Nice piece of political staging the other day in Canberra. Where, instead of going outside and actually talking to people about their rights to protest and how it’s difficult for people to ‘get over’ genocide and invasion, the political leaders take the chance to stage an outrage. In all the footage as they are leaving, you don’t see a single protester harassing the ‘leaders’. Except this one poor bloke who got trampled by the cops.
Tracy Ryan’s most recent poetry collection The Argument continues her overarching theme of perspectivism, or ways of seeing. The previous in the scope of perspectivism being Scar Revision and The Willing Eye. Just after the release of Scar Revision I dabbled with the idea of writing a review, but hesitated on the grounds that the work was a ‘thing in itself’. A work so artistically rounded that any review would detract from the act of reading the book itself. Now, however, with The Argument a pattern has emerged that sheds new light and openings to Ryan’s previous efforts. Read More…
5am we watch the sun rise at Mooro Katta.
Nowhere to sit but cold marble steps
Where we have placed hundreds of fake candles
Which hundreds of people carry hundreds
Of metres across the dewy grass
Where ducks are asleep and the plants
Are from thousands of kilometres away
With common and Latin labels.
And because there has been rain they look healthy.
Happy even. Orchids amongst banksias
Kangaroo paw amongst marri. The light
Changes so rapidly, we walk amongst strangers
And those of us who have not cried feel the change too.
At the hilltop we come to a boab;
That travelling circus elephant, rotten and cracking
A beached whale whose blubber leached
Back to the ocean, staining the sand.
Up north they use these trees as prisons.
Down below we see the estuary
That once was a river and further and further
Past the smoke stacks, purple hills.
Others are already at the memorial
Stretching their legs, straightening their backs.
A wattle bird’s silhouette on the metal railing.
Someone blows their nose and uses the same tissue
To wipe their eyes. For all the stories
We choose life and die, or choose death
And die. And after the poem is read
And we disperse, we meet a pregnant woman
Due any day, a cook from the country
Whose only wish is to see her toes again.
Fremantle Press have published a book which includes Emma Rooksby, Scott-Patrick Mitchell and myself. New Poets, edited by Tracy Ryan. Made possible by Georgia Ritcher, Kiri Falls, Clive Newman and everyone else at the press.
http://www.fremantlepress.com.au/books/1143
Also podcast here:
and part II here:
Thought I’d upload my dissertation. Please download A Tour of Ashfield Flats here
Cement bags shore
bulrushes
wooden sleepers
casurina obesa
limestone blocks
jarrah jetty
eucalyptus marginate
old car tyre
concrete slabs
a cormorant, still baking
its black feathers
moving in water reflection
caustic lighting.
Bamboo stands
fallen tree
banks quite high
fresh kills, land fill
a stratum of ripples
gravel blocks concreted
together, piles of palms
dirt bank
broken brick bank
deck chairs, a deck across branches
fence between houses
a movement underwater
makes ripples
eucalyptus rudis, a swing
the green leaves yellow in morning light
you can heard eastern highway throbbing
violence, the wake
high tide algae
constant smashing of foamy water
a shag swallowing a fish
the paddle breaking the surface
knock of metal on canoe wood.
Sand, cream grey orange
many footprints
a divet you can see the bottom in the water
but the sky, the shimmering trees
a twenty eight, rosellas ripping
tuarts to pieces
a rubbish truck, its dinosaur armature
great roots occasion the air
a tree rerooted after fall.
The fall loud and raucous in early morning
when owls chase mice
smashing their skulls
single skulls, single rocks
a blue heron pulls up on a log
blue rocks, a moved quarry
a house worth of blue metal
looks quarry-like as a bank
the shore stabilised
by a inflated yellow balloon
a house worth of blue metal
dumped in the river.
Cyclist.
We move into the cool dark,
the long line
the earth moved
two times a day
shadows marking the edge
of the channel
mulloway stalk prawns
mullet jump, sometimes
ten at once all around the canoe
half a dozen dolphins
in a feeding frenzy
a sudden feeling of excitement,
we move closer.
The dolphins roll, a dog, barking
swims out to eat them.
To play with brushmatressing,
parallel to waves, dolphins
settle, galahs fire up, squawking
sickly dorsal fins, their breathing
almost too often, thrashing
and violence the arch of their back,
Redcliffe bridge in the background.
For Patrick Ford
In John Dixon Hunts’ book Greater Perfections in the chapter ‘Word and Image in the Garden’ he discusses the role of the word and narrative and experience in landscape architecture. In context of narrative, he argues:
“[N]arratives that recount times past do so in the present, which with landscape architecture is intimately linked to the configurations of the site that functions both as setting and presumably as prompt for the narrative to be recounted. Further, the “reader” is thrust into prominence; the narrative of a place relies on the verbal skills of its visitor, who has to infer or “translate” from the given materials, which can never (qua narrative) be as complete as they would be, for instance, on the pages of a novel.”
Thus, the verbal skills of a viewer, reader or visitor in a didactic, narrative designed landscape can never as complete as the reader of a novel. This is because of the “translation” from the abstraction of the inscriptions on the materials of the site, and the site itself. Therefore, for example, a plaque by the ocean may describe the anchorage of a ship in a port two hundred years earlier. The visitor reads the plaque, looks over to the position of anchorage, and is imagines a ship there. The argument put forward by Hunt is that this scenario is not as complete a narrative on the pages of a novel. However, I think there are grounds for a contrary argument. A visitor with verbal skills may have their experienced enhanced by looking out to where the boats set anchor. A purely fictionalised novel has no landscape equivalent to compare the given materials.
Unless of course, Hunt means that a plaque can never be as long or as big as a novel. In which case he is correct. He concludes: “in short, the site qua site may play a greater or lesser role.” When, I think what he means to say is: the abstract site (narrative) within a real landscape may play a greater or lesser role.
Sites within sites, narratives within narratives; the way our minds work and our body moves through a site is immensely complex. There are an infinite amount of impressions, senses, ideas and events that coalesce to complete our understanding of a landscape or site. While historical narratives within sites seek to represent a true interpretation of a sites past, what of the fictional impressions we gain from a site? How does a shift in scale, an imagined people of the past, an animated artefact, the re evaluation of the ugly change the way we read landscapes? Can, or do we reach neutrality by championing the fake and the ugly when best practise seeks to promote the good and feel good?
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