Wisdom tooth

Posted on October 23, 2026 by Babelfishing

Fronting the busy torrent of Ballina Road as it rushes inexorably into Lismore, Melville House sits anchored, sedate, an immovable river rock that forces life to course around it as it flows downhill.

This home wears 80 years of family history like a cosy cloak, an island in time’s storm that shelters stories of the past. Built to house Norman and Myrtle Melville in 1942, today it is home to their great-grandchild, Charles, a man who cooks a mean spinach pie.

Melville House was the original family home of my great-grandparents Norman and Myrtle Melville and their daughter Joan Cila Melville, my grandmother. My mother was born in Lismore, raised here in this house, and not long after, it became hers. In the 1980s, she transformed it into a Bed and Breakfast. I also grew up in this house, and now I’m proud to take care of it and to continue its story.  

I meet Charles when I first arrive; as if by magic, he appears, courteous, interested and interesting. He is an eloquent storyteller and deeply dedicated to this beautiful place, although he mentions the attraction of a ‘one-bedder with no maintenance issues’ more than once…

He tells me that Norman and Myrtle built Melville House for their daughter, Joan. Tragically, Joan died, leaving her daughter – Charles’ mother – to be raised by them in the house. She, in turn, raised him here.

Myrtle and her twin sister Ivy proudly overlook the front atrium, knowing, fun and welcoming. Ivy was widowed, and Norm and Myrtle invited her to live at Melville House with them, a delicious thruple. I can imagine their laughter resonating around the warm bones of the house, it’s expansive design a haven in a post-war world.

Caramel wood gleams throughout, a soft styling that draws the eye along corridors radiating from the centre. Designed with a sunroom on either side and well-kept gardens that roll towards a pool, this was a house of repose, a place that spoke of elegance and gentle wealth, of sundowners and reference books, multidisciplinary art and the smell of furniture polish and the latest recipes.

Midstream between Art Deco and mid-century, the house’s generous dimensions and etched embellishment are testament to a post-war striving for modernity and architectural experimentation. Two sunrooms! A ceramic panther!

Fat seams of glass ornamentation demand fingers follow the curves, light glinting from the arcs and bevels:

A jaunty palm lends a decadent hothouse feel:

While an Alice in Wonderland corridor leads towards the back of the house, whimsy seeping out in a throaty chuckle…

The house is framed beautifully in its environment. The rooms are ‘well-proportioned’, with natural light flooding through oiled-softened sash windows that frame the garden as if it is an artwork. In the distance, steep arcs of green streak skywards, climbing away from the house and the town below, the curve of a primordial basin catchment.

The most arresting thing about Melville House, however, is the hill on which she stands – just high enough to remain safe from the waters that flood this deep indent in the earth.

This is Lismore, and the story here has writhed so deep it is embedded as lore.

I didn’t experience the horror of the floods and the unrelenting pain they caused; I can’t write about them. I don’t know. So I shall borrow memories from those that were there.

Natalie Grono’s photo entitled ‘Peter takes a moment’ won the Nikon-Walkley Photo of the Year Award in 2022

The neo-gothic monumentalism of St Carthage’s Cathedral lessened to a stone in the river’s flow

What I do know is that this quirky, beautiful place has suffered raw pain and deep disillusionment. Ravaged streets taper out into darkness, parts removed, lights extinguished, dirt roads now muddied arteries that lead nowhere. In four and a half years, community outpouring and government inaction have stemmed, like blood coagulating into a scab.

Now, the quiet howls, a mongrel sound that shudders through bone.

Chris Gurr and his son; Elise Derwin/The Guardian

Scraps of the past are everywhere. A lonely letterbox lolls against lantana, which monsters much of the empty floodplain now that it can. A trail of Spokey-Dokes are partially submerged in sediment, their colours muted and dull; a cat curls on a front step devoid of a cosy backdrop.

Lismore is a mouth with too many missing teeth, and those that remain are braced, awaiting a renewal that has stalled.

Some residents remain, staunch in their permanence, but they live in isolation, the social fabric of community frayed and torn. Deep clefts in the hollowed-out spaces are empty sockets where houses have been dragged, removed, or demolished, scars that pattern and twist tired flesh.

No matter how prepared you think you are, it is deeply shocking to see great swathes of a proud town left to rot in the mud.

This is Widjabul Wia-bal Country, within the Bundjalung Nation, once home to the largest stand of subtropical rainforest in Australia, known as the ‘Big Scrub’, a less-than-salubrious moniker for something so… big. Although the Big Banana might also suffer this inadequacy.

‘The Big Scrub’ – Archibald James Campbell, 1900

Lismore lies nine metres above sea level on the narrow and winding North Arm of the Richmond River, at the confluence of Wilsons River and Leycester Creek. While the anglicised name comes from the Gaelic Lios Mòr, which means ‘Great Garden’, First Nations names for this region hint at its location being the junction of two creeks, a confluence, and a ‘place of big water’.

Linguistics aside, Lismore has a river history. Before colonisation, rainforest swathed 75,000 hectares of the hinterland, fed by the water systems that dominate the area. It would have been a paradise of biodiversity, one Bob Brown describes as likely to have been: “one of wild Earth’s most ancient and splendid gardens”.

The colonial economy was built on felled cedar and the river trade that carried it east, in tandem with a farming legacy that took root in fertile river flats and volcanic soil, earth so rich it thrums with a resonant heartbeat.

But this history includes generations of destructive flooding. 1954, 1974, 2017, and 2022, when water surged to 14.37 metres at the Wilsons River Rowing Club. If a tall man is 2m, this 14-metre wall of water is seven tall men high. My mind stops computing beyond three-tall-men-high…

The most recent is considered the ‘highest flood on record’; however, records only started being collated as numerical data in the mid 1800s. It’s statistically likely that giant floods have coursed through this valleyed landscape for centuries.

Once, it was customary to move to dry Country when the rains came and the waters surged.

The damage caused by mass flooding is a collective trauma for which there is little therapy. The fallout since February 2022is still palpable today, the town snagged in a net of institutionalised inertia, the haunting failure of the disaster response, and ghost streets that yawn into the never-never.

In torment, we seek stability, predictability and calm, a sense of ‘foreverness’ as unlikely as that is, an island in the raging storm. For Lismore, that can only be found 15 metres above sea level. Until the next flood…

Maybe I’ll see you at Melville House, halfway up the hill.

The Blueprint to Reducing Lismore Floods by up to Two Metres | CSIRO

Building Dams to Protect Lismore Would Cost Billions. Could Nature do it Better? | The Conversation

Lismore Unveils New Flood Pumps to Enhance City Protection and Resilience | National Emergency Management Agency

Rethinking Lismore in the New Era of Floods | The Monthly

Lismore Residents Face Cruel Buyback Rejection While Council Considers Banning New Houses | ABC

Tractor Dreaming

Posted on May 14, 2026 by Babelfishing

Standing on the banks of the Goobarragandra River, diminished by boulders the size of fire engines that have calved like icebergs from sheer cliffs, there’s an Alice-in-Wonderland vibe, a megalithic landscape appearing to wide eyes. We are hastily drawn mini stick figures, a grammatical smudge in the book of life in this big-sky big-river Country.

This prehistoric valley in the heart of the High Country is a tributary of land, water and sky, coursing from the Snowy Mountains to the Murrumbidgee and Goodradigbee River systems, and carrying the stories of centuries as rivulets of time.

