Santa’s COMING for us!… Jazzed up number like stumbling over a cliff when you weren’t watching your step, first morning of the return. The shopping district in Melbourne top of Bourke Street was still lagging behind the best part of a month out…Was it only, Santa’s on his way? No, indeed. COMING. Watch out for your neck if the deer by the bend on the river catch you out! Thus far there were only hung boxed installations holding doves, one that had emerged from its cage swinging more freely than the confined. Otherwise discs in three or four colours & plastic vine. The white elongated cages had adopted the popular local form, all properly secured hopefully, unlike the wall that had collapsed on the young Bangla worker out at the site by the Anglo Chinese School. Fourth workplace casualty this month—which made November the worst for the year. In the last week before departure a chap had been battling manfully in his front yard attempting to anchor his inflatable Santa in Severn Street. Rocking on his black boots, the old guy’s jollity was a little excessive. Formerly nondescript Severn now made a row of neatly painted and maintained dwellings the entire stretch, almost not a single case of shabbiness. Passing through just a couple weeks before there had been the Halloween motifs sprung up, every second dwelling decorated with the crepe, skulls, masks and bones over the yards, across the windows and along the driveways. Halloween in the land of surf & sun, like the straight right the heavyweight champ had delivered the Cuban challenger in Vegas recently.
Friday, November 29, 2019
Hunting Party Sept25
Thursday, November 21, 2019
Conflagration (Sept26)
S-L-O-W, slow, slow turning of the pedals on Nicholson Street in particular this afternoon, coming out for lunch. At the top of Leeds lifting sand and gravel from the desert garden along the rail-line. It would be disastrous in the bushland up in the north. There had been some modelling on ABC for the expected winds in South Australia, where more fires had started. Coming through Seddon Bab had been recalled again, this time on the subject of wind, - the wild gusts suddenly out of nowhere, like someone had let it out of a bag. (Up in the Montenegrin high country it had been a Homeric life, the language fitting.) Palms & gums bending, plastic bags like our own birds of augury, carried on high full sail. A bearded ped. who had emerged from between the cars attempting to cross Nicholson had swung to an unexpected halt at the galant on his white Mojo, nose down and bum up, edging along like some kinda strange insect. How the Firies were coping lord only knew. In parts of NSW there was no water available for them. Only today the restrictions had come into force for car washing and garden watering in Sydney, where catchments stood under 60%. The toughest restrictions in ten years. The recently elected conservative federal government the while looking the other way, seeking to smooth the environmental processes for major projects. The DPM had been caught on radio talking about the multi-billion dollar coal industry and the government’s responsible oversight. In the accompanying photograph and tone of voice, the man was not so many degrees removed from the Commander in Chief in the great Northern Republic. In the green urban centre here, the fires were as distant and remote as the war zones of Afghanistan & Syria; it was exceedingly difficult to get any kind of adequate impression. At the supermarket on Paisley homeward bound, a mother had called her young boy back from indoors in order to point out for him the chocolate-orange tinted clouds blown over. There. See that. That’s from those fires, she informed the little champ, who may have had questions from the evening news.
Monday, November 18, 2019
Gauguin Again - published Orca Lit Journal
Gauguin Again
Melbourne, Australia
Yogyakarta, Indonesia
From the swivel desk-chair Nia spooned to her resistant lover on the bed. After a late breakfast he had taken a light lunch not long before.
— Faster P. Faster.
Nia insisted. A motherly, nurturing instinct that could not be denied. Heaped spoons that lost some of their freight on the short trip across the gap needed a cupped hand beneath.
— Faster Peeee....
(Ni had been mock-warned not to use the elongated form. The play was irresistible to her.)
An excellent cook like Nia knew which stall to choose for Take-out. A wonderful meal, rich and succulent, most of the sea-food passed across because of the lover’s known preference. (The avoidance of the starched white rice was also known.)
— What you want to say to me? when the meal was done and Nia moved to the bed.
There was some apprehension at the forewarning. Some little, insufficient concern.
— .... You going back to Australia....
