Anth 44 29.4.04 (first Exerpt From "in Transit")

Thursday 29/4/04. Its ppropria@ I giv a komplete nthlogy of the writing I h&d out whn I strtd th ntrprize in th year 2000 in this piece of writing whch nchractristiclly I m doing in Melbourne (@ Miller st, 12.15 arvo) as much of the m@erial in my 1st foldr was also writtn in the city. Though Zorca (c ‘3/4/04’ p 15) claims th mis4tune of being my 1 readr I hope a few othrs r ntrstd eg (4 your info, Zorca) : DsOhWaNrEoYn hoo works on me bike in th smallst bike shop in Melbourne in Victoria st (@ 5.7 x E1 covr map) undr th watchyful ey of MOODGE & hoo says sh reads my stuff coz sh likes puzzls, & BROcUhGrHiTsON @ Parkhill Cellars (@ 5.2 x D5) hoo may not hav blievd me ystrdy whn I said th@ th search 4 IDENTITY is an @mpt 2 SIMPLIFY yrslf (th@s th price & I reckn its 2 hgh) hoo probbly also reads it, & K8 (jus back from the US) † th road (@ 5.7 x D) hoo thankd me (& esp H) day b4 ystrdy 4 givng her our work. Im making ths list in th ordr the itms r in th foldr 2 O off, complete a O x going back 2 the bginnng. Here it is : 1) ART (a 3-letter word) (c ‘16/2/04 – 27/2/04’ p19). 2) GULF TRIP (typed x SA&NrIeGwA (wth hoom I had lunch in Lygon st. ystrdy) from ARTE POSTALE items he rceivd @ Melb. Uni. whch r now in th possssion of COaZdZrOiLaInNaI @ Florentina in Menton, France & Casa Tagglasco in Baiardo, Italie). 3) “They Know Not What They Do” (jc) (writtn 4 a show KEdSaMnIiNuAsS & STEmViEkNeSON did in NEW YORK). 4) OPAL (writ x Ben (4 an Age short story comp.) whch I dstributed). 5) MEDITATION ON LAKE GAIRDNER (an album of ovr 200 fotos & 7 short writtn pieces : The Gift (poem); Sleep; Labels; Naming It; Ants; Forgetting (wher I wrote “Remembering and forgetting are reverse sides of one coin” (4 mor on revers sides of coins c ‘16/2/04 – 27/2/04’ p19)); & Time). 6) 25/1/00. 7) 20/6/00. (wher the histricl m@erial on the holocaust was takn from an rtcl x SUŽIEDELIS (an histrian hoo did rsearch 4 the SIU (Special Investig8ion Unit) in th USA ) whch I don8d last sundy 2 th litho library in Errol st (@ 5.2 x D5) (1/5/04. & wher I note wth srprise Hs contribution (bside th typing) had lready bgun as th piece strts wth a poem x her & its a good 1 : “in the beginning is the word / as the sperm meets the egg / etching into ev-ery surface of the cell / replicating as the cell divides / unique grooves into wh-ich / every experience of every second / of our threescore years and ten / must run / and all our effort all our lives / is only to find / its unknown shape and meaning ”). 8) 14/8/41 (wher I mntion th ‘Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto’ put out x the holoc-aust museum in Washington & ‘Last Walk in Naryshkin Park’ x rZoWsIe (& so wth th rrival of EeWaE-rRlS @ litho hous (c ‘3/4/04 – 12/4/04’ p11 & 12) nothr O has bn joind) both of whch (2gethr wth ‘Ste-tl’ x Eva Hoffman as nothr xampl of how 2 write such a book) I also don8d 2 litho hous th@ day. 9) 14/8/41 (I used th = title again bcoz I thght th d8 so mportnt. Thes 4 poems (The Room, The House, The City, Masks) r them@clly linkd 2 no 7), no 6), & no 5). I also used lines from thm in an ARTE PO-STALE projct I maild from Murrayville & Burra b4 meetng up wth sVaAuRlNiAuS). 10) 7/9/00 –16/9/00 (alt title WRONG WAY GO BACK (strts wth a poem whch is a favourit of mine (though I writ it) so I rpeat it : “ perhaps it is too pedantic / to discuss // whether object causes motion / or the motion def-ines matter // is it the wind that shakes the branch / or has the branch given life to air // is the flower beautiful / or did perfection form the flower / can you see the dancer / or is the dancer hidden in the dance // does the dreamer dream / or has the dream possessed the man // did the flute produce the tune / or has the tune been waiting for the flute // I don’t really care about the answers / but the spirits that I talk to / all claim in their conceited way / that it is they that speak to me ”. I keep the ROMAN COIN I wrote O in th pocket of the foldr th rtcl is in.) 11) 2/10/00. 12) 17/9/00 & 18/9/00. (I was hyped up! This was the time H calld the shrinks & the cops). 13) 4/10/00 – 5/10/00 (in whch H ncluded her h& writ lettr of pology & promsd not 2 do it again.). 14) AN ESSAY (x ZIkZ8YS whch I dstrbuted. On the back page I +d : “All pasts and all futures are only reflections of the present.”) 15) 11/11/00 (a set of 6 poems O language whch I wrote ovr 30 years ago & reused in an npublishd & unpublishbl book lnth FACTION ( 2/5/04. mor fac than fic) titld IN TRANSIT whch I writ O 20 years ago & I reuse th poems again here). 16) 10/1/01 (= applies 2 thes 6 poems O death ; I put thm out in 2000 but used nxt years d8 coz I 1td th binary titl). I hav bn drinkin lambrusco as Iv bn writin & m DIZZY …. Rode back past the ZOO 2 Ivanhoe …. 6.40. H has rsumed typing. briLgAita rang 2 say sh has ordrd th tickts @ $1665 rturn (Melbourne → Sydney → Hong Kong → Tokyo → Moscow (x Aeroflot) → Riga → litho (x bus) & the rturn journey is Vilnius → Moscow etc.). Leaving 25th may & c@chin rturn flght on 30th july. 1

Ill pay her on tuesday. Friday 30/4/04. Did the banking & rranged 4 a credt card. Saw Doig 2 burn off a small wrt on me face & askd 4 & got som Temazepam tabelts in case I need thm 2 hlp m sleep on the flght. Probelms wth sleep r my achilles heel & if I get @ackd x a buzz of words I can b ncapabl of sleep & get 2 agit8d & could go crazy (so Ill also take a supply of valium & largactil). I sound like a crock but the fact is I hardly evr use th stuff. Rode in2 town 4 lunch with LfOrVaEnCkE & diaCnAdSrTeRaO. Back in Ivanhoe @ 2.30. Rturnng 2 th topik. It may b th@ som peopl travl in strght lines (→ ): careers measured x promotions & ncreass in salary; uni courss in dgrees; rearng famlies till the kids can leav home; etc etc. But I go me&ring on obscure journies along minor paths oftn in Os. Here is a xampl. Over th years Iv noticd a prtculrly elgnt gent on 3 or 4 ccasions shoppin in th suprmrkt in Ivanhoe. I judgd him 2 b O my age. His style of dressng suggstd he was connectd wth th theatr. Then O a year ago I saw him in Errol st. Whn I strt †ing paths wth som1 4 no pparnt reason I get intrestd. Then last week or th week b4 as I was gettng ready 2 leav on me bike aftr buy-ing a book (cant remmbr if it was ‘Literature and the Gods’ (from whch I quote Nietzsche writing a last note 2 Jacob Burckhardt : “Actually, I would rather be a professor at Basle University than God : but I didn’t dare push my private selfishness so far as to neglect, just for myself, the creation of the world” as quoted x Robe-rto Calasso bcoz this is Calassos own position though dsguised so as not 2 ppear rdiculous) x Rober-to Calasso (I had bn told