Pocked by mining leases, logging scars, square-cut plantations, irrigation plants, camouflaged big-fish enthusiasts and a surprising number of cycle tourists, there is undeniable beauty in the land’s resistance to human utilisation. Like fleas on a working dog, these irritations are quickly forgotten, atomic in scale in a continental realm.

While there is a symbiosis between man and ‘the uncontained wild’, the terms are deftly defined by the land itself – the all-powerful roar of Wiradjiri Country. Pounding water sluices through, an artery of frantic flow, pulsing, reaching, an ancient rhythm that carves pathways both physical and subliminal.

There is a dizzying hierarchy of life: fish flick through the clear waters, crays snap between submerged rocks, and tiny fairy wrens swoop to drink in electric-blue flurries. High above, gan-gans, King parrots and Nigel, a solitary Yellow-Tail, are vigilant observers, bright eyes alert for movement, while at the river’s edge, swamp gums, apple box, black wattle and manna gums trail limbs in the clear water, as if caressing it.

The Short-Lived Stanton ‘Endangered Cray’ Hunt

It is mesmerising, a solace to burnt-out fight-or-flight systems in need of a cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down. Born of meltwaters, the Goobarragandra is icily fresh, but beneath the curling water-splayed light and amid rumbling stones, there is a rich sense of peace, as if the maelstrom of sound and spray cancels out the thrumming in my mind.

Etched in ancient desire lines, this valley was a meeting place (likely named for the red stone and ochre (gubarr) that paints the landscape) and a conduit to the Snowy Mountains for the Wiradjuri, Wolgalu and Ngunnawal people. People have been gathering here for thousands of years, slung in the river’s liminal net to eat, drink, hunt, live and connect with each other – and Country.

And at the heart of this river story are tasty moths…

Bogong moths (Argyrotaenia infusa) migrate up to 1,000 kilometres to the cool caves of Alpine Country each spring, where billions of them lie dormant until after summer, when it is cool enough to return. It is believed the moths can sense the Earth’s magnetic field and use it to steer their migratory flights.

What is unequivocally known by Wiradjuri, Wolgalu and Ngunnawal peoples is that the moths are delicious.

Considered an ample food source due to their large numbers and high fat content, Bogong moths can be roasted over hot ashes. Legs and wings flicked off, the bodies are munched whole or ‘mashed into moth meat cakes‘, which are said to have a nutty taste, ‘somewhere between a walnut and a pecan’.

So it makes sense that between November and February, this valley would have been as busy as Wolli Creek Woollies on Christmas Eve, a steady thrum of activity, all eyes on the prize, a highway that led to the moth pantries of the Snowy Mountains, Brindabella Ranges and Bogong Peaks.

Some oral histories describe only the men venturing higher into the mountains to hunt moths, scraping them from rock fissures in the cave walls. This ties in with local stories of how women would go some of the way before ‘camping on the birthing rock where the rivers meet’, at the confluence of the Goobarragandra and Bahloo (Moon) River. Here, they would create a birthing space, gather and prepare grasses and yams for the feast, and take part in women’s business before meeting the rest of the mob to eat and celebrate the tasty haul.

I like to think of the ladies reclining at the river, awaiting their fast-food delivery, cooling hot skin and resting swim-weary limbs on rocks still warm from the sun, as we do now…

There is powerful dreaming here, of moths and river creation stories, of Gadi, the snake spirit of Bunyip Gully, and goanna, emu and eaglehawk ancestors. Each night, beneath a phalanx of stars, my dreams course with the power of the river, journeying, reaching for more, an endless kaleidoscope of light, colour and sound. And I wake up hungry.

The Cowboy is convinced there is tractor dreaming here, too.

Specifically, a staid 50s Massey Ferguson, soon to be liberated from a long dormancy. She has no brakes, but rumbles along slowly enough that he is content to ride her like an old nag, patting her flanks affectionately each time he mounts her. And, despite it taking 47.5 hours of tense mechanical negotiation with a block hammer and two cans of Start You Bastard to get her running, the joy of tractor dreaming is a rich history that will live on through the generations, a tall tale to be shared around the fire.

In this ancient firmament between water and sky, life is slower, steadier, richer. There is a languid pace, hours loosely stretched and slack with misuse, time ticking past at a resting heart rate, a horizon that stretches to the sky, surging with space to breathe.

We eat, drink, fish, swim and repeat, lounging like freshwater seals in the cool depths, watching the clouds from beneath the surface, and letting our minds wander, beholden to the river. Always the river.

Well, all except those who have chosen Massey Ferguson as their new god.

Mother of Kelpies

Posted on August 11, 2025 by Babelfishing

Depending on where you are from, Kelpies are fiercely intelligent working dogs who live to herd stock, or mythical Gaelic river spirits that take the form of damp horses that lure the unfortunate to a watery death. Either way, they are mesmerising and programmed to lead you astray.

According to the Macquarie Dictionary: /əˈstreɪ/ (uh’stray)

adverb 1. out of the right way or away from the right; straying; wandering.

–phrase 2.  go astray,
a.  to fall into error
b.  to have a moral lapse.
c.  to be lost or mislaid

All of which are apt when you drunkenly decide it’s imperative to attend the annual Kelpie Muster, and only realise it is 12 hours and 39 minutes and 1,160.1 km from Sydney along goat tracks that meander through Victoria to the South Australia border, suspiciously close to Mt Gambier… once you hit the road.

Fortunately, I am not alone. The houndsman has deigned to ride pillion, if only to keep the hounds in line. While he is devoid of deerstalking hat, walking cane and/ or hunting livery, he is cheery, at least until I advise him of the open wastes that lie ahead.

The Australian Kelpie Muster is the highlight of Glenelg Shire’s June long weekend, drawing a circling murmuration of thousands of these beautiful creatures and their country-worn owners to Casterton, settled in 1834, but home to the Konongwootong Gundidj clan of the Gunditjmara People for thousands of years before this.

It is billed as a sun-drenched autumn festival, crowds lining the streets, bagpiped marches, RSL-led parades, and dogs everywhere you look. Except the closer we get, the more extreme the weather, an Antartic tantrum of ice-fringed squalls that rock the van and unnerve the Kelpies.

On slick roads, we eventually slide into Casterton, days after we left. Expecting fanfare and excited barking, it is silent and dark, encouraging nervous date-checking and a scramble into the only open pub to suss out the scene.

Which, unsurprisingly, is like every other remote country town pub, watchful eyes, oilskins steaming around the fire, “yeah, nah, fuck off mate!” a staccato beat when conversation starts up, and the smell of beer and chip fat.

Parked up out the back of the pub, rain sideways, and half cut, I fall asleep in a tangle of canine limbs, hoping I haven’t made a horrible mistake.

Dawn is punctuated by council carnies yelling obscenities and trailing plastic bunting, and the yipping of a thousand-plus dogs, an orchestra conducted by the musicians themselves. Outside, we have 100 new neighbours, and Kelpies more excited than a dog with two tails to meet their people…

Akubras jut at every angle atop grizzled features scored into deep contours of life lived hard and well. Small kids barrel in the direction of the fairy floss, the Carlton is tapped, and the main street is gussied up in her best frock, a hint of high vis at her extremities.

The Kelpies are abundant, every colour, coat and creed (cattle/ sheep/ chicken/ goat/ stick/ ball) prancing in front of proud owners, bowing deeply to other dogs, a prayer stance known only to them.