Tears came quickly. Quiet, soundless weeping turned aside. Not a word or sound uttered. Still as if there was no breath. Turned aside and unresponsive to caresses.
— You will marry her. Nia immediately leapt to the worst.
For many months despite all, she had hoped for marriage. Her father could not condone a boy-friend; the kampung disallowed anything of the sort, under any circumstances.
No words of reproach of any kind throughout the more than two hours. None. That came in an email the next day and was quickly retracted with apologies.
— It's OK.
— It's nothing.
— ... Nothing compared to daughter...
— Please let me go. At the end when she was making off to the bathroom before departure.
As hoped, there had been good, fitting words found for the difficult task. There could be no real rehearsal; a couple of little points framed. Friendship would remain; should there be any need for help, there would be someone to call on, Nia was assured. Any problem at work, the internet, map assistance, whatever. (A day or two previously Ni had needed the nearest MRT to Yishun. The app for Maps she had not been able to download for some reason. Nia had been a fast learner on the web; there must have been some particular problem.) The future with the new girl was impossible to guess. She had been met five or six months ago; in the last four or five weeks the intimacy suddenly blossomed. (Clearly after the last meeting with Nia.) It had happened unexpectedly. In two or three months the outcome would be known; there was no way of knowing anything at present. Nia should know too, should not forget, her lover had no-one; no father, mother, wife or child.
During lunch at the corner of the window Nia had been lectured about the interest charge she was intending to exact on a loan to a neighbor from Bandung. Lending $600 and due $800 over four months of repayment. This was doing the friend a service; otherwise the Maid Agency would charge the usual outrageous sum.
But it was haram Nia. And for a neighbor too.
Nia had accepted the rebuke. She had tried to counter the arguments, but at bottom knew the truth of the matter. Usury was haram for a Muslim, and this was steep too.
Perfectly quiet, totally inaudible tears turned away in a three-quarter foetal position. Lucien Freud's paintings irritatingly came to mind.
Six months previously there had been a dalliance of some kind with a Malaysian-Chinese Security Guard who showed Nia his $40k savings in his bank account. Once, and then a second time, Nia had broken appointments to meet the serious suitor. In her first divulging of the matter Nia had made the point she would be frank and open; there would be nothing under-hand; simple honesty was best.
No! No!... Shivering…. Nothing. Never….Quietly voiced and adamant.
Half-jokingly Nia had been told she couldn't really be trusted from that time on. Almost certainly there had been nothing with the other; it seemed clear.
— Actually I also don't want to cry, Nia declared when she had been asked to desist.
It was understandable if Nia had used the Security Guard as a lever and prod. She had explained she had not sought the attention. Numerous times she had brushed off the chap. He must have been employed at the condominium where she stayed at Kovan. Nia was a girl who could not choose, she had explained in message or email in later pleading. Whatever Allah decided Nia would accept.
— Playing huh? Playing.
No!... There had been no playing Ni. Nothing of the sort.
Through a wan smile and strands of falling hair that had been the closest Nia had come to reproach. Again, quietly voiced, without harshness and undeveloped.
Consolatory love-making was declined. There came a short period of tenderness that was soon broken off. Again a kind of reflexive courtesy seemed involved; an appropriate and judicious restraint.
— Bye. I go. Bye.
Ni would need to plan again; re-think. In the new employment she had negotiated after Ramadan Nia would have carte blanche for staying out with her boy-friend. The new employer knew Nia to be responsible and trustworthy. (She had been poached from her old employer with a number of inducements.) Now there was no benefit in that arrangement. Nia needed to think again, plan again.
She was OK. This was nothing compared to the daughter, even one adopted and loved from afar.
