangerous – all froth and noise, unpredictable winds, waves thundering into the crevasse. Yet, statistics appear to show that most people who die in that particular area are washed to their deaths by surges sweeping under the seemingly benign “Natural” Bridge.

Natural Freaks: landscape and the oxymoronic phrase

Contradictions in geographical naming practices around Albany do not end with the Gap and the Natural Bridge. The term “natural freaks” is used in The

Albany Advertiser’s 1936 article on “Strange Rock Formations”. Based on the context in which this phrase is used, if “freak” is defined as “some strange deviation 114 from nature” and “natural” as being “in conformity with the ordinary course of nature; not unusual or exceptional” then the phrase is an oxymoron (Macquarie

443, 763). Oxymorons create a particular kind of tension by contradicting themselves: how can a natural object be a deviation from nature? Words in an oxymoronic phrase attract attention by their movement-toward/movement-away from each other, a bit like trying to fit like poles of a magnet together – they can’t remain together because the magnetic fields oppose each other. The conflict is not one that necessarily requires resolution. By drawing an observer’s attention to its own strange juxtaposition of words and meaning, an oxymoron creates a frisson, a shiver, in otherwise everyday language, which in turn creates possibilities for poetry and narrative.

Coloured by Imagination: our local narratives

Our local narratives enrich and inform. They are the folklore of our place, and so much a part of culture that their transmission is mostly unacknowledged.

Gwenda Beed Davey and Graham Seal, in A Guide to Australian Folklore, define the term folklore as being “the great body of unofficial customs and knowledge held in all societies.” (3) They go on to say “If ‘the folk’ accept and continue to practise

[these unofficial customs and knowledge], they become folklore.” (5)

A working definition of folklore, further explained by Graham Seal in The

Hidden Culture, is that it is informal, group-oriented, varies in form and content across time and space, is traditional, and universal. It is informal, because:

It is created, continued and transmitted largely outside of the official or formal channels of communication within a society … typically passed on by word of mouth, by imitation or in some other informal manner. (8) 115

The groups to which Seal refers can be as large as the nation or as small as the nuclear family (the smallest recognisable unit in folklore), and “may cross class and status boundaries.” Variations within forms can and do occur, though the smaller the item the less likely it is that variations will arise. Seal clarifies what he means by tradition and traditional by explaining that the terms:

do not only refer to the historical dimension of folkloric transmission (that is, handed down from generation to generation), but also to the process of informal transmission that takes place within a more limited time frame; as in the case of a rumour… (10)

There is a great variety of forms and functions that folklore can take on and there is no culture in which it is completely absent. (1989 8-11)

Folklore is a vital part of modern life. The forms that it takes include the verbal and non-verbal, behavioural and material. The sub-genres that Seal attributes to these four forms are substantial, but the one most relevant to this thesis is the category of verbal “folk narrative” which includes “myths, legends,

‘fairy’ tales, jokes, tall stories, yarns, and so on.” Folk narratives frequently act as cautionary tales “carry[ing] more or less subtle morals or warnings about the likely consequences of particular actions or inactions.” The lore plays an important role in education. It also serves to maintain group cohesion and identity, amuses and entertains, and is “a widespread means of expressing discontent, implicitly or explicitly, and so releasing those frustrations and aggressions that are generally deemed to be unsuitable for expression in any other form or context.” The latter is what Seal calls the “safety valve function” of folklore, which serves to “preserve social equilibrium by defusing any more potent and active expression of dissatisfaction.” Racist, sexist, defamatory and other negative kinds of criticism are all examples of the “safety valve function”. (1989 12-15) 116 The terms myth and legend are interchangeable in contemporary usage.

Some folklorists favour quite separate definitions: myth being “stories about godlike or supernatural beings” and legends “accounts of purported incidents involving ordinary people” (Harding 32). Others, such as G.S. Kirk, define myth as “at the very least tales that have been passed down from generation to generation, that have become traditional” (282). But meanings blur a little when the influence of the supernatural seems to move from one category to another, from myth to legend, as it does when dealing with folk narratives. It is Nick Harding’s definition of legend that is most appropriate to this project:

folk narratives that deal with realistic events that happened sometime ‘in the past’. There is always the suggestion that Legends are true and that they are retellings of actual events. They often contain supernatural elements. (152)

American folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand, who is renowned for his work on urban legend, says that when we transmit folklore,

we do not concentrate on form or content… we simply listen … to what others tell us and then pass it on – more or less accurately – to other listeners… [This] is the typical process of legend formation and transmission as it has existed since time immemorial and continues to operate today. (1)

Local narratives follow this pattern of dispersion, more often than not via the local gossip-network. They constitute a kind of quasi-folk history.

Local narratives bear a resemblance to urban legend (also known as urban myth), both are sub-groups of legend. The critical differences between the two are that urban legend is always fictional although it makes claims to truth, has no point of origin, and is universal, whereas local narratives often have a basis in fact, an identifiable point of origin, and are limited to a particular geographical location. The story of “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” is repeated worldwide and attributed to the location/country in which it is related. But the local narrative (“Reddin’s Ghost”) of a 117 lighthouse keeper’s ghost appearing on yachts in distress is specifically tied to

Albany, WA, because that narrative is linked to the Point King Lighthouse on King

George Sound. A variant of urban myth termed fixed-point narratives does exist, but their focus is on specific events rather than location, for example, the

Challenger disaster, and September 11. Despite this, the existence of an intriguing connection between local narrative and urban myth is demonstrated by the discarded overcoat that is a dominant motif in both the urban myth of “The

Vanishing Hitchhiker” and the local narrative of the “Fisherman’s Ghost”.

The moment in legend when the supernatural emerges, or the believable becomes unbelievable, is called the pivot point. The pivot point appears to be the most enduring part of local narrative. As is demonstrated by the pared down narrative of “Reddin’s Ghost” (see below), as stories evolve they become quite minimalist, rendered down to basic scenario, pivot-point, resolution. But on the latent level, they accrue credibility through repetition and retention, their mystical nature equipping them with some kind of community-endowed validity. G. S. Kirk elaborates:

The speculative and operative functions of myth may often develop gradually out of their narrative ones; the needs of the community impress themselves on story-telling, among other aspects of social life, as a basic mode of communication; and the most fantastic elements of myths, reflecting the demand for the remarkable in stories as well as the importance of the irrational and supernatural both in waking and sleeping experience, are gradually and erratically accreted. (Kirk 285)

Many other local narratives circulate in the Albany community, though most are not commonly recognised as being legends. (see Appendix 4 – Other Local Legends)

Local legend sometimes originates from a written point of origin. In

Introducing Folklore, Kenneth and Mary Clarke say that local legend is an

118 “example of the area in which the work of the folklorist overlaps with the work of the historian.” They provide an example from their own research, and go on to say:

The story is not history, in that it is not documented and has not been verified. It is a local legend, but subsequent investigation might prove the legend to be partial history, coloured by the imagination and indignation of the folk who preserve it in tradition. (124)

The Clarkes agree with other folklorists that folklore may also evolve from written origins, and vice versa. The consensus being “to show literary origins does not rule out valid oral transmission. Regardless of how the legend originates, it may pass into the stream of folklore, where it continues to change and grow” (49).

Local Narrative: “Reddin’s Ghost”, et al

John Gregory Reddin (1853 – 1941) was the last of the Point King lighthouse keepers. He, with his wife and large family, resided in the stone cottage at the edge of Ataturk Channel from 1903 to 1911 when the light was automated

(Green 15). Ataturk Channel is the only passage between King George Sound and

Princess Royal Harbour. Built in 1857, the lighthouse was somewhat unusual because it did not resemble the cone-like structure associated with lighthouses.

Instead, a tower was incorporated into a small stone cottage. What now remains of the lighthouse consists of the partially restored walls and foundations.

John Reddin had an almost life-long connection with Albany waters, having been employed around them or on them since his youth. His jobs included a stint in the 1870s as a boatman on the pilot boat, to which was entrusted the task of guiding ships from the Sound, through the narrow channel, into the safety of

Princess Royal Harbour. It seems significant that Reddin’s occupations included

119 those of guide and keeper, because they are pastimes in keeping with behaviour associated with his ghost. (Green 15)

It was oral narratives circulating about “Reddin’s Ghost” and the misadventures of the keepers’ children at Point King that first aroused my interest in the site and gave me the idea that evolved into the first of my poems “The

Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife”. The characters and events of “The Lighthouse

Keeper’s Wife” are imaginary, but they arose from my fascination with the location and the people, and the folklore surrounding them.

The location of the lighthouse seems precarious, dangerous even, but several keepers and their wives were successful in raising families there. The

Reddins had eight of their ten children living with them. I had heard several accounts of children falling out of windows onto the rocks or into the sea, and other tales of them being washed into the sea by King Waves only to be bought back on the next and deposited on the land. Later, in the course of my research, I was to come across secondary sources recording some of these events hearsay.

“Reddin’s Ghost” is a personal experience narrative that has become a memorate. This story is a really interesting example of local narrative, not only because has it attained the status of proto-legend or perhaps even legend locally, but because it has a documented point of origin. Furthermore, when transposed onto an allegorical model, “Reddin’s Ghost” starts to look like a variant of the biblical account of Jesus walking on the water in Matthew 14:21-31.