The parade is six-deep, to see the tribe of dogs 700 strong proudly snaking through the town, followed by old timers, stockmen, the fireys and kids from the school.

These beauties yelled out “G’day, nice pups!” as they rolled the EJ Holden passed…

And the pup on horseback squeaked as she rode by, her excitement streaked down her master’s thigh…

There’s the sprint and the high jump, the hill climb and more, a phalanx of fur four-stepping in glee, the calls of the owners a comedy soundscape of “gits” and “go Monkey go!”

It’s a showcase of talent and grit in which the Hill Climb is the pinnacle. Pups are called from the top of Blueberry Hill, which towers 50+ metres above us, slick and commanding. Shrill commands disperse into whispers by the time they reach the dogs’ ears, yet somehow they understand, climbing valiantly towards a dot on the summit…

Zoom in to see Dixie mid-way up and moving fast

The Stockman’s Challenge features sodden sheep and downcast horses, but the Kelpies are on point, eager to prove their worth.

This is a breed that can run 60 km in a day, with a hawk-like devotion to a job they find fun, sleeping inside the stone rim of the fire pit at night, to cradle the warmth. They are as happy herding a feather or leaf if no stock are available, and can find their way home when lost and alone. To the people here, the farmers and stockmen, ringers, breeders, trainers, and owners, they are our ride-or-die.

The muster is like a high-school reunion for dogs. Black and tans, blues, silvers, reds, blondes, there’s a hierarchy, a pack order, and within that, there are striations of when and how. Our urban Kelpies are free-er somehow, less expected to do anything but be with us, a novelty thanks to their colour and city road skills, less working, more w-o-r-k-i-n’…

At night, the rank and file are kennelled in the showgrounds, a snarl of outlying settlements beyond the pub. Behind a wall of mud-streaked tow rigs, hot coals smoke in homemade braziers in neat, utilitarian camps hung with collars and muttering with sound. We are welcomed in all, tails wagging in delight, bourbon shared in tin mugs, the stories of the mobs tangling in laughter lifted high in the night air.

The defining emotion at the muster is one of love, a canine-human equation that has an infinite result, loyalty and respect squared. The only fight is a fracas at the pub, speed-dealer sunnies at dusk, and an overturned table. Over ‘his missus’, apparently. The Kelpies are better behaved entirely…

Sunday breaks with a steady stream of patois statistics over the tannoy: “Dolly is from Molong, an 18-month-old uncut bitch, who leans to the left on a mob of stock, but will take direction”, I think is what he said. Not quite what I was expecting, but the Kelpies have their ears pricked, so it looks like we’re heading to the trials that are a precursor to the working-dog auction.

His call continues. a minaret to the believers, graziers lined up along the fenceline, watching, intent. One by one, the dogs are led out into the paddock to show off their skill, low to the ground, stalking, nipping, herding the stock into the corner and through the crush, their desire to work evident in each bright-eyed acknowledgement of barely uttered commands. They are judged on their intelligence, instinct, stamina and obedience – and ‘a tendency to nose-bite’.

It is tempered by the hopeful promise in mournful eyes of each dog tethered on heavy chains in the shed, awaiting their turn – or the outcome of the auctioneer’s gavel.

I would take them all home, these bright-eyed pups, but their lives are lived in service, their incredible instinct dedicating them to a role they are born to. Added to which, I am not in the bidding for prices that can exceed $45,000.

Legend has it, Warrock Homestead is the birthplace of the Kelpie, although this is heavily debated. We go, anyway, and find nothing of the bright intelligence of the dogs. Instead, a crumbling pile – on show for a price – drags threadbare memories through the mud. We are handed a scrap of paper with badly kerned words, and told the cream teas are over. The map dictates where to go to see this ‘outstanding nineteenth century Western District pastoral complex, featuring 36 hand-built Gothic and Colonial style buildings’. It is riven with sadness, and icy to the touch, ghostly shivers sneaking up your spine in every emptied room.

“Here the mistress took to a single bed until the end of her life, her unborn babe buried beneath the breezeway”

“Here, ‘the Blacks’ were made to sleep on broken slats slumped on mud floors”

“Kennelled here, the estate’s Irish wolfhounds were released regularly to hunt native dingos”

There’s a negligence here, lost care and hollowed lives. Station log books show the tight curl of disrepair, this hard land complicit in every aspect of life. Family photos are patina’d with sadness, eyes downcast, a visual memory of pain. George and Mary had one stillborn child. He took up with the maid. Mary died of heartbreak.

It is a pleasure to leave Warrock, with its dark history and claims of ‘the first Kelpie stock’. Because if you scratch the skin of this story, the truth exposes a lie. The landowner of Warrock refused to give any pups from his Scottish collie stock away, determined to keep the collie line. One was secreted out to a drover, however, and traded for a horse. The drover – Gleeson – named her Kelpie for the malignant water sprite of Celtic lore. She was mated to ‘a black prick-eared male’ named Moss in Ardlethan in NSW, and it is this litter that is believed to have forged the bloodlines of the breed, named Kelpie’s pups, or ‘Kelpies’ for short.

We take to the open roads, heading home to put the urban Kelpies into training for next year, starting with laundromats and how to use them…

They’ve got 11 hours and 48 minutes to master the skill.

Asbestos and chrome

Posted on May 17, 2023 by Babelfishing

Warilla is the houso suburb where you get more bang for your buck according to the real-estate ads, draped like itchy blankets over ‘concrete deals’ and ‘below median prices’.

This spacious family home in its peaceful and convenient location, for example, is a mere $670,000, starting price only:

That edict only applies the western edge though, where the town tapers out towards the lake. Closer to the pounding surf of the South Pacific, the prices are not as benign. With its as yet ‘unverified balcony’, the pile on Little Lake Crescent is a cool $2.45mill:

Supreme coastal glamour with a uniquely versatile floor plan, this top-drawer residence nestled directly opposite one of the South Coast’s most known beaches and footsteps to Little Lake foreshore, and waterside parklands. An exclusive statement in contemporary style, the property showcases an array of premium appointments guaranteed to amaze. Entertaining is of first-class caliber, and embraces multiple family and entertaining options including a spacious lounge and dining zone finished in neutral tones flowing to a wide balcony commanding those majestic water views.

Sic-kening content aside, the marble tone and neutral ‘fusion of luxury and lifestyle convenience’ DO look directly out at the ocean, if you squint past the dead tree and property eyesore.

Just shy of Shellharbour, and deep in the straggling suburbs of the Gong, Warilla is a curious place. The local Chinese restaurant sports a pseudo temple roofline and majestic cement arches: it is closed indefinitely, however.

Granny flats and troopies line streets prosaically named Veronica, Dave, Jason and Anne, Terry, Brian and Raymond. Joan is a personal favourite, her tin rooves and verdant edges a swan dive into yesteryear.

Across the main road, things are less quaint, Grimmet and Spofforth Streets carve deep grooves into an overactive imagination that conjures underground criminal activity and latent despair. But the blocks are as big…

A mobility scooter flies past, its transportation executive trailing ALDI bags and grim determination to make headway on the only roundabout for 10 miles. On the bumper bar, a sticker reads:

Your political correctness offends me

Which is apt. I suspect the Tin Lid and I might be highly offensive to some, lefties on the loose on an Easter weekend devoid of eggs, carrots or commitment.

This place is liminal, caught between cause and effect. Flagrant ad copy spruiks a realm far removed from the asbestos bungalows and tank traps, from clutches of boardriders blowing horns into the wind, and pokies at the pub, their meaty clatter heard streets away.

