I stop at the lights

and see a

woman on

the other side

of the road

standing still.

I was in a future city and the transport system comprised pods that were conveyed from one part of the city to another inside the sewage system. You got into one of a number of small pods, which were made of meatal and plastic, and it was injected into a pipe that was also filled with sewage, then it was sent at high speed to its destination. Other cities had similar systems but they were different in material respects. Some of the city systems had faults, while others were considered best practice. The city I was in had a system that was malfunctioning, and the sewage would remain coating the pods that came out of the pipe after they arrived at their destination; this was not how the things were supposed to work, I knew. The pods were very small and round and I felt unhappy about getting into one of them because of claustrophobia and because physically in my joints I am not very flexible, but I had to.

-- 25 December 2018

One thing and

another tries,

like an aristocrat,

to populate

wilderness where

we are lost.

The day’s wet

dark roadway

sets breadcrumbs

to the house,

a park, and

the harbour.

The tax

that I pay

for friendship

burdens me

one evening

at a time.

Today a friend and I went up to Newtown for lunch and we had Thai. After leaving the restaurant we walked south on King Street and I saw a young woman with pink hair wearing a white long-sleeved shirt and a rainbow-coloured bow tie. My friend and I stopped at Parliament, a cafe near Alice Street where there's an old 70s Ducati stuffed into the fireplace and a church pew for customers to sit on. After leaving the cafe my friend caught a cab and I walked back up toward the pub next to the railway station, because I had to use the loo.

In the pub after obeying the call of nature I walked back out into the bar. It was close to 4.30pm and the room was full of young people on stools and gathered on their feet around the bar that ran the length of the room toward the street windows. I dodged my way through the press of people, heading for the door and out on the street I walked north, back home.

In Victoria Park the lights were already on. I could see two taxis parked at the kerb near the university with their vacancy lights illuminated. The drivers were standing on the footpath talking animatedly and I guessed that they knew each other and had arranged to meet there. Near Broadway I saw a candy-coloured police car moving sedately down toward the traffic lights. I went across Broadway into Bay Street and walked down to Wentworth Park. In the park there were still parents supervising their children on the play equipment next to the path. A group of young people walked toward me. Near the viaduct over Wattle Street I saw the train heading eastward, its windows shining in the darkness. There were three vehicles parked on the footpath under the viaduct. People had set up for the homeless people who live in the park and they were standing behind tables serving food to them.

A woman carrying a smartphone in her hands came up to me and asked what was happening. "They're giving food to the homeless people," I said to her as we stood on the footpath next to the traffic. "There are homeless people living under the arches. Lots of them." A group of people walked in my direction on the footpath and I could see that several of them wore T-shirts printed with the name of a well-known seafood restaurant. I guessed they were Fish Market employees leaving work for the day.

At the back of the Fish Market it was dark and I saw a young woman on a scooter and a man jogging on the pavement. The shipping containers in the parking lot with the fish nets piled on top of them stood in front of the motorway pylons, on top of which the concrete roadway sat. It was getting dark. In Miller Street I heard the rail car sound its bell and looking down into the cutting I saw the train pulling up at the station, its lights shining in the gloom. I entered Harris Street with its bars and pubs and was soon home.

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Note: This is southern hemisphere so June is wintertime.

The weekend at the end of the third full week of spring we drove north to the Hawkesbury River and parked the car near the water in the town of Brooklyn. It was still late morning but there was a fish-and-chip shop open near the ferry wharf that also did burgers. There, we ordered barramundi-and-chips, a prawn bun, and some deep-fried battered school prawns. Having eaten we bustled down to the wharf and got on the small white ferry named ‘Sun’ with its long cabin and with its rows of wooden seats that are painted the same simple colour as the exterior of the boat. It was due to leave. I took a photo (shown below) of the water under the wharf, where a small white fish, about an inch long, was swimming in the green water of the harbour.

The pilot is a middle-aged man with a weathered face who took money from passengers and gave them tickets. He made change out of an oversized Tupperware box with clear plastic sides and a lid that was hinged at the back. The tickets we were given had ‘Adult single’ printed on one side and were made from a heavy yellow paper with perforations separating them from their neighbours.