I first encountered the narrative of “Reddin’s Ghost” in 1998 when it was related to me by Mark Lyall:

The ghost of one of the keepers from the Point King lighthouse appears on boats in distress in the Sound. A woman sailed a yacht from Perth, around the Cape to Albany. There had been a storm all the way and she hadn’t 120 slept for days. When she sailed into King George Sound the weather was so wild and the night so black that she couldn’t find the entrance to the channel into the harbour. A ghost, a man in an old-fashioned coat and hat, suddenly appeared on the boat and pointed to where the channel was. Later on the woman found out that the ghost had been one of the keepers at the Point King Lighthouse.

Several years later, documents located in the Albany History Collection shed further light on the legend. Amongst them was evidence of its point of origin: Jenny

Smith’s handwritten, eyewitness account of her encounter with the apparition of

John Reddin.

Kenneth and Mary Clarke maintained “to show literary origins does not rule out valid oral transmission. Regardless of how the legend originates, it may pass into the stream of folklore, where it continues to change and grow…” (49). The oral can feed into written literature and vice-versa. Nevertheless, it appears that on this occasion oral versions had been circulating prior to the written version and Mrs

Smith was responding to a request to put her experience in writing. The written record appears to have been created approximately five months after the encounter which inspired it. In her undated covering letter to the curator of the Old

Gaol Museum at Albany, Jenny Smith wrote:

Dear Mrs Blight Formatted I called to look at Samuel Mitchell 23 (Mike Westerberg showed me the photocopy) Unfortunately ‘my’ ghost turned out to be John Reddin. It was an experience I shan’t forget. thankyou for your help [signed] Jenny Smith

The letter is annotated, in a different handwriting:

26/7/89 Corresp. requesting write up of story

Attached to the covering letter is the following account:

23 Keeper of the Point King lighthouse from 1867 to 1903. 121 On Easter Monday, March 27th 1989 at 2am I had a ‘visit’ from an ‘Old gentleman’ I now believe was Mr John Gregory Reddin, Point King Light House keeper 1907-1911. We had sailed from Hamlin Bay 2pm on Saturday 25th. On board were my husband Chris and daughters Clare 9 1/2 and Holly 7 1/2 years. We had had quite a lot of experience, sailing half way around Australia some years previously. We experienced very rough conditions 35-45 knots at times from E- NE. We sailed 35 hours, pounding into large unforgiving waves in our strongly built and designed 40’ trimaran. By the time we rounded the rugged headland and entered the outer harbour24 we were weary, longing the [sic] a safe anchorage. The night was very black and it was all we could do to keep ourselves going. We had been worried navigating in such difficult conditions. The lights in the outer harbour were very confusing. Consulting our charts, we were advised to sail through Red & Green lights to enter Princess Royal Harbour. We sailed towards a pair of red and Green lights in the distance. I grew uneasy, these didn’t seem in the right place. On consulting the chart again I felt sure the Point King light should be flashing to the north of the leading lights (Red & Green). Chris and I argued a bit about it; as, to the south of the flashing light (Point King) was only the darkness of Vancouver Point. Then as I stated again of my uncertainty, before me, standing in front of the bow of our Trimaran (‘Wings of Fantasy’) was this ‘Old gent’. He had on a large dark coat with brass buttons in twos down the front of his coat, his collar pulled up, a flat black hat pulled down on his head. He had a short cut beard, and in his hand a pipe. He nodded his head and his pipe at me and at that moment the harbour ‘opened up’ before our eyes. He had told me I was right. The other Red & green lights were in line with Middleton Beach; we would have been dashed to pieces on the rocks had we continued through them. [signed] Jennifer C. Smith This is a true account of my experience. I shall come & visit the museum again soon. Yours sincerely Formatted Jennifer Smith

Two years later, the story appeared as part of an article by Angela Wellington in

The West Australian Magazine:

It’s 2am on March 23, 1989. A few kilometres off WA’s south coast, near Albany, huge seas are breaking around a 12-metre yacht struggling to reach the safety of the windswept town’s inner harbour.

24 King George Sound 122 On board a woman tries vainly to read the lights of the coast, straining for a glimpse of a recognisable landmark through the blackness. The charts are confusing but the woman is certain they are heading in the wrong direction. “I’m sure this is wrong,” she shouts to her husband. “There must be another way in.” The woman points in a different direction. “I’m sure you go that way,” she says. As she speaks a figure suddenly appears on the deck. Clad in a dark, heavy woollen coat with two rows of brass buttons and a dark flat-topped hat is a bearded old man; in his mouth a strange-looking pipe. The figure takes the pipe from his mouth, nods his assent to her choice of direction then disappears. The yacht swings around. A few minutes later welcoming red and green lights are spotted and the couple sail into the safety of Princess Royal Harbour. Later, still shaken by her experience, the woman told some locals of her encounter. They advised her to visit the Albany museum. Housed in this museum were photographs of lighthouse keepers who had served in the district in the past. The woman stopped by one. Although the vision had appeared for only a few seconds the image had been perfectly clear. This was the man she had seen on the boat. The photograph was of John Reddin, Albany lighthouse keeper for eight years. He died in 1940.

Note the variations already emerging in these two accounts:

• The date of the incident has changed. Monday 27 March 1989 was actually Easter Monday, whereas the Wellington article has the event occurring on the 23rd, the previous Thursday. The result is the loss of this narrative’s link to its Christian intertext (see below). • The 40ft trimaran has become a 12-metre yacht (measurement change probably due to metric conversion). A trimaran has three hulls, a yacht has one. • The pipe is in the ghost’s hand in the first account and in his mouth in the second. • The ghost “disappears” in the second version, which isn’t mentioned explicitly in the first version. • In the eyewitness account the “harbour ‘opened up’ before our eyes.” In the article “The yacht swings around” without reference to human agency. • The “large dark coat” becomes a “dark, heavy, woollen coat” • The story has been dramatised in the second version (taking into account differing audiences, context, and authorial intentions).

123 In the intervening period between the eyewitness account and the evolution of the local narrative, the story has shed a lot of detail, reflecting the changeability of folklore and the demands on the storytellers to “make a good story” as the Clarkes put it (48). The structure of local narrative – prefaced as it is by summary and resolution: The ghost of one of the keepers from the Point King lighthouse appears on boats in distress in the Sound – reflects traditional storytelling practice. It also reflects the manner in which Jenny Smith opened her account with: On Easter

Monday, March 27th 1989 at 2am I had a ‘visit’ from an ‘Old gentleman’ I now believe was Mr John Gregory Reddin, Point King Light House keeper 1907-1911.

At no stage in her eyewitness account does she describe what she saw as a

“ghost”, only in her covering note.

Some time later, I was seated in a waiting room in Albany when I eavesdropped on a conversation between two men. They were exchanging versions of the story of “Reddin’s Ghost”. Both tellers delivered recognisable, but slightly different, variants. One claimed to know the couple, the other to know people who knew the couple. Such a claim by storytellers is termed the “relative chain” by folklorists. The relative chain is the chain “along which the story has travelled.” The closer the storyteller is to the presumed point of origin of the story the greater is their authority to tell it. The audience assumes the legend is authentic

– is assured by the storyteller, who is validated by their close association with the point of origin. (Harding 154) Niels Ingwersen attributes this validation as endowing the story with “a disturbing immediacy – it makes the story existentially real – and fiction becomes reality, a part of history. (85)”

The authenticity that the discourse offers is often pretence – an artistic convention… The legend roams much further and wider than the other sub genres [of folklore], and that freedom will permit to the legend narrative, 124 ideological, and artistic possibilities that the other sub genres do not have.” (83)

On the 1st June, 2004, I interviewed Tony Smith, brother-in-law to Jenny

Smith:

This story happened to my brother. I can’t remember the year. They were sailing a trimaran. They’d had a very rough passage from Fremantle. It was night-time when they were coming in. With all the lights in Albany on the foreshore… shorelines… they were so tired they weren’t able to pick out the markers. The heading they were on would have got them into trouble, when my sister-in-law saw a chap with a peak cap on and smoking a pipe. He looked like an old sea-dog. He took his pipe out of his mouth and with it pointed in the direction of the channel. They pointed the boat in the direction that had been suggested then were able to pick out markers and make a safe entry.

The story of “Reddin’s Ghost” is a very recent one in chronological terms.

Despite its newness, the story’s function is similar to traditional myth. G.S. Kirk, in

Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures, defines the function of myth as

embodying a lesson or preserving a necessary piece of information” and goes on to say that it is “more prudent to assume that the narrative and functional aspects of myths tended in many cases to develop side by side, rather than [one preceding the other]. (281)

“At the very least,” Kirk goes on to say that myths are “tales that have been passed down from generation to generation, that have become traditional” (282). On the one hand, they

are by nature related to fantasy and on the other are of deep human concern… A problem could be reflected by a strictly allegorical and non- fantastic story. But … could a problem be in any sense resolved or palliated by such a means? (284)

“Mere transposition into a different code would not achieve it,” asserts Kirk, but

“perhaps the code or the mythical or allegorical model might carry its own implication of a solution” (284) (emphasis mine). With Kirk’s comments in mind,

125 one starts to speculate… to make connections. Consider, for example, an allegorical connection.

The date stated on the eyewitness account is Easter Monday, the anniversary of Jesus Christ’s rising from the dead following crucifixion. Exploring the biblical allegory further brings one to another story of sailors in distress on the sea who are saved by a man who walks on the water. In the book of Matthew in the New Testament – before he disperses the multitude following the episode of the five loaves and two fishes and the feeding of the five thousand – Jesus compels his disciples to leave him “to get into a ship, and to go before him unto the other side.”

But the ship was now in the midst of the sea, tossed with waves: for the wind was contrary. And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea. And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out for fear.

