Heading South through the Long Paddock

for Tom Flood and Dorothy Hewett

On the last day of November
I journey to see my brother,
the tyres sticky on the asphalt
as the ground thunders
with grain trucks.
The fly-blown carcasses
of kangaroos fester like boils
and I think of the times
I worked on the wheatbins,
two seasons in hell,
trapped in a hut with a bunch
of boys who had to be boys
even though they probably
found it hell as well.
It leads me to think of Tom Flood,
and his mother Dorothy
who grew up in this territory,
who set the dead sea of wheat
against itself, growing green
under the sapping sun
long before belly-dumpers
and tip-trucks rolled
along this road. The grain here
is mainly oats and barley
though some wheat spills
from the augers — but not Oceana Fine,
which belongs to another place
and another time. Soon I'll hear
how the cover of my book
was ripped from its spine
by some Nyoongah mates
of my brother's — they reckon
that tractors and ploughs
are bad for the land,
and they are right.
But this is the heritage
I bring with me,
and there's no denying it.
The windrows layer the hills
like enormous elegant snakes —
the art of humans is always
deceptive. I shouldn't be ‘saying’ this
but intimating or illustrating
by allusion or association —
I should find a new language
that will burrow deep
into the conscience,
as if it were a maggot
in a sheep or kangaroo carcass,
as if the conscience
were a piece of mangled meat
hit again and again by trucks.
Knocking some sense into it
some smart arse might say.
But this language would have to be
like everything I see,
but understood by those
who can't or haven't seen.
For it's them I'd want to tell.
For it's a story, it's my story
as well. Like eucalypt blossom
luminous in the upper atmosphere,
like another season laying
itself over this one,
like unspoken family histories
that might account for it
but don't need to. I pass
a silo, and a dead numbat.
They're rare, and the stripes
are like a warning. Later
my brother will tell me
there've been heaps
around this season; he's
been out in the bush
with his girlfriend, maybe
near the Devil's Backbone,
which is a place sacred
to her people, but now called
what the farmers in the district
call it. And as I drive
through the long paddock
glass wheat stalks deflect the sun
and the paddocks shimmer;
dams glower like blue windows
in a false surface. The long paddock —
where sheep are grazed in a hard season,
where dogs working the space
between fence and road —
a red-capped parrot sits
among a flock of twenty-eights.
And nearby, wandoo brilliantly white
strikes the already hollowing sky,
while dense stands of mallee —
once an industry in Narrogin —
stand bolt upright, seeded
onto chained scrubland,
the moon like a damaged ball-joint,
crops fox-red, hawks over the hay.
Here, with only the wind
rushing through the car window,
my language is of sight
and words merely compressions
of what I see: parrot flocks
seething on the ragged edge
of a soon-to-be harvested crop,
the header comb set low
and a crew getting ready
to spot that night. The images
crash into each other. Distantly
an old Nyoongah woman sings echidnas
out of their tree-stump hollows,
balled and spined
they walk out, struck by the song.
The wheels hit a rupture in the road.
I struggle to maintain control.
Everything here is like something else
because it is not as it was.