The pilot guided the boat out of the harbour and set it on its course for Little Wobby, which is on the north bank, on the other side of the river. The settlement is a narrow strip of houses built in the lee of a sandstone cliff that hikers negotiate on day trips when they want to see the bush. Approaching the wharf our boat shuddered at a lower frequency than it had done when crossing on open water. Olive slopes loomed above us, their brown-leaved trees and dark-green eucalypts alternating one next to the other.

Three Korean women who were aged in their early sixties stood up, ready to get off, but the pilot placed himself in the doorway and alerted them to the fact that they probably should wait until the boat reached its ultimate destination. There is no café at Little Wobby, he told them, just residences and a path for bushwalkers to use to scale the rises behind them. The women sat down on their bench again and we set off. In the water were brown jellyfish as big as soccer balls.

When we arrived at Dangar Island it was still low tide and everyone readied to disembark but before he cleared the way to the exit the pilot told people when they should expect the boat to return to pick them up. He said that the 3.45pm service would be well-patronised and encouraged people to consider taking an earlier one if they could manage it.

We ended up having a cup of tea at the café that stands next to the wharf. The waitress told us a little about the island to give us an idea of how to get around. After drinking the tea she served us and eating some Portuguese tarts we walked up the hill. Where a path sets out east from the road I asked a woman who was walking behind us if this was the way to the beach. She told us she didn’t know, that she was a visitor like us, and that she was on the way to use the lavatory.

After turning off on the path we ascended a small rise then came out in a clearing where there is a park with swings and other gear installed for children to use. There is also a bowling green with a clubhouse next to it. Some people were sitting on rugs in the park. A sign beside an open gate invited visitors to go in, and the message added, reassuringly, that the resident might be found out the back of the house in the garden. We walked through the gate and called out to alert the people living there that we had arrived.

An elderly woman with a heavy-set figure dressed in tracksuit pants and a sweater came around from the side of the wooden house standing in front of us. She introduced herself and asked us our names, shaking each of our hands, then invited us to go inside to learn about the history of the island. Next to the front door were stacks of books with stickers on them for the price. The woman, who said her name was Ann, showed us books she had published herself containing histories of the locale. We were told that we could buy copies of the books but that first she would give us a tour.

In the room behind the vestibule, Ann removed the cloth covering a table to reveal a clear plastic sheet beneath which were photographs and pieces of paper with text printed on them. She started to tell us the story of Henry Dangar, after whom the island had been named. Originally it had been called Mullet Island because there had been a time when plenty of the fish were caught in its waters. Ann proceeded to give us a detailed history of the man and, removing the cloth covering a second table situated next to the first, went on with the story of the building of the railway bridge over the river, completed in the 1860s. The company that had won the contract was American and hence the township nearby has a name borrowed from the place with the same name in the city of New York. It is called Brooklyn.

Ann told us that the bridge had however been poorly constructed because the subcontractor who had been paid to build the piers on which it rested had failed to fill them with cement, so that by the 1930s the authorities had had to make trains using the bridge slow down when crossing it for fear that the pylons would collapse under the stress of transporting them across the river, which flows in a steep valley. The war arrived before anything could be done about the faulty structure and after it was over a new bridge was built, which still stands today. There is also another bridge for cars that connects the township to the M1 that feeds traffic south and north into and out of the metropolis.

At one point in her delivery, the irrepressible Ann put on a recording of a popular tune titled ‘Rainbow on the River’, from the early part of last century, which had something to do with the Marine Hotel, which Henry Dangar’s son had operated on the island and which took visitors from Sydney who arrived on steamboats that came in from the ocean and along the river to dock at a long pier that has since been dismantled. As the music was playing, Ann hung from a nail, that had been hammered into the lintel over the entranceway of the room we were standing in, a plasticised sheet of paper that was attached to a cord. Twirling her hands and singing along to the recording, Ann sang the words that had set to the tune all those years ago, evoking ideas attached to old phonograph records that you used to be able to find in second-hand music stores, discs that were heavy and brittle and that would crackle with static when you put the needle down onto them as they span on your turntable.