Consider the similarities between these two texts:

• Plot: Sailors at sea are caught in a storm and fear for their lives. They are saved by a supernatural figure.

• Time: Both incidents occur at a similar hour of the night. The fourth watch starts at 3am.

• Light: Jesus described himself as being “the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” (John 8:12) The Smiths are looking for lights in the darkness. What’s more they are seeking particular kinds of light, for they know the ones they do see are not the right ones. “To see the light” is defined as “to be born; to be converted; to come to a full understanding or realization of something” (Brewer’s 611). The ghost is that of a lighthouse keeper.

• Channel: The channel is a metaphor for Jesus, who is a channel to God: “I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the father, but by me.” (John 14:6)

• Fear: In Matthew, the disciples are “troubled”, they ”cry out in fear” Peter is “afraid”. On King George Sound, the sailors are exhausted and struggling to keep going, “worried”, “confus[ed]”, “uneasy”, “uncertain”.

126

• The Dilemma: Both boats have experienced sailors in their crews, yet they are in need of a miracle to survive the situation they are in.

• Doubt: There are several instances of doubting in both narratives. In Matthew, Jesus is interrogated three times. Firstly, by his disciples, then twice by Peter who persists. “O thou of little faith,” Jesus tells him, “wherefore didst thou doubt?” (Matthew 14.31) In the eyewitness account, the female narrator and her husband “argued a bit about it” and she “stated again of my uncertainty.”

• The Pivot Point: In the biblical account the disciples are saved by what they at first call a “spirit,” the Smiths are saved by a “ghost”.

Amy Shuman in her article “Dismantling Local Culture” states that “Folklorists no longer confine their enterprise to what were once called authentic traditions,” because they now recognise not only that it is patronising – a remnant of colonialism – to force the “folk” into rigid classifications, but also that:

The concept of local knowledge is problematic theoretically (insofar as it is rarely possible to differentiate what belongs inside and what outside, what is local, and what is larger than local) (348-351)

Factors such as gender, race, class, and religion – individually and collectively – all work to make local cultures larger-than-local, and the impact of globalisation and the mass media should not be underestimated. Shuman elaborates further:

The relationship between the local and the larger-than-local whole is concealed so that the locals appear to be natural havens of truth or reality, and the ways in which they are constituted by dominant discourses is not made evident. (354)

It may not be immediately evident how the teller of the story is “constituted by dominant discourses” but such a concept does go some way to explaining how a

Christian intertext comes to be embedded in the narrative of “Reddin’s Ghost”. And how an interpreter/reader of the narrative might come recognise it. Shuman quotes

Melville Herskovits’ definition of cultural relativism in order to provide an explanation as to why that is possible: “Judgements are based on experience, and

127 experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation”

(350). Therefore, my extrapolating a Christian intertext from the story of “Reddin’s

Ghost” could be attributed to my background, another reader may interpret the narrative differently. Cultural relativism might also explain why the narrative separated from its Christian intertext so quickly, a reflection of the mores of the culture in which the narrative is now circulating. Formatted The story of “Reddin’s Ghost” is resurrected in local newspapers whenever something newsworthy occurs concerning the old lighthouse. All of the written accounts available can be traced back to Jenny Smith’s letter. The oral narrative continues to evolve, however, as is evidenced by this variant provided recently by life-long resident Stan Austin:

Somebody was coming in in a ship. It wasn’t a yacht, it was a ship. There was a fog. A ghost appeared and guided the ship into the channel.

And another variant from Adam Wolfe, maritime archaeologist and cultural heritage consultant, familiar with Jenny Smith’s story because of his own research, who told of hearing a “garbled” version very recently:

The lighthouse keeper’s ghost appeared on a ship in a fog and indicated the shore, warning that there were rocks there.

Even more pared down than ever, the shape-shifting narrative of “Reddin’s Ghost” has come a long way in the last 17 years.

The first time the narrative of the “Fisherman’s Ghost” was related to me was in 2001 at a noisy gathering. The gist of what I heard was that:

The ghost of a drowned fisherman walked down the middle of an occupied room and right through the wall at the other end, leaving behind on the floor a wet overcoat.

In early 2005, Dave Fitzpatrick, my original source came to see me. He had written a short story about the ghost during a writing exercise with his students. He gave 128 me in a copy (see Appendix 3). Dave’s “fictionalising” of the story actually mirrored my project, which we had been discussing at that gathering in 2001. In November

2005, I contacted Dave Fitzpatrick and asked him to relate the “original” story to me again:

This happened to the people (tenants) who were living in the house before we were there. One, a woman, had been in the kitchen doing something when this old guy –the bottoms of his pants were rolled up and he was wearing a green army-type greatcoat – walked down the corridor and into the kitchen. He said: “I’m just going to put the billy on, Mary.” And then he walked through the back door – which was closed – and the greatcoat fell to the floor as his figure passed through the wood. She found out later that Mary was the name of Billy North’s widow.25

Billy North was a local fisherman and farmer who drowned in the Torbay inlet in 1972. He had built his house at Muttonbird Island in 1926. According to

Dave Fitzpatrick, there was no electricity in the house and the Norths were in the habit of boiling the billy for tea at an open fireplace in the backyard. The motif of an overcoat left behind by a person, later realised to have been a ghost, is the central characteristic of the urban legend titled by Jan Harold Brunvald as “The Vanishing

Hitchhiker”. This particular legend involves a motorist who picks up a hitchhiker to whom he loans his overcoat. Later, the hitchhiker vanishes, leaving the overcoat behind. The motorist arrives at the hitchhiker’s destination to be greeted by the news that this person has been dead for years. The appearance of this motif in the

“Fisherman’s Ghost” demonstrates the ability of local narrative to assume new detail according to the culture in which it is circulating.

The coastline of Torndirrup National Park, including the legendary Gap, is a major tourist attraction located 15 minutes south of Albany and has a justifiably dangerous reputation:

25 Mrs North’s Christian name was Katherine (Kitty to her family and friends). 129 The rocks around the Gap and Natural Bridge [Caves Point, the Blowholes, the Amphitheatre, Peak Head, Salmon Holes, Family Rocks, et. al.] have weathered along faults and cooling cracks, breaking up the whole area into huge blocks. The Natural Bridge has formed in such a manner. The Gap, into which one can look almost 30 metres vertically downwards from the safety cage provided, is a superb example of a crack or fault line opened up by the sea. At its most spectacular during a southerly gale, the enormous force of the waves, sending spray and spume over the car park, illustrates dramatically the power of the sea. (Smith 21)

According to CALM statistics, in the thirty-year period from March 1973 to

September 2003 there were 20 fatalities and 13 known near misses in the

Torndirrup area alone (CALM 8-9). These figures exclude known suicides for which the area is also notorious. Suicides and attempted suicides are usually not reported by the local media. However, the gossip network generally ensures that news of such events is circulated within the community.

In 1997, a young woman fishing with her husband near the Gap disappeared after she left him for a moment to go to the toilet. A comprehensive land, air and sea search was conducted, and while the region waited for news, a local man, Dennis Wooltorton, told me this story:

There are underwater caves all along the coastline. That’s why the bodies of so many people who go missing off the coast are never found. They’re washed off the rocks, into the sea and dragged down by the powerful undertow. They surface, eventually. If they’re unlucky they surface before they die. They surface in the undersea caves. They’d live for a while. You’d hope you’d die pretty quick: cold, hunger, thirst. There might not be any light down there in those caves.

No trace of the missing woman has ever been found. It is not uncommon for bodies not to be recovered from the ocean in this area. Of the twenty fatalities reported in the CALM statistics (above) eight bodies were not recovered. Approximately one year later, the missing woman’s husband took his own life. This particular case has

130 intrigued locals, and continued speculation has led to the development of a local legend possessing several known variants:

Her husband was found in the shed behind their house, a suicide. Part of the floor of the shed had been ripped up, exposing the partially exhumed body of the missing woman.

I heard through the grapevine that the husband had shot himself after digging up his wife’s body that was buried underneath the shed floor of his home.

Later the guy died by shooting. The rumour is that some people actually killed him and the Police did nothing about it even though they knew.

He said she said she was going to throw herself off the Gap, but later they found her buried in the back yard. The police weren’t very trusting of his evidence. He was charged with her murder.

What is remarkable about these variants is that they contain elements of closure that were not evidenced in reality, constituting some kind of wish fulfilment, perhaps, or reflecting the community’s desire for retribution, enacting a kind of justice on behalf of the missing woman. This narrative is rapidly assuming the mantle of legend. In this example, an actual event has triggered the evolution of a local narrative.

There are caves in the area as my first informant told me, actually several types of caves. One type, The Blowholes, are “deep clefts in the rock, some 30 metres above sea level, open into submarine caves” (Smith 21). Another cave used to be one of the big attractions in the area. It is now no longer promoted in tourist literature, probably for reasons of safety, taking into account the enormous number of visitors that now come into the area. In 1909 access to Torndirrup, then called “The Caves,” was restricted to a rough sand track. By the early 1930s a road ran out to Little Grove, and from there it was a four-mile walk to the south coast.

People were parking their cars at nearby Cable Beach by 1939. During this period

131 the Cave itself was promoted in tourist literature and considered one of the highlights of “The Caves” along with “The Devil’s Gap” (which has since lost

“Devil’s”) and the “Natural Bridge”:

Approached rather arduously by a track which winds over and round the jumble of boulders, is the Cave. Not spectacular as are limestone grottoes, the cave is merely a huge hole below the granite cliffs, approached by a narrow entrance, and with its Styx-like blackness relieved by a faint trickle of light from a narrow cleft on the seaward side. Outside the big seas are thundering against the land, but in the cave their roar is muted to a far-off murmur, as of some great organ, playing at a distance. (Albany Advertiser, Holiday Number 1938 35).