Its raw edges are powerfully beautiful – a sand-blasted fringe that stretches to an ocean horizon, and a salted lake that cradles this spit of land in its embrace, full of story and lore – but at its heart, Warilla is pockmarked and sore, unable to reason with a future unchosen by its residents.

At Windang, sentinel structures dominate the horizon, placed with intent to mark a shared place, a dog beach where canine and human partner in their shared distaste for rangers and leashed areas, the air bristling with barking joy and the spray of sand, a tribe at play.

But it falls heavily into the one-careful-owner trope. This pristine Country is what attracts the development that circles – like a dingo on its prey – ready to capitalise on the ‘untouched potential’ it offers.

The traditional custodians of the land surrounding what is now known as Lake Illawarra are the Wadi Wadi people, part of the Dharawal Nation. Jubborsay, as it is known, is a place of spirits, a place to meet, eat, birth and die, burial sites and middens flanking the water’s edge.

The name Illawarra is derived from various adaptions of eloura, or allowrie; illa, wurra, or warra: all refer to ‘a generally pleasant place near the sea’, which seems like a singularly white reinterpretation. It is ‘generally pleasant’, but this belies the powerful undertones that curl around you like tendrils of hair on a blowy day, tickling your subconscious, demanding it takes notice.

It won’t be long before the tatty authenticity of this forgotten community, with its rich Dreaming and proud history, is replaced with an expensive veneer, one that ousts anyone who can’t afford it.

Generational homes on wide blocks will disappear, tended greenery will be forfeited, and the light will change as it is swallowed by buildings that reach for the sky.

And these childhood blocks, with their triangle rooves and strip of green by the gutter, will go.

The writing is on the wall just a few kays up the road. Frasers Property at Shell Cove is developing The Waterfront, and asking us to ‘set a course for luxury living’.

Like a clipper wallowing in dead water, the metaphor is insistent, nautical themes bedecking timber stanchions, caramel-and-sea-salt gelato flogged to the highest bidder.

The litany of advertorial is loud:

Here you can enjoy a harbourside lifestyle in a stunning natural environment with an array of amenity on your doorstep. The world-class Shellharbour Marina, The Waterfront Dining Precinct and The Waterfront Tavern are all open. Imagine strolling along boardwalks surrounding the marina to shops, playgrounds and in 2025 a state-of-the-art community centre, library, visitors information centre. In 2025 there will be a stunning new Crowne Plaza hotel at The Waterfront. This is the opportunity to live metres away from unrivalled amenity not found anywhere else on the NSW South Coast.

Imagine the unrivaled amenity, she mutters with a hint of Kerrigan-esque irony. Imagine a state-of-the-art community centre…

Amid spanking new builds and sharply demarked 50-zones, life here is sanitised and a world away from Warilla and her renegade residents. The kid and I came here for seals (alleged to flump their salty weight on slick pontoons and bark menacingly at timid landlubbers), but we are met with linen smocks and squealing children on motorised toys, fluffy lap dogs and maniacal seagulls. At least there is one constant.

The digital download is less prosaic: masterplans, aerial construction updates, property guides and mortgage calculators paper the air, chasing buy-now die-later rhetoric full of ‘lifestyle opportunities’ and ‘last-ever lots’.

It leads me to question how this ‘unbeatable lifestyle’ is better than what Wal from Lake Entrance Road – to the west of Shellharbour Road, the ‘bad bit’ – has.

Wal’s coastal dream has been his reality for over 30 years. His hard-earned, deeply loved fibro is an asbestos castle. Just a few hundred metres from the sea and cradled in the swell of community, it’s a crucible for his family’s memories, steeped in a wealth far richer than a Warrigal new build, shiny with chrome and vanilla scented.

Frankly, Wal says he just can’t understand the fuss…

No Country for old gods

Posted on March 22, 2023 by Babelfishing

The Librarian has a gentle disposition and an exquisite mind, questioning, answering, considering and sharing the stories that depict our world. It’s her idea to escape the molten confines of the inner city and leave the mirage-like heat behind for a few hours. Good for the soul, she said, packing a cooked chook and salad, a peace offering for the lizards.

Unconvinced anywhere west of New Zealand would be cooler than the city, the Tin Lid and I are swayed by mobile air-con, something we have never known and, it turns out, quite like.

But The Librarian, in her wisdom, is correct. When we emerge from the van with low-grade frostbite, the pathway that leads into the bush behind Heathcote train station is shaded and inviting, a siren in sparkles belting out a show tune.

An ancient track that leads deep into Dharawal Country, our feet carry us into the dappled cool of a eucalypt forest littered with cabbage tree palms and fronded ferns, breath easier in our lungs, solace found in the earthy peace that settles on tight shoulders and calms rabid thoughts.

The Tin Lid leads, The Librarian follows and I keep getting distracted by the light. It is mesmerising, guttering softly through the leaves as if caught on a breeze. The pathway is striped in shade, delicate geometries of shape that coalesce and disperse around us, and although the sun beats down on a 36º-day, it is cool and dank and shrouded.

Damp footprints suggest the track runs along an ephemeral creek line, recent rains drafting the water table close. It is welcome respite from the heat-fractured pavements of the city, where even weeds wilt beneath the fierce solar glare.

Lured in by the promise of deeper water at Karloo Pool a few kays in, we pick up the pace, skittering over wet rocks and boggy puddles, mud at our heels. The sound of trickling water in Kangaroo Creek, which feeds into the pool, brings on raw excitement and the Tin Lid is out of the blocks, honed in on the emerald waters of this 30-metre long sandstone waterhole. He’s submerged before The Librarian can get a cultured word in, an almighty splash soaking her story.

An amphitheatre of natural architecture, the pool appears carved from the rock in a natural scoop, buttery edges stepping into the cool depths of a running creek. There are bodies slick with water in every direction, paddling, floating, duck diving and holler-jumping, each as carefree as the next, old, young, sleek, rumpled. From hiking-booted Christians to eshay’s in full sleeve tatts and tiny tots clad in pink inflatables shrieking in delight – it’s a diverse mob.

Word is, this pristine and achingly beautiful place is home to a grandfather yabby, some 40cm in length. The Tin Lid recoils slightly at the thought, having come off worse with a particularly nippy crayfish named Miss Maude some years ago. There are eels and water dragons, ballsy cockatoos laughing derisively, and sparrows that flit around your heels.

But the star of the show is the light, glinting on the silken sheen of water as it ripples through the pool, piercing the surface and refracting below so that as you swim back up, you are bathed in golden rays.

There is the sense of a cult movie at play, sun-kissed limbs snaking beneath the surface of the water, tinted with tannin and indolence, a suspension of expected norms, adolescence played out through every generation. It is indulgent, luscious even; its fluidity a respite from the ties that bind.

And the Tin Lid is embracing every part of it:

This is Dharawal Country, rich in story and lore, ochre handprints, shell middens, rock shelters, stone engravings and grinding grooves, stretching south of Botany Bay and the Georges River, west to Appin, and down to Wreck Bay near Nowra. The Dharawal Welcome to Country causes raw emotion to bubble up from the depths:

Bereewagal, naa niya. Yura ngura dyi ngurang gurugal.

People who come from afar, I see all of you. Aboriginal people camped here, at this place, long ago.

Ngoon dyalgala niya, ngoon bamaraadbanga ni.