th book was going cheap on th rduced prices tabl x KcOoTnZAgBeAoSrIgSe (“HIC RHODUS HIC SALTA”) pub. x Alfred A. Knopf © 2001. ISBN : c – 375 – 41138 – 0 in whch Calasso says : “One can squeeze a juice, a “flavour”, rasa (my sisters name, meaning dew in litho, & hence no doubt of sanscrit origin) from anything, says the Jaiminīya Upanisad Brāhmana.” or Tzvetan Todorovs ‘ the fragility of goodness’ © 1999 pub. Wiedenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0 297 646702 wher he says & I quote : “Memories conflict because the glorious role in the past – the role of the hero or, in other contexts, of the victim – constitutes a precious symbolic capital in the present, one that confers prestige, legitimacy, and ultimately, more power on those who can successfully lay claim to it. But memory is not merely a place where wills collide, each seeking advantage over the other. Memory is also open to the establishment of truth.” without giving any ndic8ion of not-icing the contradiction in the claim) @ Readings in Lygon st. Carlton he stoppd 2 talk 2 th lady hoo was nchainng th bike nxt 2 mine. So whn he left I askd her hoo he was as I keep †ing paths wth him I said 2 her. His name is cEhAeGsLtEr (great name says LfOrVaEnCkE) & he has writtn 10 or so book-s & he has 1 an Age Book of the Year AWARD & he is working on n OPERA. I hav nevr heard of him nor has any1 I know but I made nquiries @ a new bookshop specializing in 2nd h& ozzie lit calld THE GRISLY WIFE (from a titl of a book x rHoAdLnLey) BOOKSHOP (like the 1 sheLlEtEon used 2 hav here whch specializd in ozzie POETS & wher 1 of me kids found ‘clocks ticked on’ x ZjIoZhYnS © 1975, the author. pub. x ‘flying duck enterprises’ @ 214 darebin road thornbury, 3071. designed x : david g harris, typeset x margaret, terry & david, printed by strawberry press, assistance & advice : terry, arpad, andrew & πO. ISBN 0 9598272 0 X) whch has just opend opp. the st8ion in Eaglemont Village & they had 2 of his books (‘Play Together, Dark Blue Twenty’ ($25) (Belongd 2 Leonie Clancy in 1987) McPhee Gribble Publishers © 1986. ISBN 0 86914 031 0. Typeset in Garamond by Bookset Melbourne Made and printed in Australia by Globe Press, Melbourne, & ‘House of Music’ ($27.50) 1996 set in 10 point Palatino, is printed by Print Synergy, Nottinghill, Victoria 3149 and published by Trojan Press, 23 Langs Road Ivanhoe 3079 Australia. © Chester Eagle. ISBN 0 9592077 1 6) so I bought thm & read thm. ‘Play Together …’ is O Melbourne Grammar & is autbiografcal & not a p@ch on JjOaYmCeEsS ‘Portrait of an Artist …’ (whch I had thght woz O me whn I read it as a youth) & the short stories in ‘House of Music’ rnt much eithr but @ least hes a local livin here in Ivanhoe (b. 1933) & I can tell hes bn 2 th places he mntions in his writng. What cght my @ntion was th@ in 1 of the sup-posedly fictionl short stories he refrs 2 a persn x th name DOUGIE being airliftd in a mergency 2 BR-OKEN HILL x the Flying Doctor Service whch is based ther. Now whn I was DOWN & OUT in White Cliffs (my +ress : Permissive Occupancy Site No. 11 in the “Blocks Area”) ther really was a DOUGIE, good friend of mine, airliftd 2 the hosptl in Broken Hill. I reckon it must hav bn th = persn & 2

nxt time I † paths wth cEhAeGsLtEer Ill ask him. I srmise th@ Chester has vsitd White Cliffs & 4 all I know I hav talkd 2 him in the pub but was 2 drunk 2 recall it. Thes thghts nfluencd me 2 change me plans 4 th trip I was going 2 leav on nxt week in th north eastly drection & I dcided 2 go north 2 White Cliffs nstead but now it in turn has bn ovrtakn x the trip 2 litho wher I was born 19/8/41 in KAUNAS (KAUEN / KOV-NO) & livd nxt 2 the NEMUNAS (NIEMEN) rivr 4 the 1st 3 years of my life. Howver 2 make up 4 not going 2 White Cliffs I nclude th follwing xtract from IN TRANSIT (in whch th 3 protagnists Mallacoota Man, I, & Jim Brown r thinly dsguised versions of me – if Freud can do it so can I). @ the time I wrote what H dscribed as the most sc@logical book sh had read I was bcoming ncreasingly convinced th@ a fixd IDENTITY was neither dsirabl nor possibl 4 me so prhaps it is fitting I put out this xtract O th desert just as my @ntion turns 2wards a country of lakes & deep greens & wher the sky is said 2 b low & leaden & the peopl grey (my mum says a vsiting frenchman told her so b4 the war) : “As Jim zipped up his fly he heard a car door slam. Peering behind him through the scrub he could make out a battered four-wheel drive with a couple of beer cans standing on the bonnet. His memory had fully returned now. As he strolled up to the landrover which was parked in the middle of the wide dirt road, he observed that Shaky was peeing into the hole of a colony of giant bull ants. For them the drought had truly ended. Shaky’s old blanket and an oily hessian bag which he had used as a pillow lay in fro-nt of the car. He had the dubious habit of sleeping on the bare ground in the exact centre of a road or track. Jim knew that Shaky slept like a dead man and would never hear the drunk rousabout who one night would come hurtling down the road on his way home from a gymkhana and cannon into the ba-ck of his car killing him instantly. Jim had slept twenty yards away preferring the security of the scrub. (paragraph) They were on their way home to White Cliffs on the last leg of a mail run that had taken five days. Most of that time had been spent getting lost and bogged on station back-tracks. The most unusual feature of this mail run had been that the mail usually got to its destination ahead of the mail-man. This is how it happened. (paragraph) The regular contractor claimed to have had a heart attack the day before he was due to do the weekly run and asked Shaky to help him out. The mail-man’s heart condition had been caused by a week of solid rain which had left the countryside sodden. Even under the best of conditions this mail run was a losing proposition. In selling contracts for the remote runs the government depended on an unending supply of outback operators, who lured by the prosp-ect of a regular income, were too naïve to make sufficient allowance for vehicle costs. Needless to say, Shaky, known throughout White Cliffs as a soft touch, decided to take his own battered landrover for the trip. The night before several casual references were made to the possibility of wet conditions on the tracks but generally they concentrated on small talk and personalities as was their usual pra-ctice. They drank till 2 a.m. or thereabouts which was also par for the course. It was a feature of life in White Cliffs that no more than one task was ever attempted in a day. The task might be to fetch youn-g Steve from the shearing shed twenty miles away. Or it