Today, the Cave is no longer on the tourism agenda. A hazard, it is ignored, virtually forgotten by all but a few locals who visit from time to time leaving graffiti on the walls, ashes in fireplaces, and empties added to the already existing heaps of rubbish in the corners.

Local narratives articulate strong cautionary messages. On a visit to Port

Hedland, members of my family and I were on a fishing expedition to a creek accessible only by four-wheel drive, outside the town. The tide was out. While we were waiting for the tide to turn, bringing with it the fish, my brother sent us on an expedition to recover valuable lost hooks, lines and sinkers from snags in the mangroves at the edge of the creek. There was laughter as we floundered through the mud, getting stuck and unstuck. After tide turn, as we fished, my nephew told me this story:

There was this woman. She walked out onto the tidal flats, didn’t know about the mud. She was trapped in it. The tide came in.

He swore it was true.

I wondered about the woman trapped on the tidal flats, waiting for the water to come, and alternated the wondering with images from a visit years before to

132 Derby further north, in the Kimberley. At low tide, I’d leaned on the wooden rail of the Derby jetty and watched giant mud-skippers skate over mud-ridges created by the outgoing tide. I have never been able to substantiate the story of the woman drowning. Is it actually a regional myth/legend? In an attempt to answer my own question, I made a creative connection. I began to develop an idea for a narrative poem using the woman on the tidal flat as source material.

I asked my brother, a long-term resident of the Pilbara, if he was familiar with the story. Not this one, but he related two similar stories. In the first, a couple spend the night in a mangrove tree when marooned by the tide. In the second, another couple walk out to an island near the coast at Whim Creek. Before they are halfway back to the shore, they are caught by the rapidly rising tide and have to swim for their lives, using their eskies as floats in which to transport their gear.

These additions to the “original” narrative provide an example of the phenomenon that I call “clustering”. The term describes the way in which the telling of one local narrative invites the relating of another. The outcome is a cluster of stories that embellish the first. The moral shared by all three tidal flat stories is a cautionary one.

Narrative also arises when people attempt to explain the inexplicable. Peter

James’ hypothesis is that “the idea of the supernatural is pretty well entrenched in the human psyche” and that we “crave an underlying mystic pattern to life.” All myths appear real, he says, “until they are falsified by a new set of myths.”

(“Geology and God”). Furthermore, it is in the nature of human society to utilise the oral tradition as a means of transmitting myth. In cautionary tales, moral, ethical, social, geographical behaviours are illustrated by example, through story. The resulting narratives are perceived to be true, because they are so familiar. 133 As in classical mythology, the supernatural frequently plays a role in local narratives, for example, in the following ways:

1) Sensing the Sacred: entering the country

In “Karijini Walkabout”, Ron Crittall describes a ritual enacted by the Punjima people of the Karijini region in the Pilbara whenever they enter an area:

At the first waterhole, Bonny [Tucker] bent down, scooped up a handful of water and blew over it, while talking quietly. She later explained: “I’m saying ‘I’m Punjima, I belong to this country’, I’m telling the spirits why we’re here, that we’re bringing you to have a look at this country. (12)

This kind of ritual isn’t restricted to Aboriginal practices. A devotee entering a

Catholic Church may dip their hand in holy water upon entering. Metaphorically, it is as though the protagonists in some local narratives have failed to sense this sacred nature of the Australian landscape and, as a consequence, they come to harm.

2) Knowing the Unknowable:

Another way in which the supernatural is manifested is the way in which the storyteller often has knowledge of aspects of the narrative that would be known only to the protagonist. In the story about the underwater caves speculative aspects entirely imagined by the storyteller are presented as truth. If the protagonist has disappeared, how can their “story” be known? Knowing the unknowable also fulfils the desire for resolution by attempting to explain an inexplicable event, especially when the outcomes are difficult to come to terms with. For example, one of “The Gap” narratives speculates that the lost woman is to die – marooned (but more importantly, intact) – in an underwater cave, rather than by death through drowning, dismemberment, consumption by predators, or

134 murder. Others assume murder has occurred, but have the perpetrator meet an appropriate end.

3) Transformation of the protagonist:

The death and rebirth theme is considered by Northrop Frye to be the archetype of archetypes. (Abrams, 11) The transformation of a protagonist at the moment of, or soon after death is also a prominent characteristic of many myths and legends.

Some local narratives end at the moment of death of the central character; however the death/rebirth theme is often perpetuated in the form of supernatural transformation, such as ghost stories.

In Appearances of the Dead, an overview of ghost stories and perceptions of the “life” of the dead from Homer to the 20th Century, R. C. Finucane documented how “the dead are perceived in Western European traditions” and how and why those perceptions changed. His conclusion is that “the results could not be divorced from their social milieu”. For example: the medieval perception was that the returning dead were motivated by a desire to be helpful to humans (1).

Other folklorists specialising in this area of study, such as R.A. Bowyer, join him in this belief (Davidson and Russell 186).

Finucane maintains that our present day perception of ghosts stems from the Victorian era: “In a Christian society assailed by scepticism and science, but influenced too by romantic hopes and visions, Victorian apparitions satisfied the thirst for immortality” (212). He concluded that changes in social assumptions:

particularly those associated with theological opinions and scientific accomplishments, affected the ways that the living envisaged their dead in England and Europe. Each epoch has perceived its spectres according to specific sets of expectations; as these change so do the spectres. (223)

135 Drawing upon these conclusions then, if the kind of ghost one “sees” is a reflection of your milieu, it is therefore not surprising that someone in distress at sea encounters the ghost of a lighthouse keeper, or that someone at work in a kitchen has a more domestic kind of experience. Despite Finucane’s assertion that the contemporary view of ghosts derives from the Victorian period, the examples from the local narratives cited above indicate that the medieval perception of ghost as helpmeet is one that also survives to this day.

As with other examples of folklore, there are documented instances of elaboration and embellishing of ghost stories. Katharine M Briggs describes the evolution of a particular haunting in her essay “Tradition And Invention In Ghost

Stories”. Briggs’ particular interest was in “the accretions which grow up around a story when it has been told several times with an interval … between the tellings.”

She called this creative memory, defining the term as “the way in which folk elements filter into the story without the conscious knowledge of the [single] teller.”

The example Briggs provides is one of a Scottish woman (firstly relating the experience the day after the initial event) on her way to church, who steps into a laneway and experiences an impression of stepping into a slow moving crowd. The teller came to the conclusion that she had encountered a ghostly funeral procession making its way towards the church. Briggs isn’t specific about how much time had passed by the time she reencountered the story, simply that it is “a good many years later”. Creative memory has brought about a whole new version:

By that time she had not only felt the pressure round her but she had seen the procession, dressed in monkish cloaks and carrying flickering torches, and she had heard their chants too.

136 Briggs intercedes at this point, challenging the storyteller: “You didn’t really see them or hear them did you? You only felt them pressing against you.” But the storyteller is adamant, “quite sure she had seen them and heard them.” Briggs goes on to say that even in cases “where we have not personally witnessed accretions we can often deduce them from anachronisms in the traditional stories”, especially in those which are told “quite a number of years after the experience, when the creative memory would have had time to build details around it.”

(Davidson & Russell 3-9)

Creative memory plays a role in the local narrative “Fisherman’s Ghost”. In fact, in keeping with Briggs’ definition “the way in which folk elements filter into the story,” we find in this narrative a connection to the urban legend “The Vanishing

Hitchhiker” (Davidson & Russell 3-9). Both tales feature an overcoat that is left behind. In many of the many variations of “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” an overcoat is left behind by a man/woman (someone who is cold/dead) in a car/cemetery by a hitchhiker who vanishes from the backseat/frontseat/cemetery, and who in the resolution is discovered to have been someone who is deceased (Brunvand,

Harding 79). The overcoat in “Fisherman’s Ghost” (someone who is wet/drowned) is left behind on the kitchen floor by a man who vanishes. In both examples, the overcoat symbolises that which does not serve the ghost. The hitchhiker/fisherman is cold/wet dead/drowned and cannot be warmed up again. There is no benefit in either retaining a garment intended for that purpose. In addition, where Briggs deduces the presence of folk elements from anachronisms in the story, Brunvand, too, cites examples of so-called “true” stories eventually determined to be urban myth by the inability of some elements to stand up to scrutiny. The appearance of

137 the motif of the overcoat is precisely one such anachronism present in the

“Fisherman’s Ghost” narrative and it transforms it from a ghost story into legend.

Joan Rockwell, a folklorist who also works in the area of ghost stories, maintains that “the content and form of the ghost story can serve as a container for many moral and social attitudes [and] … cast a net of explanation”. Rockwell uses the term “gossip-network”, defining it as means of transmission of “stories which carry an explanation of what really happened.” (Davidson & Russell 60) (emphasis mine) The gossip-network is the means by which many local narratives circulate, but it is illustrated most effectively by “The Gap” narrative. This is a narrative that has its origins in an actual event: a vanishing. Motivated by sympathy for the alleged victim and the desire to enact some form of justice on the alleged perpetrator, “The Gap” narratives bear a close affinity to ghost stories featuring the restless dead still attached to this world but subjected to eternal punishment in the afterlife for undetected criminal acts. The purpose of these hauntings is “to punish symbolically those who cannot otherwise be punished … to restore natural justice”

(Davidson & Russell 46).