We embrace all of you; we open the door to all of you.

Ngoon – mari ngurang – niya mudang yura ngurra.

We lend this place to all of you to live while we sleep.

Dyi nga ni nura.

Here I see my country.

Dharawal welcome to country: The story of the Dharawal speaking people of Southern Sydney

The Dharawal People ‘lend this place’ to us. Think about that. As part of the oldest living civilisation on earth, and proud survivors of colonial genocide, there is such poignancy and pride in this powerful acceptance of shared space despite a past littered with pain, marginalisation and dispossession.

It is truly humbling.

Dharawal is said to mean ‘cabbage tree palm’, which is fitting in this canopied world. It is believed that Dharawal women were some of the first to fish with hand lines, too, weaving taut strings from plaited hair or twine from the palms.

The ‘guru’ – deep water – here is a great source of food: frogs, yabbies, tortoises and eels (‘burra’), which the men would catch by placing hollow logs into the water and then pulling out the log once the eel had hidden inside. To keep the little ones safe, they were told the story of the bunyip that haunted waterholes to capture children and stash them in an underground lair… an effective deterrent by any measure, though not for the Tin Lid, who has now considering a swan dive.

As we eat Famous Five food (hard boiled eggs, salad, ginger beer) on warm rocks, our toes in the water (a curious lizard picking up crumbs of yolk while steadfastly refusing the lettuce) it is easy to understand what this place gives back. There is a serene calm that comes with being cradled by the natural world, and the memories of mobs of people fishing, swimming, living and loving are etched on the air, an invisible tattoo of the past.

A quick round of Pooh Sticks, adapted today into a gum leaf race, and we head back to the track, the long scramble uphill bearable with the scent of cool water still on our skin.

While the shadows are longer, shaded tree boughs still have gilded crowns, and the expanse of the Royal National Park is awing. How many other sacred waterholes exist in this leafy nirvana? How many eons of time have passed unperturbed by modern life save from whooping joy and the flash of a neon floaty?

Some say The Shire is ‘God’s own country’, but there is no ‘god’ here. There is reverence and respect, and a deep sense of place that fosters an ancient worship, the recognition of Country, of spirits, the earth, the water, the sky. But no god.

And that is exactly how it should be.

My thanks to Les Bursill, Mary Jacobs, artist Deborah Lennis, Dharawal Elder Aunty Beryl Timbery-Beller and Dharawal spokesperson Merv Ryan and their insight in DHARAWAL The story of the Dharawal speaking people of Southern Sydney.

In the time of picnics

Posted on November 15, 2021 by Babelfishing

According to the NSW Government, on secondment from governing and moonlighting as health professionals, September 2021 is picnic time:

Households with all adults vaccinated will be able to gather outdoors for recreation (including picnics) within the existing rules (for one hour only, outside curfew hours and within 5km of home). This is in addition to the one hour allowed for exercise.
https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/

Parks throughout the Greater Sydney Basin are brimming with socially distanced crowds, interspersed with authority figures to verify vaccination certificates. And while there is a palpable sense of relief at this easing of restriction, there is a Pythonesque element to this decree. Picnic hopping is now a thing, along with exquisitely delineated schedules that incorporate five, six, seven events adjacent in the park, and an overindulgence in cheese.

Never ones to break the rules, we too decided on a picnic in a park, albeit a national park, at a table scored by eons of time and beer-bottle tops, far from civilisation and with not a soul in sight.

Deep in the Wollemi, beyond the fringes of remote, along washed-out fire tracks and dirt-choked run-offs, this is 4WD country, the smell of diesel and hot brakes a sticky perfume that garlands the blue haunches of Mount Yengo and Pon Pon as the the convoy jolts deeper into the interior.

Captive of Pierce’s Putty Valley Tours – track-felled trees our speciality! – all we know is we’re heading west, along spine-like tracks said to follow songlines. This is Darkinjung Country in the shadow of Mount Yengo, where the dreaming speaks of silver-lipped gums, dappled light falling on gullies of unexpected flowers, and soaring grass trees. impervious to anything but a proud primordial form.

The peak of a dormant volcano, traditionally used for learning and ceremony for tens of thousands of years, Mount Yengo is rich with cultural significance. It is to the clans of this area as Uluru is to Central Desert communities, a sacred space that thrums with a pulse as old and deep as time itself. With a plateau’d top, the ancestral story of Mount Yengo depicts Baiame, a creational figure, jumping back up to the spirit world after he created the mountains, lakes, rivers and caves in the area. When he sprung skyward, Baiame flattened the top of the mountain. A landmark visible from every direction, Yengo is our guide as we venture further in, its stories cloaking us.

Pierce’s Putty Valley Tours come replete with stories, too. Theirs are lives lived in the very heart of this place, from grandfathers who built slab huts by hand to fathers who cut in the tracks with dozers and heavy plant equipment, through a landscape wild and untamed, ceding just metres a day. Each generation protects it, too, their stories secrets shared with only a few, or at least never pinpointed on a map.

And while the Sheepskin Hut is marked as a campground on the National Parks website, littered in 4WD conversations and the pinnacle of trailbikers’ torrid retellings, it is a lonely place rarely visited, a step beyond hillbilly haunts that spew woodsmoke and juice from the still.

When the hordes who’ve escaped the confinement of the truck quieten, it is still, listless; engines tick as they cool, a whip bird calls out caution. It is as if time forgot.

From beyond Kindarun Mountain, Wollemi and into Wiradjuri Country in the interior, this was a staging post on the stock route east. Drovers would graze their mobs here before the final run to the coastal markets. It is a lonely reprieve, but its functionality – built by men on horseback, carrying tin, carving stone and timber from the landscape – would have softened tired eyes and sore bodies.

One side of the hut is for animals, a tin umbrella on poles to shelter their ears, The other is a raw-hewn structure that is stained with stories and thick with ghosts.

Inside, the tin is singed, mottled with use, a cow cocky’s musings cast in leaded scrawl. The floor, compacted dirt and beer-bottle tops, is hard and cold but flattened for a swag. A broad-hipped fireplace holds a memory of raging heat, a lagerphone slouched against it happily worn.

The stink of old dung and smoke still lingers, and the ghosts are quick to let us know they are here; tin cups and horses’ bridles clink and jostle, moonshine slops in a barking laugh, an animal snorts in the dark. Tall tales swirl in the smoke, the weather catches in a rattle on the roof, and a rustle of wildlife in the thick undergrowth causes the dogs to snarl.

I can imagine the Sheepskin Hut, respite to a mob of travelling souls on the long journey east. We scoff damper and hard-boiled eggs, cured meat, beer and a billy of tea in salute to the old timers, aware that our only stock concerns involve running out of diesel.

The locals say there are rock petroglyphs in the area that feature sheep, drawn by the Darkinjung people, as this is their Country. I like to wonder at their wonder upon first meeting a sheep… let alone a mob of them driven by hatted men on horseback, the scent of sweat and durries ripe on the breeze.

The tall trees above us are part of a thick eucalypt forest of mountain blue gum and rough barked apple that slopes towards Doyle’s Creek, home to raucous gang-gangs that drop seeds and attitude from up high. We investigate the creek, marvel at the enormity of the canopy, and shiver a little, ghosts and the weather wrapping themselves around us.

We don’t stay long at the Sheepskin Hut. It entreats you to build a fire, settle the stock and bed down for the night, and though there is no doubt it can fit us all, its bare bones are cold to the touch.