might be to shoot an emu to provide Freddy Tree’s dogs with meat; emu meat was very oily and said to be good for a dog’s coat. The men with whom Jim lived were morally spent, intellectually bankrupt; there was no one here who boasted of possessing a multilayered mind. One job was the most a man could cope with in a day. The mail was tomorrow’s job. (paragraph) Their preparation was thorough as usual. They were woken up someti-me mid-morning by the various incomprehensible expletives Freddy Tree, from the next dugout, ma-de when he threw a saucepan of water from the forty-four gallon drum by the entrance over his head. That was the beginning and end of his morning ablution. They each crawled out of bed according to their various fashions, at a pace that was in harmony with the shattered nature of their lives. Shaky got two cans of beer out of the kerosene fridge and handed one to Jim. Jim’s morning prayers, for he was a lapsed catholic as you know, consisted of stumbling out the doorway into a day where the sun shone with a metaphysical brilliance. He could hear someone retching behind a mullock heap. His hands were shaking and his mouth felt like the bottom of a bird cage. He raised his spare hand, like St. Paul, to shield his eyes from the blinding glare. It was a typical start to a day in White Cliffs. Break-fast consisted of scrounging leftovers from the previous night. He found a piece of cold yellowbelly fried in crumbs : it was delicious. Shaky and Freddy cracked another can : they did not partake of solid food 3

in daylight. Much later, while Freddy was feeding the dogs, Shaky drove the three hundred yards into town to collect the mail bags. When he came back it was already afternoon. It was decided that Jim would accompany him on the mail run. Next followed a long discussion on whether the dogs, who were sitting expectantly in the back of the rover, should be allowed to come along. Freddy decid-ed that they should not. Finally, Jim and Shaky, each with a freshly opened can in his hand, climbed into the rover and were off. (paragraph) There are a number of insanities / In the world / And my grandfather had them all! // Let us suppose that one fine day / You wished to go / To the other end of the world // In an ox-cart. “Aha”, he would cry, / ”Aha!” / Hurry, my little man, // Hurry, my child, run and bring / My prayer shawl / And the pots of clay, // And three pieces of cheese, / Two onions / And six pieces of well-salted meat, // Two strong shoes and a pair / Of cotton socks / And one convenient shirt. // When one goes on such a long / Journey, / When one is finally serious, // When one really undertakes / To go / It would be a shame not to be ready. * (x Leonard Wolf) (paragraph) Three hundred yards and one minute later they pulled up outside the pub. This was normal practice and an essential part of the preparation for any task that they undertook. They had to stock up with tinnies. But first, now that they were at the pub, they might as well catch up with the latest information. The barman, who usually knew everything, told them about a new arrival by the name of Hans who claimed to be able to find opal by using a divining rod. The idea was that you could locate fault lines in the opal dirt by finding areas of greater moisture. According to Hans it was in such places that there was a better chance of finding opal. At this stage Dougie Bow and a few of the real drunks arrived and it was clear to Jim that they were settling down for a relaxed session of drink and conversation. The discussion on this occasion centred on the knotty problem of whether Freddy Tree’s unorthodox method of training dogs worked equally for both sexes. That in turn led into questions of morality and finally deep philosophy. One drink followed another and the afteroon moved into its second phase. It was not unusual for them to get so engrossed in this part of their preparation that by the time they tottered out the pub door the sun was already low in the sky : then Steve would have to stay at the shed for a day longer; the dogs would have to go without their emu meat. The mail however must get through. So with an hour to go before sunset, at a tim when the mail man would normally be well on his way home, Shaky and Jim, having stocked up with an enormous quantity of tinnies which now lay haphazardly among the mail bags, set out on the journey proper. (paragraph) The first leg of the run took them to Clancy’s, the local station, only ten or so miles down the track. The track was completely dry and the surroundings showed no signs of the previous week’s downpour. Apart from hitting a large pot hole, which it was clear to Jim Shaky had not seen at all and which made them stop and rearrange the cans immediately behind the back seat, they reached Clancy’s without incident. The station owner, a regular at White Cliffs hotel, was in a jovial mood and invited them in for a beer. They reluctantly refused the invitation in order to indicate to him the importance of their mission. He was not impressed however and they took the line of least resistance. A can or two later they stood up ready for anything. It was already dark and the station owner raised an eyebrow at their boldness in pressing on. He had been under the impression that they were going to spend the night at his place and offered them a choice of a woolshed or the shearers’ quarters. But Shaky who had sheared all through this county and into central Queensland assured him that he still knew the station back tracks. The owner advised them either to take the high track or better still to go back to the Wanarring road until they came to the front track into the next station. Shaky strode to the landrover with a reassuring wave of his can and they were off again. They went the back way because it was more direct. (paragraph) They took off with a lurch and before they had gone a kilometre Jim could tell that Shaky thought he was on a graded road. They hit a bump at speed and nearly flew off the track. He glanced at Shaky’s face. He looked as if he was in a trance : his eyes were bulging and staring straight ahead, his arms were held in a peculiarly rigid way, elbows up high. Shaky was driving into another night, perhaps from his past or in his future, or perhaps into the night of his soul. It is said that the geography of nature corresponds to the outlines of a man’s soul. That it does not do so exactly became obvious when at a bend in the track they just went straight on. They blundered about in a copse of belah and bimble-box until they regained the track lucky not to have got bogged, for though there was 4