Rockwell says “sometimes the dead seem to want to return out of a mere nostalgic wish to continue their former life. (54)” The story of the “Fisherman’s

Ghost” coming home to “put the billy on” illustrates this function. Likewise, Richard

Boyer in his investigation of medieval ghost stories isolates the motivation of the

“returning dead” as being a desire to be helpful to humans. Both the fisherman and lighthouse keeper’s ghosts have a service to perform, one domestic, and the other lifesaving. (Davidson & Russell 186)

Clare Russell attributes the phenomena of haunting to several factors, one of them being “the stamp left on a house by a previous occupant”, a likely 138 explanation in the cases of both the “Fisherman’s” and “Reddin’s Ghost”, but she also places a lot of weight on the attitude of neighbours who are “involved emotionally with a place and what occurred in it. (Davidson & Russell 125) In her summing up, Russell defines the ghost experience as a:

dream state while awake, its appearance is subject to its continuing relevance to the social group in the neighbourhood, and it expresses the return or re-emergence of repressed information. (128)

“In psychoanalysis,” Russell concludes, “the repressed is supposed to be brought into consciousness in order that unconscious repercussion of the repressed material should cease.” (130)

Bearing Russell’s comments on “the repressed” in mind, the story of

“Reddin’s Ghost” becomes even more remarkable, because it is such a recent phenomenon. Reddin lived at Point King until 1911, died in 1940, yet no sightings of his apparition had been documented prior to Jenny Smith’s account in 1989. The lighthouse was entered into the State Register of Heritage Places in 1997. This, along with subsequent renovation and easier access to the site, has ended its

“repression”. The increased level of attention contributes to keeping the ghost story circulating and evolving in the consciousness of the community. Likewise, the pun on billy in the story of the “Fisherman’s Ghost” (punning on Billy North), and the persistent speculation of murder associated with “The Gap” narrative, have a similar effect, serving to keep the name of a deceased person or a significant event in contemporary memory.

139 The Sidebar

In the course of my research, I spent many hours in the Albany History

Collection poring over microfilms of Albany newspapers dating back as far as the nineteenth century.

People eking out an existence in a small, struggling community on the coast of one of the world’s most isolated continents would have had little to look to for news and entertainment other than gossip and the broadsheets issuing from the presses of their local newspaper houses.

Several things stand out about early accounts of sudden death. Journalists of earlier times and in that locale were operating before photography became commonplace in newspapers. Compared to the economical nature of modern news reportage, earlier articles utilise elaborate, highly visual and empathic prose. For example:

Sad Fatality at Torbay A Man Drowned Yesterday afternoon information was received at the Police Station that a man named William Venn had been drowned while fishing near Torbay. It seems that three men named William Venn, William Foster and Charles McFarlane left Torbay yesterday morning on a fishing excursion at a point on the coast almost five miles from the Saw Mills. At this place the shore is formed of rugged granite rocks, and the position taken up by the men while fishing was on a double-ledged rock jutting out from the mainland, In front of it was another large rock, divided from that on which they were seated by only a few yards and which served in a way as a break-water for the sea as it dashed against the shore. After fishing for some time, an exceptionally high wave dashed clean over the foremost rock and up over the ledge on which Venn and Foster were seated, although this ledge was about 20 feet above the ordinary water level. Both men were carried into the sea, but Foster managed to reach a cleft in the rock and thus regained the shore. Poor Venn was unable to get near the shore as the tide was running out strongly and he was carried out further and further by each receding wave.26

26 “Sad Fatality at Torbay.” Australian Advertiser. 24 August 1891: 3G. 140 Today we live in an era of mass voyeurism: reality television; the paparazzi; digital photography; tabloid journalism, and the World Wide Web. Compared to people of the 18th and 19th Centuries we think ourselves more worldly. However, newspapers from those periods contain some graphic reportage of accidental deaths, murders and suicides, and particularly long and detailed accounts of the proceedings of inquests.27 In a paragraph printed during the search for two sailors from the German schooner Meta in 1890, a body recovered from the sea is described as:

“horribly mutilated by being knocked about on the rocks. The fingers, toes, and extremities are worn away, and the face is almost unrecognisable.”28

By contrast, articles from the 1950s, more often than not, avoided using the word “suicide” altogether. One account, the article on which 1959 Jimmy Newhill’s

Harbour (“The Gap”) is based, reads as though it is describing a suicide yet stops short of saying so explicitly. At first this seemed to be censorship at work – perhaps arising from religious issues and/or community and family sensitivities – and it aroused my curiosity further.

I am speculating when I state that the change in the manner of reporting suicides over the span of three centuries is linked to changes in social and religious attitudes, but I think this speculation is correct. In the course of researching the local narrative of the alleged murder/suicide associated with the vanishing of a woman fishing with her husband at the Gap in 1998, yet another reason presented itself to me. I was offered the intelligence, since verified, that an

27 For example “Tragedy at Mount Barker: James Sounness Hangs Himself.” Albany Observer. 11 November 1890: 3E. 28 “The Body of One of the Missing ‘Meta’ Sailors Found.” Albany Observer. 14 June 1890: 2H. 141 ‘informal agreement’ exists between local health organizations, police and newspapers where – to avoid the ‘ripple effect’ where one suicide encourages another copycat act – suicides are, usually, not reported in the media.

It was the when? where? how? who? why? narrative structure of the newspaper articles, along with the informative and concisely worded CALM interpretive signs located at the Gap that encouraged me to look for some way of incorporating some of these materials into my creative project. This led me into the creation of what later became the “sidebars” and “sidebar poems” in “The Gap” and

“Jetty Stories”.

I wanted to create a backdrop of authenticity for the narrative poems, to incorporate textually the area’s reputation, but also wanted to avoid swamping them in a sea of quoted material. There is nothing untoward about the fact that someone can completely vanish off this coast. That is precisely what has been happening in this area – in times documented by white-memory – since European settlement of the south coast. White-memory has led to the development of local narratives, and they, like urban legend, have a pseudo-authority often supported by secondary sources such as newspapers and oral histories.

Some of the older newspaper articles suggested possibilities for poetry by demonstrating subtle use of sound patterning techniques. Note the occurrences of sibilance, alliteration and consonance in the following sentence, and the pun on

“Meta”:

The police, with native assistants, went out this morning to patrol the beach in search of the bodies of the missing sailors of the Meta.29

29 “Untitled.” Albany Observer. 12 June 1890: 3A. 142 It soon became apparent that the most complimentary option available to me, as poet and creative writer, transformer of these (found and historic) materials was to firstly, quote directly from the signs – themselves already rich in poetic language – and secondly, to transform the gist of the newspaper articles into poetry.

Whilst mimicking the lyric in form, the sidebar poems are narratives. The large poems are narratives as well, but they are fictional. I wanted those sidebar poems derived from newspaper articles to retain their non-fiction tone and the link to their originating event. This method has its shortcomings however. How does one avoid distressing relatives of the victims? I didn’t want to avoid one of the area’s more recent tragedies, but I took a slightly different approach to it, using a distancing technique that consisted of describing what was there to refer to what was not there (2003 Salmon Holes in “The Gap”).

The larger narrative poems are set in the same vicinity as their smaller counterparts. They are linked to those particular locations by the use of specific place names – which serves to blur the lines between fiction and fact, hopefully adding a sense of the real to the work as a whole.

Initially, I thought a short strict-form structure similar to the cinquain or tanka might suit my purpose. Strict-form poems have shortcomings, however, especially when meaning must be sacrificed in order to meet the demands of conforming to a particular structure. So, this idea was eventually shelved in favour of beginning with a compact, single stanza poem in the style of free verse in “The Gap”. The form became more relaxed in “Jetty Stories”.

I wanted to incorporate the poems into the body of the work in a way that ensured they would not be overwhelmed by the larger, fictional narrative. The smaller, historical poems needed to be located near, but not be essential to, the 143 larger poem. I envisaged them – with quotations from the signs, other texts, eyewitness accounts and other bits and pieces – as satellites orbiting the central poem. They came to resemble the sidebar of print journalism.

In feature articles, the sidebar is located alongside the main body of the article. It is related yet self-contained, offering some additional information that serves to enhance the main article. The reader’s attention is attracted to the sidebar by the use of eye-catching frames, headlines, colour, graphics, and fonts.

Rather than use these techniques myself, wanting to avoid raising complicated layout issues, I elected instead to rely, in-manuscript, on the use of single-spaced, italicised and right justified text in a manuscript in which the majority of the text is 1

1/2 spaced, regular and left justified. This approach appealed to me because of its simplicity and subtlety.

For example:

Woman’s Body Recovered From Newhills Harbour Using ropes and a stretcher, police and a party of about 20 volunteers on Sunday night recovered the body of a woman from the bottom of Jimmy Newhill’s Harbour. The body was later identified as that of Mrs. Maria Dusz (40), who had been reported missing from her home in Katoomba-st, [sic] Albany. It is understood that she had been ill for some time. Two Perth youths who had been sight-seeing around the south coast reported having found the body at about 5p.m. on Sunday, some feet from the water on the eastern side of Jimmy Newhill’s harbour. A party of police left for the scene immediately after the report was received. Meanwhile arrangements were being made for assistance from volunteers. It took police and volunteers about 40 minutes to bring the body up the narrow cliff track by torchlight. Some of the steep 400ft. climb with the stretcher had to be done on hands and knees. The body was brought to Albany and the coroner notified. An autopsy was performed and this, it is understood, disclosed that death was due to drowning.30

30 “Woman’s Body Recovered From Newhills Harbour.” Albany Advertiser. 3 April 1959: 18. 144 The preceding article was transformed into a sidebar poem in “The Gap”:

1959 Jimmy Newhill’s Harbour Night: police and volunteers, for forty minutes, struggle to carry a corpse four hundred feet up a steep, pinched path.