Nature has the last laugh though, as is so often the way. It takes three hours to weave our way out, a ribald game of fill your boots with sawdust in play. Strong winds that rocked the Hunter two days earlier have littered the tracks with downed trees, giant obstacles that prevent escape.

Fortunately Pierce’s Putty Valley Tours – track-felled trees our speciality! – come prepared, a barrage of chainsaws revved and ready.

After 13 impromptu stops, chains loosed, diffs locked, coated in mud, we emerge from now darkening valleys. As our noise dissipates, the silence falls again on a world that seems intent on keeping the picnickers at bay.

I can understand why.

Along the Nine Mile

Posted on February 3, 2021 by Babelfishing

Wild beaches churn and boil with a savage beauty, and Nine Mile is no exception with its storm-crushed surf laying waste to to a coastline that cannot escape, the roar of fury held hostage in white-capped waves, and the howl of unforgiving offshore winds that sift sand through their teeth.

They are untamed places that force us to forgo comfortable ideals of control and mastery over the natural world, substituting vicious surges of adrenalin in their place. Fight or flight coursing through the blood, ancient instincts override the system and rank survival kicks in.

Where the earth’s contours are rewritten into endless spools and mirage horizons contort basic assumptions, humanity seems fragile, the likely victim in a power play with nature, its visceral force a stinging rebuke.

The CB crackles with static, voices muffled by the elements. The truck slews through thick drifts of knee-deep sand, the block bellowing, low-range torque clawing its way across the terrain, crab like. The Cowboy is in OK-Corral heaven, aviators glinting at each new obstacle, yee-hah-ing as we get air. The Kelpie has her front paws on the dashboard, her nirvana nearby; and I cling on for dear life, muttering disjointedly about tyre pressure, the lick of high tide and tank traps.

Nine Mile Beach is not. It is actually seven miles and riven with whorls of soupy shifting sand. The vollies at the bucktoothed entrance – all potholes and exploded rusted steel – are quick to remind everyone that the beach is abnormally soft, and known to eat SUVs for breakfast. The Cowboy is calm: Private Camel, he reassures me, can handle anything.

An ex-mining water-drafting truck, the Camel is a rarified beast, which is readily apparent in this showcase of 4WD utes, bristling with roof tents and B+S ball stickers. A dual cab Mitsubishi Canter with Super Singles, a truck-bed gate cage under canvas and a race-track’s worth of diesel grunt, it is a show pony… well, a Clydesdale perhaps, dutifully dragging its dray.

Sticking out like tits on a bull, we rumble through the grainy scrub of wetlands at Belmont, and down to dip tyres in the raging drink at the edge of the beach.

The Wetlands State Park that fringes the beach is 549 hectares of crown land, dunes, bush, and brackish wetlands acquired by the State Government in 2002 from BHP. It has a rich history of degradation: Redhead Coal Mining Company mined the land in the late 1880s; during the Second World War, Blackshmiths Beach was considered a potential invasion point, and defence strategies to protect Newcastle were shipped in – Cold Tea Lake was excavated as an anti-tank ditch with twin rows of large tetrahedral concrete tank traps linked with interlocking cabling studding the southern bank, like inedible cake decorations that shatter teeth.

In the 50s, silica dredging was the degradation of choice, followed by sand mining in the 70s and general abandonment until 2002. Scabbed and damaged, this unloved dog doesn’t offer up much when you first meet it, with its straggly undergrowth scarred with rusted wrecks and muddied hollows. But it is loved, by many, from hoons and horseriders to twitchers and tent-dwellers.

The wetlands are the traditional lands of the Awabakal People, bounded to the north-west by the Wonnarua, the Worimi to the north-east, and the Darkinjung peoples to the west and south. Middens, artefact scatters and campsites dot the margins, while it is believed that undiscovered burial sites edge Belmont Lagoon, a dreaming site formed when the Moon wept out of loneliness. The Awabakal were determined defenders of their land, too, repelling incursions by neighbouring clans for thousands of years.

People are still fighting over this culturally contested land, with environmentalists agitated by the off-roaders, fisherman at odds with swimmers, and the BWSP Board of Directors recently disbanded due to a bitter power struggle between members. But beneath skies so sharp they could shatter and icy ocean spray, we find a like-minded tribe parked up in the hind dunes.

The Camel ticks softly in the fading light, cooling. Driftwood fires emerge along the sand, tinnies clink, and the raggedy tribe of mutts that Belmont welcomes holler and yip at the water’s edge. The Kelpie is above such things as she has her own camp chair and a stash of sticks all of her own. Later, though, she spends hours dancing at the surf’s edge, ears, tail and tongue cartoon-like in bouncy joy.

The Cowboy goes into mountain-man mode for a while, hauling out the unfortunate from vehicles bogged to their bellies and cutting wood for the fire, while I emu pick along the churned tracks searching for shells.

The power in this unbound land catches you unaware. The space, with its 360º rake and skin-scouring love climbs inside you, stilling the human while enticing a primitive other. Fire, shelter, pounding water and the sense of smallness that we rarely experience in this conditioned world – these are the things that echo here… that and the meaty roar of V8s sideways in the sand.

We remain alert, though, watching, waiting, heartbeats a skip faster than before, salt-tight skin tingling in anticipation of the next assault of hormone laced primitive fear. We fail, repeatedly, to keep the sinuous, mutable force of nature at bay. Paint is scoured from the Camel’s flanks, there are fat welts in her tyres and corrosion eats at her underbelly, while the Cowboy and I look like Cactus Beach locals, wire-like hair slicing pink skin, eyes scrinched shut against the elements. The Kelpie, alone, resists. Perhaps it is her lack of the deep, primal and internalised Man vs Nature conflict humans must bear. That and the sticks.

War of the roses

Posted on August 5, 2020 by Babelfishing

She’s brave, The Russian. Opted for a road trip with the Tin Lid and me willingly, which was fortunate as I was relying on her vehicle, and, as it turns out, she makes a mean pot of earl grey as dawn lights the scritchy underside of acrylic hotel blankets.

It wasn’t cheap, this patronage. It came with a gutteral accent and the Killing Eve soundtrack on repeat, interspersed with Dasha impersonations. But who doesn’t need a Russian in their lives? [Note: The Russian is actually Welsh but is deliciously dramatic, and frankly, the comedy circuit might be missing its star turn. Ed.]

The road in said trip was a glorious respite from the city’s confines, studded with roadkill, low-slung sky stories, the endless hum of tyres on tar and the slake of cold beer at each day’s end. And in the slight of a winter sun, Silver City glinted promisingly from 1000 kays out, red dirt thick-coating the footwells from just past Nyngan.

This is desert country, thick with deliverance and dirt. It creeps into everything, from folds of skin to attitudes, a crunchy layer of separation. Ian Parkes wrote of the outback landscape seizing you, but this wild sparsity does more than that. It hijacks you, twirls you into another reality like a renegade tango lead, foot-stomping you that way then this while holding you in a firm embrace. And when it has had its fun, it delivers you, wide-eyed and stinking into the arms of a new understanding, of spangled night skies and rusted treasure, endless hours, dirt on the breeze and the tick tick of life baking and cooling in an endless cycle far greater than humanity.

This is Wiljakali country. With a history spanning up to 45,000 years, the Wiljakali have strong ties to the Barkindji people of the Darling River and Menindee Lakes, travelling ancient routes captured in song to regularly visit each other. The Wiljakali are joint managers of Mutawintji National Park, the first national park to be returned to its traditional owners in NSW, and the Wiljakali Aboriginal Corporation routinely negotiates mining deals, and Native Title Land Claims in this region. Theirs is a story as ancient as time.

