Roads and Bones

far western Queensland


Wheel ruts,
curled and curdled clay,
churned
dried mud,
the bones of gidyea;
lacy, silver-leaved boree,
"a pretty tree,"
allowed to stay -
"a graceful tree, not like
that rotten gidyea!"

Horned and hooved
red beasts,
gamboge
patina of hot
gibber plain;
Mitchell grass
a smudge of grey;
pale tribe, pale-eyed
who came to claim...

Deep in the weathered range
lie footprints
petrified in slime,
fossil prints of emu, roo,
doomed creatures of the dreamtime.
"Soft pads on their feet
don't hurt the earth, no
hooves to cut and bruise.
Sixty thousand years
went by, there was less
desert that time..."

The plaque beside the airstrip
reads: "John and Mary Winter camped
October nineteen hundred and ...
before resuming 'Ventry'".
A message on a petrol drum,
the lonely track near Isisford:
"On this site, friendly natives
told...'This river is Barcoo'".

Pulled scrub,
remains of trunks and limbs -
a battlefield
where no-one wins.
The casual cruelties
that purchase comfort -
legal tender.
In four-wheel drives
with searchlights, guns,
the waves of firing-
squads roar through,
bloodthirsty gods
bring death to kangaroo.

Two years back the floods
were epic, biblical;
stinking of carrion, the mud
spawned flies and crows
in shiny swarms.
A fly-blown doe
hopped to the shed,
begging to die,
the woman said.

At dusk the crickets spin
day's diamond light in dazzled
spools of sound, the first star
stands transfixed above the ridge
at Diamond Downs.
"The whitefellas kept lookin
at them stars and lost
their way. Animal tracks
always led to water."

The one store in the township
sells sheep raddle,
red and blue;
a fly-specked sign
pleads from the street-front window:
URGENT SALE -
BUSINESS AND RESIDENCE -
ENQUIRIES WELCOME

They say that if you
cross the Barcoo River
you'll return.
Mentally, I finger
a black stone.

They say that after winter rains
the bluebells and the daisies
turn claypans and gidyea plains
to cloth of heaven, Eden...

*

Starlit

Across the plains of tussock grass
steals faint light of a quarter-moon;
multitudes of crickets sing a song of stars.

Out there in profounder dark,
tough trees, almost like olive trees;
wild goats, ancient, wily, wry,
like goats of Greece.

*

for Herb Wharton - stockman, poet
and storyteller, whose ancestors
this country was
 
gidyea, pronounced gidgee (Aboriginal word):
(stinking wattle) small gregarious Australian
tree, Acacia cambagei, which gives off an
unpleasant odour at the approach of rain

gibber (Aboriginal word): pebble, boulder