The sidebar poem is related (in form but not function) to annotation. Samuel

Taylor Coleridge incorporated marginal glosses into “The Rime of the Ancient

Mariner”. Coleridge’s complex ballad is unlike other works of the Romantic period, having a structure that is quite calculated, and almost post-modern in its execution.

“The Rime” is a collage of genres: mock-archaic, Christian moral-tale, academic, and parody. The non-standard layout serves to call attention to all these aspects.

(Warner viii, The New Princeton 118)

The first poem in my manuscript, contains no sidebars at all. To my way of thinking, this sets up an expectation that the conventional left-justified appearance of the text will continue. When the first sidebar, a quotation from a sign, appears at the second poem, “The Gap”, it takes the form of epigraph. The next is in-text and is another quotation, its presence signifying that the shape of the poem is evolving.

But, when we encounter the third sidebar, we meet the first of the “sidebar poems”, and – hopefully – because the first two sidebars have contained authentic detail this poem, too, is perceived to have the same status.

Sidebar poems can offer a solution to the “flattening of diction [and] uniformity of tone” that Dorothy Hewett identified as being problems with contemporary verse novels. She believed a “strong narrative drive“ must eventually dictate style, thereby leading to language use that is more prosaic in nature than poetic (Hewett

May 1999). Sidebars help side-step the slide into uniformity. They work because

145 the non-standard layout of the text diverts the reader’s attention from the extended, central narrative poem to a compact poetic form and then back again. The reading process moves from narrative to lyric to narrative to quotation to narrative to lyric to narrative to found poem, and so on. When used in conjunction with periodic long lines in the central poem sidebars serve to slow reading down, offering an alternative to the story’s headlong rush down the page. The reader has the opportunity to dwell on the page. The onus is on poets working in hybridised forms not to be diverted by the demands of the other genre, to blend but to remain committed to the use of figurative language and the crafting aspect of writing poetry.

Writers use everything – and they transform it. The “integrative mythology” of which Abrams wrote is as much a hybrid as the prose-poem or verse novel

(112). It is a fusion of history, legend, myth, story, gossip. Far from feeling compelled to abide by historical truths, writers shift these truths into other spaces.

Immersion in theories of narrative, landscape and folklore, and the complex process of transforming local materials into the poems which became The

Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife, and other stories came, for me, to resemble deliberate legend-making.

* * * * *

146

Bibliography

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154

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“Rather Rough.” Albany Observer 21 June 1890: 3E.

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“Sad Fatality at Torbay.” Australian Advertiser. 24 August 1891: 3G.

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“Strange Rock Formations.” Albany Advertiser Holiday Number 11 Nov. 1935: 49- 50.

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Taylor, Paige. “Ghostly charge in safe hands.” Albany Advertiser 7 January 1997: 1.

“The Boating Fatality: Mr Davis Supposed to have been Killed by a Shark.” Australian Advertiser 3 Dec. 1896: 3A.

“The Body of One of the Missing ‘Meta’ Sailors Found.” Albany Observer 14 June 1890: 2H.

“The Caves, South Albany.” Albany Advertiser Holiday Number Season 1929 – 30: 17.

“The Drowning Fatality: The Inquest.” Albany Advertiser 23 Aug. 1898: 3G.

“The Gap and Natural Bridge.” Albany Advertiser Holiday Number 28 Nov. 1938: 35.

“The Torbay Drowning Case.” Australian Advertiser. 26 August 1891: 3G.

“Tragedy at Mount Barker: James Sounness Hangs Himself.” Albany Observer 11 Nov. 1890: 3E.

“Untitled.” [“Another sad case of suicide by drink…”] Albany Mail 23 Nov. 1887: 3G.

“Untitled.” [“In a bottle picked up on Middleton Beach…”] Australian Advertiser 27 Oct. 1893: 3C. 155

“Untitled.” [“On Monday morning at about 9.30…”] Albany Observer 17 June 1890: 3A+.

“Untitled.” [The police, with native assistants, went out…] Albany Observer 12 June 1890: 3A.

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“Woman’s Body Recovered from Newhills Harbour.” Albany Advertiser 3 April 1959: 18C.

Miscellaneous Items

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Amazing North. West Perth, W.A.: Cooks Tours, 2005.

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---, Interpretive Signs. Torndirrup National Park. Albany, W.A.: Dept. of Conservation and Land Management, [c2000].

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Golden Holden Oldies: The FJ Holden (1953 – 1956).

156 http://autoweb.com.au/cms/newsarticle.html?&M=gmhnews&article=gmh9806151 24 October, 2004.

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Richardson, Shane. South Coast Rock. Subiaco, W.A.: Stone Productions, 1998.

157 Rogers, Danny I, Theunis Piersma, Marc Lavaleye, Grant B. Pearson, and Petra de Goejj. Life Along Land’s Edge: Wildlife on the Shores of Roebuck Bay, Broome. Photographs by Jan van de Kam. Kensington, W.A.: Dept. of Conservation and Land Management, 2003.

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---, “Shorebirds of Albany’s Harbours.” Ms. W.A. Museum, Albany, W.A.

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“Yoga Postures Step-By-Step: Vriksha-asana – The Tree Posture.” http://www.santosa.com/asanas/vriksha.html 1 March, 2004.

Research Notes

Peter Blyth, retired Farmer. Elleker, W.A.: 16 June 2004. Mark Roddy, CALM Ranger. Torndirrup National Park, W.A.: 24 April 2004. Linda Elms, State Emergency Service (FESA). Albany, W.A.: 16 June 2004. Dan and Dave (Snowy), Fishermen. Albany, W.A.: 16 June 2004. Adrienne Beatty (nee North). Mutton Bird, W.A.: 1 July 2006. Stan Austin. Albany, W.A.: 21 June 2006. Malcolm Traill and Julia Mitchell, Albany Public Library: Albany History Collection. Albany, W.A.: 22 June 2006. Adam Wolfe, Maritime Archaeologist and Cultural Heritage Consultant. Albany, W.A.: 29 June 2006. Tony Smith, former CALM Ranger. Albany, W.A. 1 June 2004 and 26 July 2004.

Local Narratives: Informants

Mark Lyall, Michelle Frantom, Tony Smith, Dennis Wooltorton, Val Milne, Malcolm Traill, Julia Mitchell, Barbara Black, Adrienne Beatty, Mark Roddy, Stan Austin, Adam Wolfe, Dave Fitzpatrick, Lyn Peters, Joan Blight. Dave Fitzpatrick, Naomi Dann, William Temperton, Bill Temperton Jnr, Sarah Drummond, Warren Flynn, et al. 158

Appendix 1 – Publications

1. A maquette, a shortened version, of “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife” won First Prize in the 2002 Tom Collins Poetry Prize. Since that time, it has appeared in: • FAWWA Newsletter, March 2003 • Westerly, Vol 50, November 2005 • Wagtail, No. 53, April 2006, Picaro Press • Best Australian Poetry 2006. Ed. Judith Beveridge. UQP: Brisbane, Qld, 2006. • Hidden Desires. Ed. Christina Houen. Ginninderra Press (publication pending 2006). Formatted The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife

Not an ordinary cottage, walls as wide as her husband’s chest, the tower-light a maypole the keeper’s wife and daughters skip around west-east, east-west.

Once, she saw a ghost, grey as possibility, drip salt water along the passageway some long-drowned former tenant drawn back to trim the twin wicks, combined bright light visible for miles.

Not an ordinary garden, she’s cultivating granite where the lighthouse stands. Not an ordinary garden, she’s cultivating wind to harass the keeper’s tough-stuff, growing stunted in kero drums, through soils he’s backpacked in flourbags. The woman nurtures native rush-grasses in fault-lines, a reclining melaleuca in the fertile gap between two boulders, bright lichens as a border between the land and sea. Not a connoisseur of silence, she’s cultivating noise the sea is never silent here, the nights are never dark.

159 Working against the keeper is not unlike embroidery and every time her sense of duty hems her in the keeper’s wife dwells on the night the light went out, her second daughter’s fall into her father’s sea; and her own night-blindness; blundering around on the rock in her nightdress in the dark and knowing the storm was tearing the whitecaps from the waves, and she was two-times bereaved.

Working against the keeper is not unlike embroidery. With every pass of his magician’s needle through the fabric of the sea, she has a counter-pass with thread: stem stitch becomes herringbone, blanket stitch chain, a temporary tack an oversew, and she resets the hoop daily, straining the weave until the grain is warped. And she rehearses tangles, French knots, lattice stitch, keeps her needles shining, her scissor blades sharp.

And just when she thinks she has her husband where she wants him, she stands at the table in the kitchen comparing cottons, sizing thimbles, tape’s capacity to gauge her blackness. When from this vantage point she detects the keeper shepherding the channel current east, she turns it west, when he reroutes the cove rips north, she turns them south, when he guides a freighter cautiously toward the harbour she gouges its hull out on a hitherto unknown shoal.