no sign of surface water, the ground underneath had to be wet. Some kilometres later they nearly cleared a washout that cut straight across the track. Unfortunately Shaky’s attempt at flying the landrover landed him about a metre short of the other side and they found themselves at the bottom facing the wrong way. Jim knew that there was no way they would get back up but he had not counted on the depth of resources available to the true drunk. Shaky exploded into activity driving the landrover in all directions at once, riding the steering wheel like a shearer trying to hold a scrub ram. Next thing they were on the road again and what’s more, facing the right direction. The furious activity had the effect of some external realities penetrating into his inner journey for he now slowed down to a pace more consistent with the surface he was driving on. In this more peaceful mood Shaky became talkative and embarked on a long story which could easily have been the story of his life except that Jim could not understand a single word he said. His mouth moved, various sounds came out, but not a single word could be understood. Shaky was talking in his sleep. Jim reached in the back and got two cans. Shaky passed him the can opener from the glove box and Jim held the can between his feet as he opened it. He was bouncing up and down on his seat as he did it and paid the penalty for facing downwards by copping a tremendous spray of beer directly in his face. It was their misfortune for the rest of that night never to have more than half a can of beer at a time. Meanwhile, somewhere in the midst of Shaky’s strange monologue, the road suddently went underwater. They did not realize how big the puddle was till they rounded the corner for their headlights did not reach the other end of it. They were driving straight up the middle of what appeared to be a river and it was only the serendipity of honest drunks that found them several hundred yards later, on dry ground. Shaky now lapsed into several sentences of what appeared to be human language. Jim thought it meant that they were about to arrive at the next station but instead they arrived at a stock dam. They almost drove into it but stopped in the nick of time. Shaky was really coming good now, Jim could understand nearly everything he said. He knew which dam it was. They drove around it till they found a trough ; Shaky felt he needed a wash. Then they drove to another spot where they both had a leak. Then they opened two more cans and again lost half their contents. Then they drove off again. In good english now Shaky explained that he had to go back almost to the puddle where another track would take him to the station. Jim noted that the track they were on had no tyre marks on it and so could not be the same track they had come to the dam on. They turned around and went back to the dam. The trouble now was that they could pick up tracks going everywhere in their headlights as they had probably driven around the dam several times. In a flash of inspiration, drawing on all his resources as a bushman, Shaky hit on the idea that if he drove round and round the dam in circles of ever increasing size he would finally drive over the track (there were only a finite number of tracks coming into the dam) with his own tyre marks on it. So it turned out. A few hundred yards further they found the track they had been looking for. They drove on some miles or maybe they were kilometres. They had to be very close now so when they came to another stretch that was underwater there was an incentive to keep going. Even at night this puddle looked murky and treacherous. They drove into it with sinking hearts. They churned on and on and still there was no end in sight. Then Jim realized that they were still churning but they were not moving forward. He looked at Shaky and recognized that glazed look in his eyes again. After a while as they settled deeper into the mud, water began coming in through the floor. Soon it covered their feet. Shaky regained sufficient consciousness to switch off the ignition and immediately fell asleep with his chin slumped on his chest, hands on the steering wheel and feet underwater. Jim took a can from behind the seat, the can opener from the glove box, his sleeping bag, and waded out onto the dry ground by the track. (paragraph) Next morning Jim woke up ravenous. He felt as if he had not eaten for a week and when he thought about it he realized that his last meal had been that piece of cold fish he’d had for breakfast the previous morning. When he asked Shaky what he had brought in the way of food it became clear that no provision for eating had been made. Shaky had expected to be fed at the stations. He now wandered to the back of the ute and pulled out a loaf of bread from a consignment that was meant to be delivered with the mail further up the road. As the delivery was already a day late they reasoned that one less loaf would be needed. Shaky ate a couple of slices while Jim finished off the rest of the loaf. They contemplated their predicament with 5

resignation. The water was a third of the way up the door and they could not see the end of the puddle for it stretched all the way to the horizon. They did not look each other in the eye for they were consumed with shame. The cause of their shame was the fact that only five metres away, running parallel to the track they were bogged in, was an alternative track, on higher ground and perfectly dry. There was nothing unusual about that : in this country when a track became too sandy or sank too far below the level of the surrounding countryside, people simply drove alongside it till a new track was formed. They had been blind indeed last night. (paragraph) Christians have always known that God has a hand in the affairs of men. If it were not so the prayers of the devout would be useless. But, (paragraph) dont pray loudly / with impatience // as if the Lord be deaf // in the mothers womb / the infants bones / grow silently. (paragraph) Some are not prepared to concede though, that His intervention in man’s destiny is governed by laws which are not amenable to human logic. Man tries with his clocks and his measures to impose his will on time but succeeds to confound himself with what is only an illusion of power. Fathers and mothers take pride in manipulating their children through schools and universities. They boast about their successful parenting as if they had some insight into the nature of man. Buffoons! Your sons may be doctors and engineers but that still will not prevent them from becoming wankers, (deleted), students of pornography and pompous bores. Your daughters will grow up to be vacuous cows, social climbers, consumers of sedatives and clients of psychiatrists. (paragraph) Shaky’s