Tuesday, November 5, 2019
Compass Needle (Philippe V. Again)
Boy of eight tall for his age crosses the tamped earth floor of the house in Western Bosnia not far from the Croatian border between the legs of his 2.1m tall granddad Stojan. The French-speaking, Algerian-born mother who had fled the war in the 60s had taken her sons to meet the family of her husband. Without Serbo-Croat the visitors would rely on other forms of communication and understanding. The boys learned fast in their new environment, where from what she had seen in the first two weeks the mother had the confidence to leave her children three months. Three months of learning animal husbandry, water-fetching from the spring, tending the vegetable plots and the standing hills all round. Old Stojan had another son named Milan, dear one; (the boy’s father was Slobodan; verb, adjective and talisman for free). After having escaped the country illegally in the late 50s in a commandeered school bus that he and a group of teenage companions drove to the Austrian border, from where they walked to Switzerland, were apprehended by the authorities, transported and dumped at the Red Cross Centre in Marseille, France, the boy’s father could not return home to Mali Dubovik. (Five hours the interview lasted for the mother and her two boys at Belgrade Airport on first landing in Yugoslavia, French interpreter officiating.) The whole of autumn in the small forest of oaks that gave Mali Dubovik its name—due south of Zagreb; Bihac 100kms west. The earlier visit to the mother’s side of the family in central France had been a useful preparation: tamped earthen floor again, animals sharing the house together with the peasants and the well indoors there. A thicker, forbidding you would have thought forest behind the French village (a neighbouring local boy of the same age steered well clear). After the early morning tending of the herd, collection of kindling, eggs from beneath the chickens and assorted other tasks, the dark stand here became a powerful draw for the new tall, older boy. Late afternoons hearing the bells of the returning herd was time to go back home, where no one asked the lad where have you been, what have you seen. The grandmother on the maternal side had been born on Malta and spoke Arabic; Corsican the buccaneering grandfather, on whose island there was a secluded cove perfect for requirements. (The dots were not difficult to join here: on a clear day the coast of Sardinia across the water enticed, and Malta not far distant.) The family still regularly gathered on the French/Italo island. Friday coming the man that was the tall boy would depart for Hobart, Tasmania; following on the 13th of the month begin across the lagoon into the wilderness west of Cockle Creek; a fortnight’s trek through the forest on the other side of the water, where a mountain awaited. Rain was expected and forecast throughout. On the last meeting Philippe took from his pack the Daygo waterproof trousers speckled with reds, blues and greens that were for evening celebrations at the camps. It was impossible to share such a trek; it could only be undertaken alone.
Saturday, October 26, 2019
Publication news: In Parentheses - “Fighters”
Fighters
Jets
Pair of late sixties Yankies next table for breakfast. In the Muslim quarter. Jet crossing understandably draws their notice, chap with his back to the flight path needing to swivel around in order to get a proper look. Any educated, affluent American male traveler ought be able identify expensive military hardware of this level sold to an ally. What was the proportion of the U. S. labor force employed in the armaments industry, 1 in 12? Fellows returned prematurely to their hotel around the corner. Sequestered within under the aircon they will miss the lads coming in for lunch, often near a dozen, one every two minutes as the kettles in the mess-halls boil. (But perhaps this is dangerous information to publish.) Nice enough chaps drinking teas here of course, quiet and thoughtful. Hardly obese. Arrived from other allied territories no doubt, — Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea. Wives laying in. Heat was mentioned during the conversation. Even if they were from the Florida Keyes or New Mexico, something else entirely here merely ducking between taxis, restaurants and hotels.
Geylang Serai, Singapore
Blackbird
This Blackbird model from as far back as the 60's was it? did 3,500 kms per minute, not hour. London to NY in the time of a city commute. Thing flew so high and fast Soviet radar of the time was unable to detect it. In the picture book the various thin-finned bombers and fighter jets we drew in school dropping their payloads came back. The designers at Fighter Command had some of the boy in them too of course. Lots of creased and crumpled, shaggy-haired and rumpled old boys remained struck by it all even now, by the human invention and mastery: planes, boats, cars, artillery, bridges, mines, tools and gadgets. Ingenuity and imagination to burn. You had to hand it to those guys, the technicians and scientists beavering away. In Afghanistan right now, says this bright-eyed fallen angel, this sewer rat star-gazing plumber still plying his trade, the satellites are able to pick up the dirt under the fingernails of people down on the ground. Zoom-Zoom-Zoom-zoom-ZOOM. Central command in the control room able to tell the difference instantly between peasants and Taliban in disguise plotting terror. All the get-up in the world won’t help the latter.