From the light tower the kero drums, performing their daily cycle of expansion and shrinkage, toll dully. She knows the smell of kerosene as well as she knows her own distilled essence, the scent of her children’s hair, the keeper’s salty presence. Kerosene smudges everything with its hazy-blue skin: is the lighthouse’s other tenant, always present, never seen, a bitter layer on the lips after she’s kissed her husband’s hand. And remembering her daughter’s dog barking until its voice was gone, she wonders how long she could scream before she would not make another sound.

2. Two excerpts from the long version of “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife” (“She is at the edge” and “The fisherman tastes”) were published in the Journal of Australian Studies, Ed. Richard Nile, Issue 81, API Network & UQP: 2004.

3. Six Sidebar poems from “The Gap” – “Greetings from the Southern Edge” – were published in The West Australian newspaper’s Summer Reading Supplement, Tuesday 14th December 2004. The poems were: “1959 Jimmy Newhill’s Harbour”; “1960 Blowholes”; “1967 The Gap”; “1973 Natural Bridge”, and “2003 Salmon Holes”.

160 4. Since 2003, I have collaborated with Albany musician/composer Rod Vervest on our “Story to Song” Project. To date I have written three sets of song lyrics drawing upon the principles and research for “Ceremony for Ground”. The songs have been set to music composed by Rod Vervest, and performed live by the as part of the closing sessions of the Sprung Writers Festival (2003-2005). “Parade Street Preacher” (2004) was also performed live at the ABC Radio “Fresh Air” Concert broadcast live on Regional Radio on Wednesday 17 November 2004 and on Radio National’s “Music Deli” Saturday 27 November 2004.

The songs are:

2003: “Lighthouse Light” (Performers: Teresa Hughes, Rod Vervest, Steve Scanlan, Mike Hyder, Emma Luxton; Andrew Winton)

Lighthouse Light

Verse 1 The western gales fill her sails She’s not lain down for days and days She knows the song of winter waves Heavy helmed in the raging bay.

Bridge to chorus It’s an age-old fight between the sea and night and the sight – of the lighthouse light.

Verse 2 Lighthouse keeper looking south High on the windblown coastal heights The keeper knows the ocean knows How to win the sailor’s love.

Bridge to chorus It’s an age-old fight between the sea and night and the sight – of the lighthouse light.

Middle 8 Breaksea Island, heavy seas Mountain dark, she cannot see lightning strikes buying time Keeper’s ghost gives the sign

Sub Chorus red beacon left green beacon right shining eye of the lighthouse Light. solo over to Middle 8 sub chorus

161 Verse 3 Keeper watches from the lighthouse ruins, Its crumbling walls crown the channel rocks Waits for the sailors, winter nights High on the wind blown coastal heights.

Bridge to chorus It’s an age-old fight between the sea and night and the sight – of the lighthouse light.

Outro

2004: “Parade Street Preacher” (Performers: Geoff Waldeck, Rod Vervest, Steve Scanlan, Mike Hyder, Emma Luxton, [with Stewart Gartland & Les Karski – ABC broadcast]; and from the Safety In Numbers choir: Teresa Hughes, Wendy Cochrane, Sandy O’Doherty, Jill Larsen, Gillian Evans, Ann Pinchen and Kath Craig.) “Parade Street Preacher” is based on Thomas Booker Sherratt (1791 – 1859) – a local merchant and lay preacher – who built “The Octagon”, Albany’s first church. (Garden)

Parade Street Preacher

Parade Street Chapel eight walls, chimney and choir Small bare room burns bright with the preacher’s fire Grey slate tiles and a mud brick floor Preacher reads a sermon for the new town congregation of his desire

Parade Street preacher says a better world’s coming to life When spirits fly high their bodies go along for the ride He’s a fisher of men from the whaling boats Trims his net with salvation floats Says the Lord is coming in with the tide

Hey glory, glory people Spirit at a real good price Come on in his Chapel and he’ll make you feel all right He’s hard as the rocks in the church he built His altar wine ain’t never spilt Come on down we’ll walk on the water tonight

See him on the street and you’ll cross to the other side he speaks in tongues behind that righteous grin of pride His poison pen, say his fellow men Will lead you to his demons’ den Saying there but for the grace of God go I

162 Hey glory, glory people Spirit at a real good price Come on in his Chapel and he’ll make you feel all right He’s hard as the rocks in the church he built His altar wine ain’t never spilt Come on down we’ll walk on the water tonight

(a Capella) “Verily, Verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water, and of the Spirit, He cannot enter the kingdom of God.” (John III.V) (a Capella) “I stand here not to accuse, but to admonish you, that the kingdom of God existeth not in words; but in holiness, in righteousness, and in peace; and to remind you that the heralds of this kingdom have been most explicit in their declarations of what characters shall be suffered to enter therein.” 31

His charity doesn’t include the hungry or poor You can buy that by the bottle at the Preacher’s store The purse strings of your net he’ll hold Fill it up with liquor cold You can hear the congregation sing for more

Singing Hey glory, glory people Spirit at a real good price Come on in his Chapel and he’ll make you feel all right He’s hard as the rocks in the church he built His altar wine ain’t never spilt Why don’t you come on down we’ll walk on the water Come on down we’ll walk on the water Come on down we’ll walk on the water tonight

2005: “Wherever You Go” ((Performers: Sue Scanlan, Rod Vervest, Steve Scanlan, Mike Hyder, Emma Luxton; Lochie Gillett) Formatted Wherever You Go

Borne between Breaksea and the Land, christened Night by the southern-coastal sand, I croon around your windows in the night, lullaby for sleepers till the moon is setting white, in my voice you’ll hear the echoes of the past,

31 from Sherratt’s sermon book: Whitaker, Rev. E.W. Family Sermons, Volume 1: Feed My Sheep. Printed by Bye and law and sold by F. and C. Rivington. No. 62, St Paul’s Church Yard. 1798. 386. 163 my songs are stories of things that didn’t last. I am the Wind. I am the Wind.

I have lit Torndirrup and the Land, hold Destruction and Salvation in my hands, I signal hope in darkness lost to light, nurturer of spirits ere the sun is burning bright, Breaksea beacon, red coal in Noongar hearths, my glow warmed new settlers and quickened Anzac hearts. I am the fire.

Wherever you go there I am Wherever you go there I’ll be in the broken glass on the old Gaol wall by the clock in the tower of the old Town Hall, marking time.

Solo Over earth I spread my hand shaping the islands, new born land, I marked out rivers, pumped the forest blood assaulted prophets holding back my floods, I called the whales, bought the salmon and the salt, I kissed the feet of sailors and fishermen of old I am the sea. I am the sea.

Mountain ranges formed of land, granite rock, gravel-sand limestone caves byre-bright, forged a cradle for the sleepers of the night, hear me I‘m the poem in the dreamer’s harp, my songs are the softest but there is fire in my heart. I am the Earth. I am the Earth

Bridge Chorus Wherever you go there I am Wherever you go there I’ll be Wherever you go there I am Wherever you go there I’ll be in the broken bottles on the old Gaol wall by the clock in the tower of the old Town Hall, marking time. Formatted

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Appendix 2 – Workshop Transforming our local stories

Drawing upon the principles and research for “Ceremony for Ground”, this creative writing workshop – delivered on Sunday 21st September 2003 at the Sprung Writers Festival – was designed to introduce the 25 participants to the topic of local narrative, its application in creative writing and to techniques for transformation.

I set up a display, which participants were able to browse before the workshop started. The display comprised:

1. A4 posters defining the terms I’d be using during the workshop: anecdote, legend, myth, urban legend, memorate and local narrative. 2. Quote from Peter James: All myths are real or appear real until they are falsified by a new set of myths. Peter James 3. Items from my research on the Point King Lighthouse: • Photographs and drawings from various periods • Maps • Photocopies of pages from my journal. For example: a night-time field trip, and rough drafts for the poems. • Drawing of the floor plan of the lighthouse (speculative) • The short version of the poem. (The long version was on my desk) • An illustration of how prisms work in lenses • Extracts from articles. • Coast fog signals from “The Lighthouses of the World” • Architectural drawings • Notes from the Albany Maritime Heritage Survey, and the Albany Historical Society newsletter

Workshop Synopsis

Our local stories serve multiple purposes. For example: They inform; they create a sense of identity, of belonging to a place; serve as cautionary tales or as a means of knowing the unknowable, and might also illustrate universal themes such as death and rebirth.

This workshop explored ideas about how one gathers our local stories, and how the stories can then serve as a resource for creative writers. In the second half of the session the participants were invited to trial the process. They were provided with examples of local stories (for the purposes of this workshop, I selected items from old newspapers) that offer potential for transformation, and invited to write a creative piece, which could be either poetry or prose fiction.

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Part One of the workshop dealt with three central points: 1. Finding our local stories 2. The stages of a narrative 3. Techniques for transforming our local stories

Part Two – a practical writing exercise

Part One: Formatted Intro The greatest stories are not necessarily those built on the scale of War and Peace. Frequently they are constructed from simple, quieter ideas. Likewise, the greatest stories are not always located in some distant, exotic locale. Sometimes writers find ideas for great stories in smaller, quiet events in the own backyards, in stories that are as familiar to them as the lines in the palms of their hands. Witness the success of Robert Drewe’s The Shark Net as evidence of the attraction local stories have for an audience. (Robert Drewe attended the festival and had spoken the previous afternoon. Most folk at the workshop had heard his talk.)

1. Finding our local stories: Listening Reading – historical materials, newspapers, autobiography Research – local studies, historical societies Ask – Have you heard? Tell stories yourself – often listeners will offer up their versions.