and Jim’s resignation was firmly grounded in an instinctive understanding of these profound theological truths. An understanding which was sharpened by the consumption of vast quantities of alcohol. They placed themselves in the mighty hand of God with such ease that the Pope himself would have been proud of them. (paragraph) though we will drink your wine / we cannot / drink your vinegar / as you hold us in your hand / protect us / from the nail (paragraph) Salvation came in the form of a grader driven by the owner of Clancey’s. He had radioed his neighbouring station late the previous night and discovered that Jim and Shaky hadn’t made it through, which is what he had expected anyway. He set out following their tyre marks in the morning and found two mail bags, one belonging to the neighbouring station, that had fallen out of the landrover when they had hit the washout. He returned with the mailbags which were now being delivered by a ringer who worked on his property and had to head north today anyway. He set out again but in a grader this time for Shaky’s tracks, though erratic, were tending towards low-lying country where he was sure to get bogged. The track that Shaky had taken after they left the dam was heading away from the homestead they were supposed to be going to and would have taken them all the way to the swamps of the Paroo if they had not got themselves bogged meantime. It was lucky for them that it happened as early as it did for if they had made it closer to the Paroo, and they were always going to get bogged ultimately, it may have been difficult for the grader to get to them. As it was they were still on Clancy’s and for that matter not very far from the homestead. And that’s how two bags of mail reached their destination ahead of the mail man. God’s will be done! (paragraph) I won’t go into a detailed description of the next five days. They were bogged every day, sometimes several times a day. They lost most of the mail bags and as with the first two they were found by station hands and delivered to their destination ahead of the postmen. They lost themselves many times; indeed it could be argued that they were lost all the time. Their mission took on an air of unreality. By the third day station hands were anticipating where they might come to grief and were waiting for them at strategic spots with a beer and directions. Jim later discovered that the station owners, who were all in radio contact with each other, were by then monitoring their movements with wry amusement as if following the blundering progress of rats in a maze. Their peripatetic mission had led them into another dimension where their failure to achieve specific goals did not impede their progress towards the fulfilment of a greater purpose. Now they were almost back in White Cliffs. None too soon either, for their beer had run out and they were thirsty. (paragraph) Back in White Cliffs Jim was overcome by a craving for meat. After five days on the road surviving almost solely on bread (as you guessed it that consignment was never delivered) Jim could have eaten a horse. He went from dugout to dugout looking for any left-overs but found only two small chops on a frypan at Freddy Tree’s. He knocked off a couple of patches of tiny maggots and wolfed down the meat. His stomach immediately felt better for their diet in White Cliffs norm6

ally consisted almost entirely of meat and fish. Feed the man meat! He sometimes wondered if the excessively long time it took for the cuts and abrasions on his hands and legs to heal was in some measure due to the absence of vegetables from their diet. Right now, however, it was meat that was needed. As he was walking past the general store on his way to the pub where he had left Shaky he noticed someone coming out eating a meat pie. Ah! The luck of the Irish! There was a bus load of tourists in town and the store had heated up some pies. Jim devoured three of them and felt almost back to normal. In the pub the regulars were seated around the bar drinking stubbies of Southwark, for this was in the days when draught beer and Forsters had yet to reach White Cliffs. Here is a brief curriculum vitae of several of them : (paragraph) Shaky had been a shearer and now had a crook back. He was admired throughout White Cliffs for his good cooking and because he kept a clean kitchen. The stereotype of the swearing swaggering bushman exists only in the mind of city types. Down here a bushman was judged more by his cooking and other small disciplines that he subjected himself to. There was a black mark against any man who went to bed with his boots on. Jim had done that till he learned better. Shaky was a man of few words and known to be a soft touch. He is dead now. (paragraph) Skeeter was a drifter. He lived in a string of sheds and makeshift shelters that stretched all the way to the Gulf country. A shed on the common a few hundred yards behind the pub was considered to be his when he was in town. In the days when short back-and-sides were still obligatory he earnt a few bob on the stations and shearing sheds cutting hair with proper barber’s scissors which he carried in his swag. He also carried a guitar. He claimed to have been a jockey in Adelaide and to have been cruelled by love. On other occasions he said he had roved for Port Adelaide. He was deeply in debt to alcohol and now sits in a grim institution for acute alcoholics in Dubbo or some such place, staring vacantly into space. His mind has died but his body refuses to co-operate. (paragraph) Dougie Bow had been a pilot. He was a specialist at finding good opal in the mullock heaps after rain in the days when it was still possible to get big stones that way. He was proud of his eyes. Jim once saw him, after a drinking session at three or four in the morning, nearly cut his thumb off attempting to hack a piece of meat off a kangaroo carcass for his dogs. On another such occasion he drank a mouthful of sheep dip which for some unaccountable reason he kept in an old unlabelled wine flagon and which he mistook for plonk. He was rushed to hospital in Broken Hill by the Flying Doctor Service and did not return for a week. A week after returning he repeated the mistake and died. (paragraph) Barney Brady was an old geezer who lived for the tourists in the days when that breed were still a rarity in White Cliffs. He loved to engage them in conversation, spinning them tall tales, and even taking them to his dugout to show them what an original one looked like. Jim was later to become his neighbour when he purchased the adjoining one from Fred Sealy who got spooked by the snakes that had taken up residence inside it. Barney died from old age as