St. Kilda, Melbourne
Three Cups
Five or six steps in the unfolding reminiscent of a magic show; audience drawn along.... Prior to the teh arriving it was a carafe of water. No sign food scraps, crumbs nowhere visible. At the approach of the waiter earlier the older man had pulled a long face, a House of Horrors' mask that would have frightened any child passing. A natural no need tuition: dropping the jaw, lowering the fangs, eyes like from deepest underground caverns. Lads in company were still in their twenties, though older looking. Possibly ten years older himself, looking older still the leader. Whatever may have been exchanged between the pair—waiter and patron—the face pulled had said enough. Three cups delivered, the yellow Kiddie-land mugs they used at Restoran Mehran on Jalan Ipoh out toward Kampung Bahru. Turning aside away from the table the man takes one cup, pours, serves. Takes another. Pours. Serves. Collects the third; same again. All even and square. No cigarettes. A phone however was essential; the leader had one of those. There was little doubt. What else could it have possibly been? Flickering looks around the place waiting for they were unsure what. Teh at Mehran was RM0.80 — twenty or twenty two cents. Old clay oven on the street for nan same as Ras Balouch up the road. A dedicated Paki enclave. Later the old guy was gifted a ciggie by the tall young blade with good English turned up in his auto with hope of something in the offing possibly.
Kuala Lumpur
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
The Artist Philippe Vranjes
Three or four good, accidental meetings with the artist Philippe Vranjes over these number of weeks. Philippe had been recovering from a bad cold and hadn’t been able to make a time in the first little while; after which the man might have intuited the shared preference for the accidental. All smooth and well as usual at the get-togethers. It had been an unusual first meeting with Philippe, or acquaintance in fact, twelve or thirteen years ago. Faisal at the d’Afrique café in Nicholson Street had mentioned the hospitalisation of one of his regulars, the quiet tall White guy with that look about him. The man had no one in the country, Faisal reported; he was unwell; he ought to be visited. It was a kind of appeal, on humanitarian grounds. No meeting of eye, much less words exchanged with Philippe at the time. French-Algerian, Faisal informed. At Western General he could not be found; he had been discharged it seemed. Understandably, Philippe was rather startled at the matter when he was informed some weeks later, but didn’t say too much; not even really offering thanks for the solicitude. Fruit had been bought for the invalid. Philippe talked art in a way that was convincing and compelling. He seemed older than his fifty years (at the first meeting he had been short of forty). Philippe would be turning fifty in a few weeks in the middle of a lagoon in the SW wilderness of Tasmania. For the past couple of years he had been exploring the Grampians and from there went down into the bottom of the continent, where the roar of the Southern Ocean crashed onto the beaches along the coast. A fortnight’s trek would begin in early November. The lagoon was two days out of a place called Cockle Creek, a strange settlement populated with a few hundred people whose descendants went back to the whalers settled there a hundred and fifty plus years ago. A protected heritage area, largely unexplored, where these descendants were allowed to remain in their great tents and various shelters. Building was prohibited in the area. Gathering firewood was permitted this folk, fishing rights and hunting too it may have been. Southern Cross flags were flown at the township, the local men sporting big bushy beards. Many of the landmarks through the area carried French names from early explorers. Philippe had ventured there three or four times, read numerous trekking and walking accounts. Philippe was meticulous in his preparations—precisely 20kg pack, food for two weeks with appropriate nutritional requirements, emergency satellite tracking. A Ranger inspected visitors and checked their packs. In the event of any kind of mishap a helicopter would be needed for rescue. The first part of the lagoon Philippe had investigated some months previously and the dense forest on the Eastern side was entered a few dozen metres. Within that dark thicket only smallest shreds of sky had been visible. There was a great deal of rain in the area; drenchings were common and sun for drying apparel rare. The Why? was impossible to answer for Philippe, understandably. A strong compulsion drove the man and the talk beforehand was a little beside the point. There might possibly be some indefinable artistic outcome from the upcoming venture. Earlier trekking posts on Philippe’s Instagram had won a few hundred followers. As with some other encounters with personally important artists and writers, the talk with Philippe had preceded exposure to the work—work that had subsequently been found strong. It was another rather unusual, happy accident of the same kind as with other artists. Looking at Philippe’s Instagram portfolio with him over lunch at our African cafe, the strength of the images was no surprise. Striking, intriguing pictures these that raised questions and challenges. In the remote locales of forests and creeks Philippe sometimes donned colourful clothing of his own manufacture; striking and elaborate cross-dressing kind of apparel. Like traditional people the world over in such territories responding to their habitat, Philippe agreed. The body of preliminary work sighted on Instagram strongly persuades belatedly signing up to that platform. Philippe was estranged from his Bosnian father, whose family name referenced a large Southern Serbian town. It was another point of contact with Philippe.