As we stood next to the table near the front door where the books were stacked, with display copies standing on plate racks, I pointed out the two I wanted to purchase. Ann took the books to one of the tables that held the documentary evidence of the early settlement, and obediently signed them for us using a black Biro. I gave her thirty dollars and she put it on the table but while we were there she didn’t pick it up. After this we walked around Ann’s garden looking at the plants as she named them, one by one. Next to a pale green plant with spreading leafy fronds set in a core hidden in the dirt of a large planter, Ann searched for a word and with her right hand silently snapped her fingers impatiently, as I thought “artichoke”. Which is what it was. We soon left, and walked east, then turned south and headed down a sandy path to a beach.

It was bordered, to the east, by a rocky outcrop covered in oysters. To the west it was clear and we walked in that direction. A jellyfish lay partially buried in the yellow sand. The mudflats were crawling with tiny crustaceans and boats at anchor lay stranded on them, revealing that the bottoms of their hulls were covered with marine growth.

We walked to the end of the beach and then turned back the way we had come. Navigating our way along the dirt paths that thread among the houses on the island, we arrived back at the café near the wharf and bought cold drinks to have while we waited for the ferry. Mine was off and I threw it out in a bin near the shop’s entrance. On the way back to the car the boat vibrated as it had done on the journey outward. I thought about Ann and her insistence that Henry Danger had not, as I had read in other books, paid for the legal defence in the case of the crown against the Myall Creek massacre perpetrators. It was an inconvenient fact and had to be ignored for the rest of the edifice to stand.

Dreamt that they were bringing people back to life after death. It started with people installing angle grinders into a structure that could then be submerged to take it down to where the caskets containing the dead bodies were kept. I was evidently then using scuba gear when I saw the first dead body: that of a dog. The skin had completely come off its head but I patted it on its skull anyway. One by one the dead bodies were removed from their protective caskets, including that of Einstein, whose hair was still full and rich and whose face looked a bit worse for having been buried for many decades. He was still recognisable however.

--------------------

First entry in planned book, 'Dream Journal' covering 3 years of captured dreams. Would you buy this book? Suggestions welcome.

It's been a while

since cold

broke the ice

of the morning

we swelter

love, in

daylight hours

down here

where the sun

rattles the cages

of every heart

as soon as it rises.

Augie, sweet girl, lived with her olds nearby

the intersection of the two major

arteries that link up the tethered isle

with the metropolis; the bus would roar

through the strip mall where my mother’s gift shop

sat at the top of Petrarch Avenue,

pass the bowling club, then corner, and stop

to let you off before it would renew

its howling on the straight past the lighthouse,

then negotiate the decline toward

the old fishing village. I’m curious

as to how my journey might have played out

if I’d been with Augie, her strawberry

hair and her skin like milk; the signs were there

to get serious, what got in the way

it’s hard to recall; was she just too square

for my mercurial temperament? I

had an invitation to her house once;

I sat on the chintz sofa with the sky

staring through the window at my fingers

resting on my pantslegs while Augie’s dad

engaged me in pleasant conversation

and poured beer to enliven the arid

ensemble we made; there were complaisant

mutterings when I forgot to open

my mouth while tipping my glass, spilling beer

on my tie. I had been overtaken

either by a bad conscience or some queer

anticipation of intimacy;

things hovered in the room like poltergeists.

Had her father asked to meet me? Did she

think that our recent friendship might convert

itself suddenly to romance? That would

have put an unwarranted rationale

on our ties, which were never understood

so entirely as to want parental

consent. Thus my thoughts unfolded as we

got in the car and drove down to the golf

club by the sea (we were always by the sea)

where we ate lunch, our knees under the stiff

tablecloth; it might have been a buffet,

and though I spilt nothing else on myself

it’s like Augie had tucked herself away

just like a white napkin: folded up safe.