did Tiger Harris who lived on the other side of him. (paragraph) Young Steve had been crossed in love and had been doing odd jobs all over eastern Australia prior to settling here. He often worked as a rousabout and copped a lot of flak for wearing a long pony tail. A local station manager with a big reputation for fistic prowess poked fun at Steve’s hair in the pub one day. Steve king hit him and knocked him out with one punch. Subsequently, the manager often drank with Steve without ever recognizing that it was he who had knocked him out. (paragraph) Horst was one of the first to live in a dugout after the war. He had been an engineer in Rommel’s army but instead of obeying orders to line up with the rest to surrender and then spend years as a P.O.W. he simply walked away in the opposite direction and lived with an arab family till the war ended. He was a misanthrope and a fierce opponent of Jim’s in chess and speculative thought. He was always planning to move to a spot thirty miles away as he claimed White Cliffs had become too crowded. He had already mentally prepared himself to die for a year when he bled to death from an ulcer which he had refused to acknowledge. (paragraph) Freddy Tree had been a medical student and a Stuka pilot in the second world war. He had a wife and daughter in Venezuela and had jumped ship in order to become an illegal immigrant here. He was known as the dog man. One of his dogs was trained to cull a sheep out of a flock and drive it back to the car parked by the track. Freddy was never short of meat. He had another dog that he rented to surrounding properties. He was famous for his methods of training dogs but modesty prevents me from revealing them 7

; besides I’m frightened that my mother may get to read this someday. He was on probation forever, after getting acquitted of a murder charge. It was Freddy that had befriended Jim and invited him to share his dugout when Jim first arrived down and out in White Cliffs. He always used to drink a bottle of Bacardi between eight and ten in the evening and then go down to the pub for a fight. Later he shifted in with a black woman with half a dozen kids in Wilcannia and now has a picaninny of his own. Freddy’s favourite words were “Yabba, Dabba, Doo!” (paragraph) These were Jim’s friends : colourful but benign. None of them were weirdos like the guys he’d done time with. They were weird really weird. That’s why he spent so much time studying, so that he wouldn’t have to talk to them. There was a Kiwi there who was in for flashing himself to private school girls. He was turned on by girls in uniform. He seemed a perfectly nice bloke, just your average flasher, till Jim found out that back in Kiwiland he’d fallen in love with a cow ; when the relationship turned sour he drove over her with a tractor. They have some weird cows in New Zealand. I read in the paper that there was one there recently that had a relationship with an elephant seal : she loved his trunk. Anyway, compared to the types he’d lived with inside, these men were positively unspoilt. (paragraph) White Cliffs still looks much the same now as it did when Jim was there. But it has undergone a spiritual death. This coincided with it finding a bigger place on the ever burgeoning tourist itinerary. The individual changes that caused its death are subtle but taken together they have been lethal. (paragraph) Those innocents, those children of fate that Jim lived and drank with are nearly all gone. They have been replaced by practical men of the world in control of their lives. The new men are not trapped here as they had been ; but as with a prostitute who is good for a short time and easy to leave, they come in winter and go back to their city homes in summer. Some of these new arrivals are here to profit from the tourists by selling them the various useless articles that they so love to buy. (paragraph) If you examine the three rises surrounding the town proper you will notice that the dugouts in the hill behind the pub are as palatial as suburban homes and that their occupants can insulate themselves from their surroundings just as completely as they can in Melbourne and Adelaide. Their television reception is better than in the capitals because it is beamed direct from a satellited with no surrounding electrical interference. Notice too the shiny four wheel drives parked in front of them. In Jim’s day that hill was bare. (paragraph) White Cliffs has become gentrified. The car bodies that once gave it a surreal and desolate character have long since been towed away by the Progress Association, not because the locals found them offensive but because they believed that the tourists would. The obligatory carseat by the dugout entrance is also a thing of the past. There are fewer dogs and some of them look as if they are bathed and groomed. There is an enclosure full of giant solar dishes that provide electricity for the modern dugout lamps and the town’s four streetlights but cannot generate enough power to run the hotel’s refrigerators. Consequently the pub generator, which used to be turned off at about eleven plunging the town into a silence so profound that you could hear ringing in your ears, now runs the whole night. That acre of silver monsters is, of course, a compusory item on every tourist’s itinerary. The primary school teacher no longer lives in a tramcar. The publican takes tourists on sightseeing flights. You can buy fresh milk in the general store. There is a caravan park with coin-in-the-slot showers and laundry. (paragraph) The most hurtful change of all has taken place in the pub. As you walk into the bar you see men standing tall in their R.M. Williams elastic sided boots and their Akubra hats. They are drinking cold beer on tap from glasses. A TV can be heard from the next room. They look smug for they see that they are dressed in the style of the other men in the bar. What they don’t realize is that every man jack of them is a tourist and a fraud. Their expensive city four wheel drives covered in stickers to signify former conquests are parked out front. They have been driven here fifty metres from the caravan park, where these fakes and dilettantes will spend a maximum of two dusty days before roaring off again on the new Wanarring Road to their next conquest. In Jim’s day the cars lined up outside the pub looked hardly in better shape than the ones that littered the rest of White Cliffs. What’s more they were unregistered and usually full of dogs. The occasional tourist had to walk past these cars with his heart in his throat into a bar full of wizened shattered men covered in dust and with faces ravaged by alcohol abuse. The tourist would stand respectfully by the door holding his can wondering how these derelicts could afford to buy a beer at triple the normal price. If a study of 8