At the end of a day that stretched from a dust-strewn dawn into a miraged surrealism featuring emus, Broken Hill is a welcome sight, despite her hill no longer being broken, or even a hill. A faded showgirl with fake foliage dangling around deafened ears, a slash of greasepaint sliding south onto chipped dentures, she is resolutely attractive in the soft late-arvo sunlight.

Billed as an oasis in the desert, this dusty queen is a sanctuary from the storm and a town with a past. Gridded streets with gritty names, legal year-round Two Up games and a pub swarming with the ghosts of drag queens departed, her history reverberates with hard-bitten words like workers’ solidarity, blacklegs, unionism, radicalism, ‘viragos with tar pots’ and lead poisoning.

Known as the Silver City, hers is a story that glitters but at its heart is a darkness that spools out like blackened thread. From the dank bowels of a mined earth to sequin-sprayed glory and back to the inevitable inequality that striates so many outback towns, Broken Hill has a two-faced tale.

A jagged scar in the Barrier Ranges, the town is eponymously named. Eagle-eyed boundary rider Charles Rasp discovered silver ore in a topographical wound, and the rest is history. The original miners of the Hill, the Syndicate of Seven, went on to build their operations into some the world’s largest mining companies, including BHP Billiton (formerly Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited), Rio Tinto and Pasminco.

“The miners dug silver from the barren land in scorching summer heat or numbing winter cold, living in tents and rudimentary shacks, their families regularly threatened with typhoid.”

What is left of the Line of Lode ore body that dissects the town is an all-surveying silver skimp dump that slithers and creaks with mercurial intensity. It’s the most obvious place to gain some perspective over this settlement of multiple personalities.

Ruined mine works squat amid the blackened spoil, their memory a mournful echo of the men whose spirits haunt this bleak place, yet the contemporary rusted metal memorial that crests this rubble is fitting. With wind howling through jagged steel and a wrought sky churning above it is the antithesis to the tomb beneath in which men tumbled to their deaths like dominos.

Rock falls, “suffocation in slime”, septicaemia, crushing, shaft fall, electrocution, explosion, air blast, toxic fumes, “no details” – the toll is heavy, 800 lives and counting, captured and mourned with flags and roses.

The conditions, dire at best, deadly in the main, fomented into some of the bitterest industrial disputes Australia has ever seen, and Broken Hill became known for its political radicalism. Violent clashes in 1892, 1909 and 1919 led to the formation of the Barrier Industrial Council in 1923, a block of 18 trade unions designed to protect the lives of workers and their families.

“Mass picketing [was] reinforced by the militancy of women armed with axe and broom handles, and who led foray after foray against blacklegs and shift bosses with vigorous violence, to keep the scabs out.”
Red Flag

Red Cross women march on Argent street Broken Hill.(Supplied- Albert Kersten Mining And Minerals Museum, Broken Hill)

Supplied by Albert Kersten Mining And Minerals Museum, Broken Hill

This militancy, factionalism and “commie” behaviour led to the introduction of the eight-hour day, the 35-hour week and penalty rates. It was driven in part by a storm of rebel women: they led marches on horseback, gathered in their masses, openly insulted police officers and established their own hospitals, and theirs was the guiding hand in the incredible social activism that is the bedrock of this remote outpost.

It is still a worker’s world in the Hill, where unionism, efficacy and fairness are measured with pride, and schooners sunk with the privilege gained from a hard-won day. The Social Democratic Club in Argent Street, the Working Men’s Club, Trades Hall on Sulphide Street with its iron mansard roof and stained-glass roses, the Cameron Pipe Band Hall, Barrier Industrial Unions Brass Band, and the Workies Club – these are the stalwarts of this fight, a fight that is adorned with roses. Why scented florals? Perhaps they relate to Polish immigrant Rose Schneiderman’s rallying cry for women in 1911, at New York’s Metropolitan Opera house, when she said, “The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too”.

At the heart of this story is The Palace Hotel on Argent Street. The spectres that flit around the bar carry the scent of roses, along with a greasy boiled-mince hue. It’s hardly surprising: they’ve been here a while – miners, wanderers, unionists and temperance ministers, grey nomads travelling no further and disaffected drag queens that flounce around their forever home. Rumours swirl that ladders sunk deep in the mines led to trapdoors in the basement of the hotel, though even The Russian is unwilling to verify such haunted curios.

The Tin Lid wastes no time making himself at home. With its curious mix of mid-century vinyl and shearling carpet, hand-painted walls and pebbledash bathroom splashbacks, The Palace invites you to step back in time. For The Russian, the ghosts inspire her to linger on the stairs and have a chat. The Tin Lid is taken by the shadows of the balcony lacework, and the echoes of Shining-esque corridors that unspool into the nothing…

Sticky with neglect, dust piled in sorrowful corners, she groans in pain when you step on her aching joints and sighs at night as she creaks into rest. Threadbare halls offer little comfort in the sprint to the shared baths, the pipes clank and boil menacingly and handpainted wallpaper is both a scintillating talking point for a young mind and a job of such magnitude in today’s must-have-now immediacy it is humbling.

Built as a coffee palace in 1889 by the Temperance Movement to abide by their vision of “a place for fine dining and coffee”, The Palace was set apart from the melee of less salubrious drinking establishments in the Hill for 1000 long days. But by 1892, this course was deemed singularly unprofitable, and the old girl embarked on the six-o’clock swill with gusto, a tradition that has extended to an ‘any-hour-it’s-open swill’ ever since, complete with crinoline curtains and flammable bedspreads:

The Russian dragged us here, muttering Slavic potato curses beneath her breath. A muralist of repute, she had heard about the walls of The Palace, which are garlanded with paintings that steal both your eye and your curiosity. One-time owner Mario Celotto began the tradition, and then called for artists to match his ceiling rendition of Boticelli’s Venus.

Indigenous artist Gordon Wayne accepted the challenge and, so impressed was Mario with his talent, Gordon was commissioned to paint almost all the hotel’s blank walls with Renaissance-inspired landscapes, each with water coursing through it, to reinforce the hotel’s credibility as ‘an oasis in the outback’.

They are beautiful and impressive, albeit with a curious bent – a face contorted, a hand splayed, an exoticism rarely seen in these parts, caught in the delicate blossom of a wattle or the knowing eyes of a mermaid…

Shirl from the bar knows about exotic though. Coiled into the very fabric of the place is a flamboyance and a ribald blue-ness that is coyly demanding, equal parts sexual liberation and tack-o-rama. The enduring legacy of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, much of which was filmed at The Palace in 1994 and which continues to act as the frilliest drawcard in town, has entrusted itself to the stories here.

The Priscilla Suite on the first floor, where the characters frocked up for the night, is planted firmly behind a waterfall. It is also resolutely shuttered to those of us in the cheap seats, but The Russian has contacts and the slyest of deals rewards us with a glimpse within… and one fewer Cuban cigars.

Never one to let an opportunity get away from her, Broken Hill clutched Priscilla to her well-padded breast and spawned the now annual Broken Heel Festival, which features wall-to-floor divas and spangled sass in homage to Mitzi Del Bra, Bernadette Bassenger, Felicia Jollygoodfellow, Bob and Shirl from the bar, who is a local.