A small sample of the photos provided by Philippe:
https://www.instagram.com/philippevranjes/?hl=en
Thursday, October 17, 2019
The Captain (May26)
50, 60 or 70 cars streaming below in the time it took to cross the old footbridge. Four lanes either direction, 80kms per hour with perhaps 25m in length. The foundations for the new footbridge had been prepared one side, which would no doubt be a handsomer form than the old that linked with the Federation Trail stretching to Werribee, 25kms out. Various memories of the old bridge during schooldays. Poor young George Golic, couple years below in the junior forms, had been rescued once when he was set upon by a bigger boy. In fact it may have been all playfulness there at the entryway, but nevertheless, whimpy little George was spared anything further that day and the perpetrator given a fright. You didn’t mess with compatriots when the school football captain was passing, fella! A spiky-haired Pole or Ukrainian, getting too big for his boots. George’s father was a Serb, an older man who had married a younger German woman, once the labour camps had been liberated. For the German frau after the war there had been a shortage of men. In Australia after that wave of post-war immigration the reverse was found, which resulted in chaps circling blonde, mismatched Mrs Golic. In that same year near where George had been rescued the football captain had once been ambushed by a group of lads from an opposing team, an inferior outfit which had been well beaten some weeks previously. At the head of this party lying in wait was the tough nut, Joe Sacco, who had already left school and had a job at one of the meatworks, At Smorgans and the others there boning & slicing knives were employed. There were three or four of the Seddon lads, with Joe at their head, awaiting their chance. Returning from lunch at home and coming upon the party, wisest course was to get your ass well outta there, pronto. Speedily down Fogarty Avenue to the creek and around back home, the long way round. A stumpy Maltese stood little chance against a thoroughbred with a head start. Fisticuffs might have been another matter. With the cars hurtling beneath there was often a jet risen in the big Northern sky, winging from the airport. After the best part of a decade sequestered in the concrete canyons of Singapore, the wide vista dropped like a screen over your eyeballs. Following the low winter skies further expanse was offered early autumn, an encouraging, calming field of limitless scope. Up on the sides of the village shepherding, up at the high summer pastures, all the ancestors across the generations had entered the great skies above and travelled between the clouds with their herds. One old prorok, prophet from Village Uble was famously said to have anticipated the advent of the aeroplane, claiming at some point early in the previous century that the day would arrive when donkeys, if not pigs, would fly. Back at the house two possums had been caught in the hire cage and taken down to the gum-lined rail-line at the bottom of the street. Despite this, the quiet mocking screech behind the plaster at the foot of the stairs continued mornings going down for breakfast. What kind of animal was that? How did it get in & out of the roof? The thinking now was that perhaps a shrill may have been involved. A couple evenings ago checking the seal on a presumed access point up on the ridge of the roof, a dark shadow had suddenly flitted below from the direction of the neighbour behind. Wha! Whoooo!… All uncanny quick-time. Wings had beat under the alcove of the house, glossy and darkly black. At that speed the sudden rise that would have been needed to avoid crashing into the closed gate around the corner of the Studio would have been quite something to behold. Hard down on the joystick and eyes shut tight, Birdie! What was most striking was that the bird had passed hard-by the lounge-room windows in front, between them and the thick posts holding the room above. Hard by the near post, left at the corner in order to avoid the entry porch and ninety degrees! An eye of an needle threaded around that corner, at such reckless speed.