their faces gave him some slight insight into the desperation that made such extravagance possible he would know that he did not belong in the same world as they did. He would finish his beer quickly and leave quietly never to return. Now they lounge about as if they own the place. They talk loudly about petrol consumption and crap like that. They hog the pool table. The few genuine locals that are still left creep into the bar to buy their half dozen and sneak off, like strangers in their own town, to drink back in their dugouts. It makes me so angry that I can’t hold myself back any longer. (paragraph) You voyeurs, you masturbators and arse lickers. I, an obscure Greek of Armenian extraction, have the blood of antiquity running in my veins. I was there in the searing heat under a murderous load when the pyramids were built. If you glance into my eyes you will see that they are smouldering with resentment for I am partly an Arab. When I was in Jerusalem they invented tear gas, rubber bullets and public floggings to get rid of people like me. I look at your plump city features, your contented smug expressions – and I spit on you. I’ve been to Siberia and Tibet. (paragraph) Nod by the fireside / With your family close, while your books and clocks / Scheme to impose / On the natural world a pretense of order // I know better / Padding noiselessly outside, / at the settlement’s edge // My face narrowed in a red-eyed stare // To pierce the chill, my coat riveted onto me. // You would shoot me, / using the legends of my ferocity / To excuse your own. / And yet / You have had warmth to thaw your heart. / I have had snow to freeze mine. // I was born in a foodless winter, / In a gaunt death of branches / When the snow held a glitter like prophecy. / I have seen that glitter often / In the split-second of a near miss / With gun or trap. // I serve your delusion. / In the image of my lean grey form / You deposit dread and terror. / You persuade yourself that every dark force / Can be similarly shot, baited, held off / With bolted doors. // While you can shudder at me / You need not shudder at yourself. // So be it / I remain as I am, / Possessor of a grim pride / Being able to stand the cold. * (x Peter Kocan) (paragraph) I’ve been to Balmain too, but more about that later. Right now I must return to White Cliffs and the connection between circles, wheels and tourists. (paragraph) The Greeks of antiquity, my ancestors, had a belief that the circle represented perfection. It was perfectly symmetrical and it had no ending. There was a strange and irrational relationship between its radius and its circumference which appealed to their sense of mysticism. They were able to explain the movements of the moon, stars and even the erratic planets by a fabulously complex model based entirely on small circles driving larger circles inside other circles again. The model, as perfected by Ptolemy of Alexandria, required a truly agile mathematical mind to be understood. Men clung to this system for over a thousand years while it became ever more complex as new anomalous observations had to be incorporated into it. They were mesmerized by its paradoxical beauty. The more complex it became the more amazing it was to comtemplate that such an intricacy of mathematics could have at its core the eternal simplicity of a circle. (paragraph) the song that you sing / is silent / as a star / in its journey through space // we on our distant planet / are deaf to / the song / of your night // the galaxies of space turn on eternal wheels / the music of infinity / is not for mortal ears (paragraph) I can assure you that none of these considerations play any part in the tourist’s attachment to wheels. No sensitivity to beauty of any kind, let alone the beauty of ideas, burdens his mentality. It goes without saying that you do need wheels to get from A to B but your average tourist usually has an infatuation with wheels that goes way beyond this. The purpose of all his wheels is to distance him as much as possible from his surroundings without actually keeping him home in Melbourne or Sydney during his holidays. In the Far West of New South the regular tourist beat takes him from Willandra to Mungo to Kinchega to Broken Hill to Sutrt National Park to White Cliffs and then home, or vice versa. Most of his time is spent roaring along flat, well graded roads from one dusty camping park to the next. He rarely spends more than one or two nights in any particular spot as he doesn’t have the faintest interest in his surroundings. His real interest is in wheels and the machinery that makes them go. He never uses station tracks or camps off the road, he doesn’t swim in the dams and he wouldn’t dream of walking further than one kilometre. Like the man who prefers the picture of the nude in the magazine to a live naked woman in his arms, his experience is almost exclusively visual, consisting mainly of what he sees through the window of his car. (paragraph) I have devised a scale which allows you to assess the level of depravity of a tourist by the number of wheels he travels with. You find out where you belong 9

on this scale by adding up the number of demerit points you score. The scale goes from 0, which means you are a perfect human being, to 100 demerits, which means you are a 100% dead shit. Though the scale ends at 100 it is possible to score much more. (paragraph) The only way you can avoid getting demerit points is by not having any wheels which means walking. No one ever walks to White Cliffs as the nearest town is Wilcannia, 65 miles away. That just shows that nobody is perfect. If you came here with only two wheels you earn 5 demerits. A score of 0 to 10 means you’re a galah. In Australia this is a term of endearment; we send a footy team called the ‘Galahs’ to Ireland each year. If you did come on two wheels it would mean you rode a bicycle and that you are probably a student. Quite frankly I would rather you had stayed home studying even though I admire your grit. In the three years Jim lived in White Cliffs no one had ever ridden into it on a bike, though the local mad woman was known to spend the occasional night riding about the town on hers. Don’t get the idea that I’m rigid about the number of demerits you earn per wheel. If you ride a motor bike you score 15 demerits which puts you in the second category. A score of 10 to 20 makes you a wacker. If you are also wearing a leather jacket with the name of your club on the back of it you get an extra 10 points which makes a total of 25 and puts you into the third