Fortunately, she is yet to embrace the potential commodification of Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel Wake in Fright, and the 1971 movie that followed, which may be the most disturbed story of its era. Set in a remote outback mining town, many believe Bundanyabba is a thinly disguised portrait of Broken Hill. The Australian Gothic undertones that lace this depiction paint a tale so bleak as to be terrorising, yet many also believe it is far from fictional.

The Silver City has a tarnished glint, a patina that sheds like sloughed skin. The many personalities of Willyama, as this land was once known, are gendered, sexualised, politicised and commercialised, rolling in on each wave of ‘change’, and often at odds with each other.

The Russian notes, wryly, that this is a story indistinguishable from countless other outback towns, and she is right, as ever. But this old dame, with her monogrammed pub carpets and etched glass, row upon row of workers cottages lined up like teeth, ornate gates and filigree lacework – the corsets of age – all set against the backdrop of an ever-extended horizon across red dirt and big skies… in her truest form she regal, the stories of time etched deep in wrinkled skin.

She has outlived her names and altered her course, changed her perspective and flipped her audience. She is a shapeshifter, transitioning from one reality to another, while keeping the ghosts close to her breast.

Willyama. You are Wiljakali country, always will be. But you are also a queen in drag, your many faces the entertainment for a crowd that bays for more: the outback rogue, the wealthy widow, the mining magnate, the sequined showgirl and the back-up dancer in someone else’s film.

They all wear roses.

On a side note, The Russian says you owe her money.

Time after time

Posted on May 20, 2020 by Babelfishing

With the neo-liberalist free-market world order staggering, sickened to its marrow by COVID-19, and the masses learning about a brave new world of social distance, reduced exposure and enforced quarantine, something has shifted – as a continent shifts on its tectonic plate, or a pole shifts on its axis.

As 2020 is forced to reconsider precisely what it was that it did so wrong, it becomes apparent that isolation is calming the heady frenetic rush of yesterday, the paranoid rapidity of “what will tomorrow hold?”. A double-shot flat white “on the double” can still be procured (at home), but its viscous virility is increasingly being sidelined for a nice cup of loose-leaf Assam.

It’s as if mankind has gulped an anxious breath, afraid to exhale. And in this temperance of time, a steadying calm prevails.

We are ruled by a harshly benevolent mistress. Flanked and flattered by her sisters, Prescience and Hindsight, Time is regal in her demeanour, overseeing her domain with an imperial haughtiness born of knowing her time and place… every moment of the day.

Hers is a role wrapped in the ermine of control and domination, her work a feature of every countenance of life. Ritual, story, evolution; birth, death and the afterlife – all are corraled by time, the metronomic heartbeat of humanity.

Equal parts “I must do this NOW!” and, “You should take a little time out for yourself…” almost everything we experience in life is cloistered in time. We are governed by the seasons, the tides and patterns of light. Our pulse is timed, our breathing measured, our toes are counted and ageing is incessant.

Few can exist beyond the boundaries she sets and those that do are deep within their own worlds – bare skin on a remote beach, brewing feni in the dim light of seclusion; locked up tight in a no-longer-working mind, time lost in a mental fog that grows ever thicker. Even then the staccato tap of frustration or a constant hum of fear is a giveaway that our bodies forever hold their own beat.

For the rest of us, tick tock…

“How long will it take?”

“What time is dinner?”

“Are we there yet?”

Imagine the hallowed halls of London’s Kings Cross, Changi Airport or the steps of Sydney’s Town Hall without the parameters of time. Could they exist? Would those worlds of connection, of movement and momentum not fragment into untethered ethereal chasms of space without the steady pulse of uniformity and understanding?

Even if mankind, the empath of constructed time, was removed, would nature not still pulse ever onwards, its sequence true, each Fibonacci ratio further evidence of its innate temporal power?

And yet… time is slowing, stuttering and faltering.

Isolated, emptied of obligation and set free from a rabid schedule, I’ve watched veggies grow and nature rot in an elegance of unchartered time; I’ve watched the sun swell, splinter, contract and give birth to the moon, and I’ve witnessed a child learn to absorb beauty through his mind.

I’ve seen bones contort and rust flake, shadows skitter and clouds bleed…

And I am in thrall to the way light plays as if humoured, flitting and twirling through the sky like a child with a balloon…

My appreciation sharpens to an acute awareness of the delicate beauty of the world’s hesitancy and unease. It is timid, delicate and curious, a lesser-known prize sidelined by the more obvious.

Form, alignment, anticipation, repose – all take on a deeper calibration. Bodies swell with age and impending definition, canine minds romp through deep dreams, and alliances strengthen, a shared experience unlikely to be repeated.

We coil into a new pattern of life, once steeped in response rather than reaction, a new understanding of small things that get lost in the big picture. And honestly? I love it.
I breathe differently. I sleep longer and deeper, cushioned in velvety darkness, the bleed of city lights muted, traffic stalled.

But I know that the longer you hold your breath the louder the hammering in your chest becomes, a swelling crescendo of a beat that howls for attention. I am loath to kowtow to this bullying tone, but I am increasingly aware that the time is coming…

Perhaps, with Prescience missing in action, Hindsight will be a guiding light in how to re-engage with a world once more constricted and strangled by Time.

Under a blood-red sky

Posted on January 8, 2020 by Babelfishing

The Scooby-Doo house has history, like mangy dogs have form. An indent in the coils of the Putty Road, it is a mongrel place that wears its non-conformity with snarling pride, its stories cyphers steeped in allegation and denial.

Or it was until it burned alive.

I used to use that phone, hyped up on bush-doof anticipation and cheap goon. Scissoring through endless tracts of land along a cursive white line, we’d slew to a halt, the trusty Falcon ticking and hissing, to use the phone. In those days, long before mobiles, it was the only way to find out where the doof was, although more often than not, by this point you could already hear the primordial heartbeat.

Seems funny to think that all those years tinged with sparkles and abandon were coordinated from a place of such repute.

This repute? It is a sub-rosa subset of anecdotal awe, tall tales, quick digs, fading memories and truckers lore. The old Fleet Wing servo, called out over the airwaves on long nights hauling; a deal gone bad, bloodied hands and a woman on the run – by the time the missing person’s report had been lodged, the body was gone; pig dogs let loose in the scrub, hounds of fury that roam far…

To us it was the Scooby-Doo house, a tatty scrabble of tin sheds and lean-tos green with age and rot, windows darkened with sacks; shrouded in the landscape, deep in thought, it had an air of malevolence that conjured Scoobs worst jitters. It was creepy as hell, hence the lack of photos.

Now it is a still, smouldering pile of ash. Twisted iron climbs from the wreckage, molten metal cooled into pools from the hubs of a hundred old trucks, and an endless ache of space where once the bush was impenetrable. The eyes that used to glare at us unseen are now gauged out, sockets rasped dry.

The gate flaps forlornly, something ticks nearby, and blackened crumpled cans are the last vestiges of lives lived unknown. It is said there was a mob of people here, a rabble of family. We never saw them, although I am certain they saw us. In despair, they are no less unveiled, the mystery of them and the stories they have inspired stealing away, disintegrating on the air.

I heard the firies had to pull the old fella out of his bed so determined was he to remain. I wonder what he will do, his everything obliterated, scorched into the bowels of an angry earth.

It is incomprehensible. But everything is incomprehensible at the moment as fires rage through the land, soot falls from the sky and the bush echoes with the screams of burning animals.