Duetting With Dorothea

With strange compelling instinct
We seek the heavy truth
Of new sophistication,
The plenary uncouth,
So now each maker tempted
To raise invention's stakes
Will climb a self-set ladder
To rob a nest of fakes.

We cannot trust the simpler
Magnitudes of love,
We think that skill and falsehood
Are ever hand-in-glove.
A stanza by Mackellar
Goes by with standard whoosh,
Its privilege and parkland
No rival of the bush.

A seedling grown patrician,
She wanted us to hear
That mise-en-scène Australia
Must always be more dear
To us than coasts of Europe
Because it's what we see
As Anglo-Celtic transplants
In Angel-Infancy.

And Patrick, sailing homewards,
Observed her on the deck,
Light-stepping, pissed and wayward,
In lace up to the neck;
He judged her postcard Southland
Could offer no new starts,
Migration prove no changer
Of fixed empiric hearts.

Shakespeare's Captain Macmorris
Asked in his Irish way
‘What ish my nation?’ Poems
Have no flag to obey.
It's natural our writers
Eyeing up the grants
Are Hi-Tech patriotic —
Australia Fair, Advance!

But Dorothea's Country
Did not seem mine when I
First looked out of the window
With costive childhood eye.
Instead I saw a landscape
Lit up by inner doubt
And scarred by self-attrition,
Not Barcoo Rot or drought.

I need a further stanza
To amplify my sense
That latitude and seasons
Make little difference.
The human creature burgeons
In social permafrost,
Its feral hope adjacent
Some reasoned holocaust.