level, that is the 20 to 30 level, who are prawns. If you are one of those Japs who rides a bicycle right round Australia in about three months just to prove his masculinity and that he’s descended from the Samurai, and who after seeing nothing exc-ept his front wheel and the courrugations in the road, tells the press how empty the place is, you imm-ediately score 100 demerits, which of course puts you at the top of the category of dead shits. As I said, there is nothing schoolmasterish or inflexible about my scoring system. Four wheels earns you a minimum of 25 which makes you a prawn at the very least. That’s not too bad really, most of us are prawns, but the only way you get so few demerits with four wheels is if you’re driving an old holden or falcon. A new commodore or new falcon or any other new car scores at least 30 demerits which pus-hes you up into the category of dills. If your new car is an expensive four wheel drive then you start with fortyfive points. A score of 40 to 50 means you’re a dag. Pulling a trailer takes you up to six wh-eels and earns you ten extra points. Having an attachment for carrying a bicycle by itself earns you an extra five points and with a bicycle attached you get 15. A trail bike gives you an extra twenty, and two trail bikes an extra 50. If you are also carting along one of those three wheelers with balloon tyres and you’re not heading for your dairy farm add 40 to your score. I leave the additions up to you : 50 to 60 demerits makes you a drongo, 60 to 70 a nerd, 70 to 80 a wanker, 80 to 90 a dickhead and anyth-ing over 90, as I said before, is a dead shit. If you have a kid who plays around in the camping park with one of those radio controlled toy dune buggies you get 200 points, whichever way you came here. If one of them ever comes near me I am going to crush it like a bug. If you are a Yank or a Jap you start with a handicap of one hundred, you get an extra 100 if you’re over 80 years old. In that case you’re a super, dooper, dead shit and you should be back in your geriatric ward in Tokyo or Los Angeles or wherever you come from. (paragraph) The highest scorers that I have ever seen were three Japanese, apparently grandfather, father and son of about ten, which by the way gives them a starting score of 400, who got off an air-conditioned bus, that’s another 100 each, outside the Yanco Glen Hotel. The grandfather took a photo of the father and son standing in front of the pub grinning diabolically, then all three trooped back into the bus. The whole exercise took about one minute. For the next twenty minutes that the bus was parked they stayed inside. All three of them had been wearing R. M. Williams elastic sided boots, for which I gave them 50 points each, Akubra hats, which is another 50 points each, and a complete Davy Crockett, now better known as Crocodile Dundee, outfit, buckskin fringes and all, for which I gave them 1000 points per head. That gives them a total of 4000 demerits. I don’t know what to call them. (paragraph) I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m crook on wheels; it’s the tourists, those parasites that skim along the surface of life without ever getting burnt by its fire, that I am down on. Without the tourists wheels are okay : (paragraph) there are wheels in clocks and watches / wheels of time / there are wheels in bureaucratic departments / wheels within wheels // and a man may easily / be tangled up / in all those wheels // but don’t worry / it doesn’t matter // as long as you are in time with / the wheels of God. (paragraph) To my eternal shame I was a tourist myself once.” H is typing th +vntures of BRjOiWmN & Im O 2 bcom a 2rist 10

again! S@urday 1/5/04. Aftr w got home from the Bocadillo ystrdy wher I had drunk my usual 3 SANGRIA(blood)s I drank nothr couple of glasss of lambrusco as I w@chd the footy on telly & poppd 2 Temazepam tabelts just 2 tst thm out as Doig had sggstd I do. Whn I got up ths mornng I told H I ddnt think they had made any diffrnce but H said Id hav 2 polgize 2 th neighbours as I had bn screamin & ullul8ng in me sleep & sh had yelld JOHN! JOHN! rght in me ear but couldnt wake me. Sh says if it happns on the plane theyll hav 2 pull th cord 2 eject the seat. Mayb Ill ask Egle hoo says Tokyo → Riga takes 13 hours & has don it sevrl times what sh pops. Ncidntlly her husb&s brothr (Garrick) is a big name brain surgeon in Sydney hoo strtd his medcal career with the BROKEN HILL Flying Doctor Service. 1 day Ill ask him if he rmmbrs showng a guy calld cEhAeGsLtEer O & pickng up a mergency patient @ White Cliffs x th name of DOUGIE. This mornn w read th ppr @ AIOLI / usual & Daniel rturnd the ‘Stalker’ video blongn 2 Vaidas (2/5/04. c ‘3/4/04 – 12/4/04’ p4 & 5) whch I had lent him. I rmarkd th@ Tarkovsky is not 4 every1 as he has a unique vsual language (so said Bergman) whch can b hard 2 ppreci8 4 som & he said its evn hardr 2 ppreci8 whn youv falln sleep. Smadar did 2. 2 make up Dan offrd us muffns on th hous. I read in th ppr th@ they is celbr8in in litho 2night coz they hav joind th EU (& my litho passport whch was spposd 2 take 3 months (c ‘Aug 18’ p2) still hasnt rrived 8 months l8er) & Im gettn xited O joinin th celbr8ions. Im rturnn 2 th issue whethr th PAST is in th PAST (whch is a O xplan8ion as is also 2 say it “happnd” or “was” or “long ago” or “gon” as all u r doin is substutin the word PAST wth nothr word wth the = meann ie. ther is no xplantry pwr in doin it) or in th PRESENT as I know it has 2 b. But if in the presnt how thn (som1 mght ask) 2 ccount 4 th@ feeling of layering as if its in a deepr strata or foggy or as Sebald says (c ‘Sept 20’ p19) as if u r lookin down @ it from a skyscapr? Mayb its 2 do wth layrings in the brain, not in the nervs & tissue, but in the sequences of lectrical firings or chemcal changes 4 I suspect th@ nothin is lost but only changed (trans4md) & I 1ce had a drug nduced xperience whch proved it. Will th litho language (I was good @ it 1ce) rturn 2 me in full suddnly as if it has always bn ther but sleepin? FRtYoEmR says ther r sprises in stor 4 me. U will hear all O it in th nxt xiting nstallmnt – if ther is 1. Im signin off wth a poem (1 of the 6 in 10/1/01. c p1) : for a while I behaved as if I was an expert on death as if in my arms I had long carried a dead child through swamp and desert forest and valley till finally after many years following a winding river and grown weary now with the burden I reached a village by the sea or perhaps more accurately a tourist resort there I laid the dead child at his mothers feet and as I looked at it I realized that it was no longer a child but had grown into an old old man

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