2. Stages of a narrative Formatted • Telling – the story begins somewhere • Repetition – It is retold, again and again. • Like Chinese whispers pieces are lost (forgetting) and found (remembering). • Elaboration – Speculative details that are added in by individual storytellers, which then become part of the narrative. Embroidering. • Clustering – different versions exist. For example: “Reddin’s Ghost”: different versions. Or, Little Johnnie jokes. • The term “clustering” describes the way in which the telling of one local narrative invites the relating of another that focuses on the same aspect of landscape. The outcome is a cluster of stories, which embellish the first.

3. Transforming local stories – Distancing techniques Formatted • Keep the basic plotline, the bones of the story, then elaborate. • Depersonalise it by losing the names of those involved. • Alter point of view. News reports tend to be 3rd person distant/omniscient. Change to 3rd person limited/focalised through the protagonist or to 1st person observer/character narrator or first person protagonist. • Change the protagonist’s characteristics. For example: age, gender, educational background, economic status, race, sexual orientation.

166 • Change the location. Detach the event from its place of origin by de-naming or re-naming. Keep elements of the place that are essential to the story, eg. Inlet in the fisherman’s ghost story. • Explore the landscape; get to know it intimately daytime and night. • Speculate, elaborate, and embroider. • Ask yourself: What isn’t here? For example: the stories I was hearing about the lighthouse were all about the keepers or the children. The women were absent from the stories. So I created a fictional wife for a fictional keeper and wrote a story for her.

Part Two: Formatted Formatted Practical Writing Exercise – Transform A Local Story Formatted

1. Circulated “Created” local narrative: news clipping 2. Transform/Create fictions. See Distancing Techniques (above)

The stories I collected to use for this exercise were found in very old (c1800s) newspapers in the Local Studies collection of the Albany Library. They were: 1. “Message in a bottle: sinking ship” – “The handwriting of the message seems too steady to have been written on a foundering ship.” 2. “Coroner’s inquest: Body found in the bush” – “A man in the horrors frequently got up and went out with out any clothing on his body.” 3. “Narrow escape from drowning: attempted suicide?” – “they looked into the water and an upturned face was clearly visible.” 4. “Another sad case of suicide through drink” – “a mean, vulgar female effigy … hanging from a lamppost.” 5. “A grisly story” – “three ropes which had successively hanged grandfather, father and son of the same family.” 6. “York Street invaded by caterpillars”

I was thrilled with the outcomes of the workshop, overall they were very positive. Participants found the concepts easy to absorb and had no difficulty in putting the techniques into practice. Everyone present wrote something. Twenty three participants were happy to read their work aloud and to talk freely about their experience of the process.

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Appendix 3 – “Wind in the Pines” by Dave Fitzpatrick (used by permission of the author)

Kate was home alone in the kitchen of the old, stone house she was renting in the country. She liked the peaceful, isolated bush setting of the grey, granite house that had been built by a fisherman. It was the first house to have been built in the area, between an estuary and the sea. It nestled in the lee of a peppermint- covered hill. At dusk, feral peacocks called out in their haunting cries as they roosted in the peppermint trees. She liked the house, but the kitchen was a bit dark.

The fisherman, Bobby South, had lived in the house he had built for forty odd years with his wife Elsie; they had raised their family here. Late in life he had lost a leg. Locals say this might have caused his fatal boating accident. One winter, of hight rainfall and heavy flood, he had been net fishing in the estuary. They say he must have lost his balance, toppled his dinghy, and hit his head on the iron sluice gates where the estuary current was strong. At any rate, he was found drowned with a blow to the head. His grown- up children still lived around the area, but none wanted to live in the old family home.

Kate’s partner, Tom, worked at a day job in the town ten kilometres away. He was trying his hand at copywriting for the local radio station. He would often come home from a hectic day of buzz and deadlines, to comment on how relaxing it was to live in a quiet house with no noisy, electrical gadgets, out of earshot of the nearest neighbours. No harsh, electric lights, no noisy appliances. Tom was enjoying his stint away from the city. He especially liked the soft, dusky light in the old, stone kitchen at the end of the day.

Kate’s days, in contrast, blended into one another in a soothing routine of housework, tending chooks and gardening. Sometimes she would go into town shopping, but mostly she just liked to be in this peaceful place. The soft dinging of wind in the twin pines. The occasional visitor punctuated her rural existence.

Tom and Kate enjoyed the fact that the house was not connected to the electricity, and that they could lead a little bit of an olden days lifestyle. It got a bit hot in summer, with no fans or air-conditioning, especially when the old Metters No.2 woodstove was fired up for cooking. Apparently old Bobby and Elsie used to boil a billy out the back door on the grass. There was a ring of stones still there. It kept the temperature down in the kitchen. Tom and Kate had taken to the same practice.

The previous tenants had been a bunch of young people from the city. Rehabilitating in the country. Alcohol, drugs, mental illness – that kind of thing. The locals said that all kinds of “weirdos” used to come to stay. Every now and then, one would drop in on Tom and Kate, looking for people who didn’t live there. Kate

168 could tell they were city people just by looking at them. More often, one of her friends would come by for a “cuppa”.

One weekday, while Tom was at work, Kate was home alone making blackberry jam on the woodstove. She loved the bubbling mass of colour. You could stir a galaxy or a whole universe in it. Stirring, stirring, round and round, she looked up suddenly, to see an old man walking into the kitchen. He was wearing an old, army greatcoat and his trousers were rolled up to his knees. He said, matter-of-factly, “I’m just going to put the billy on Elsie,” as he continued walking towards the back door. Kate, totally surprised to see him, slowly opened her mouth to say something. As she did, he walked through the back door. It was closed.

As the figure walked through the wooden door, the old army greatcoat fell to the ground. Kate noticed one wooden leg as it disappeared through the door...

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Appendix: 4 – Other Local Narratives

Numerous local narratives circulate in Albany and in other communities.

“Woman In A Red Dress” is a local narrative particular to the town of

Broome in the Kimberley region of WA. It was related to me by Naomi Dann, a local woman, in August 2004:

Captain Cook careened his ship on Buccaneer Rock. Woman drowned. This woman in an old-fashioned red dress comes down on the foreshore at night and tries to seduce men into accompanying her into the mangroves. My brother was in a group drinking on the beach. A woman in a red dress joined them. My brother noticed that the woman was drinking but she wasn’t getting drunk. He hightailed it out of there because he figured out who she was. The woman is white.

The “Captain Cook” referred to is probably William Dampier, but the narrative is from more recent times. When I asked long-time Broome resident Sally Bin Denim about it she told me it wasn’t an old or dreamtime story, but a newer one, “a younger people’s story. They are terrified of her,” she said.

Stories about tunnels on the slopes of and on Mount Clarence, one of the older sections of Albany are quite common, especially so is one about the existence of a tunnel from the Earl of Spencer Inn leading down to what was formerly the Customs House and Post Office and is now the UWA Albany Centre.

Another variant is that the tunnel goes from the Old Post Office to the Old Gaol further down Stirling Terrace. Rumour has it that the tunnels were built by the convicts who were engaged in constructing the Old Post Office building so that

170 they could move around without the townsfolk seeing them. One explanation offered was that the geographical nature of the terrain being largely granite subject to cracking and splitting could create the impression of a tunnel. Val Milne, of the

Albany Residency Museum, said the stories of tunnels were unproven. Milne’s explanation is that the Albany stories arose in response to aspects of construction of the Old Post Office building. When the Stirling Terrace level of the Old Post

Office was originally built, windows – covered by bars – were situated at road level in order to allow light into the belowground floor (Proudlove Parade level). During a later renovation the road-level windows were closed over. Looking into the cavities that remained, from the belowground floor, may have created the impression that they were in fact tunnels. Malcolm Traill of the Albany History Collection, Albany

Public Library, offered an explanation substantiated by plans held in the AHC.

What are assumed to be tunnels is actually a system of drains. The Post Office building was a major construction, and it was necessary to build a large retaining wall on the uphill side to manage the large amount of run-off water from Mt

Clarence. With regard to rumours of the existence of a network of tunnels at the

Forts on nearby Mt. Adelaide, Traill said that there are no tunnels at the Forts.

What is there are actually covered excavations of military origins, the purpose of which was the transport of ammunition from the magazine to the gun battery located further downhill in the vicinity of Point King. However, the magazine at the

Forts was built taking advantage of chinking in the granite, which gives some credence as to how stories about tunnels in Mt Clarence may have evolved.

Another story related to me by Val Milne, and again by Joan Blight, colonial historian, concerns the tower at the Old Gaol. The ghost of a red-haired priest is 171 reportedly seen looking out of the windows of the upper room, windows that are too high for any human being to see out of. The second floor room, which doesn’t appear on any plans of the Gaol precinct, is presumed to have been constructed later. The story goes that the room was built by a wealthy local family so their schizophrenic son could be incarcerated there after he had harmed a family member. A red-haired priest was apparently the prisoner’s only visitor.

Another local legend (but without any supernatural element) concerns Sir

John Forrest, famous explorer, statesman and the Premier of WA from 1890-1901.

Rumour has it Forrest, whilst on an official visit to Albany, was pelted with eggs and fruit on the steps of the Town Hall. Forrest is reported to have said in response to this indignity, that “grass would grow on the streets of Albany before the government would do anything for the town”. This particular legend is sometimes cited as the reason why it took so long for some important developments to occur in Albany (Milne). Malcolm Traill said that no documentation of the alleged event has been located, but that even if it had occurred, newspapers of the period were so conservative that it is unlikely they would have printed an account of the incident.

* * * * *

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