Adam Aitken

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Adam Aitken is the author of four collections of poetry and a new book is forthcoming from Giramondo Publishing next year. He is currently living in Cambodia. (Photo by Juno Gemes)

Fin de Siècle

Between two climates she’d be waiting, the slender young émigré
so dark and delicate the wind passed right through her,
always there before you, the bright architect of love
who knew her way around the café chairs, the Latin lovers.
How she’d inspired that horizon, the penthouse, the tower.
Greek, French, Ukrainian, all of the above? No-one knew for sure
what drove her south one winter, a whim or a storm?
Her age or why she had promised to see you again,
or why she always promised, sighing, mood wracked,
hat wide-brimmed with daisies and gliding towards you
through the fun palace colonnades before sunset – no one knew
why she always promised to be there
under the whitewash crumbling that left its stain
on your waiter’s apron and in your hair, as if you had emerged
unscathed from its collapse, the blast driving you back,
grasping your last tip.
She would arrive after work (though no-one knew what she did),
complement your menu, then a final swim
before the chill shadows enclosed the beach.
Statues murmured in the dusky shadows, mascara dusk
and in the golden bracelet of a rockpool children sparkled
among their castles, before they flooded at high tide.
Were they her children? If so they could never be too careful
building their moats, before she moved to a bench in the sun.
The Latin lovers waved and she didn’t wave back.
She was the pleasure of the world passing, about to shake
her wings free of the disaster, and take off, and leave you
once again thinking this had been the best century ever
and you were haunted by what she could not forget,
already beyond your knowing, what she is and was.

Fable

That year they rode low in the water
on ballast of oaths and convicted emotions

moved on to springtime ports
past the Pig and Sows reef
and the ridiculously expensive prison
lost steerage in a lull of unconcern
and absent-minded fishing.

In those days an invasion
was a kind of plague jellyfish,
laid back remorae, or cold front
that blew in early, unseasonal.
Everyone was hitching rides.
When someone entered
new seasons of exchange– fluids, fire,
language and metal–
someone else exited.
They were what they made, and what they couldn’t
someone else did.
Another’s lack seemed
no more than their own.
All land codified
as the visible
scoured and clearfelled,
the land
of the forever language.

At Rozelle Hospital

At Rozelle Hospital, his final destination
some quartermaster who’d cracked
drew
on a sandstone pier
a worldly fish, a navy frigate in its port,

a tropic bird of seed.
Full sails, great promise,
a kind of escape
from a madder Captain.

King’s botanist inside
who made the book for all
engraved, exotic
with his names – each new flower and tree

and new stiff Latin, the whole evolutionary kit,
the iron bars of  genealogy.

Doctor, I ask you: what inky blot liberates
or draws together us
between the covers of hand-bound books
when you want your name
a legacy to crown the sky?

Fig trees, for instance, just
appear between the stones, green
as immigrants or refugees
hidden by the dark?

Are they natives now by instant decree?
You wear their leafy heads, and see
yourself once again,
historical footnote, crazed misfit

scattered, afraid, frozen
in unseasonal rain.
Or are we wasted now, due to
lack of name or use: seedy fruit
scattered in the grass,

imports that multiplied?
                    What of the bigger machines, like
                    destiny, meaning, sanity?
The fork and divergences
of who we want to be?
                   The rigging
on that ship
will catch the breeze,
then what?

Ionian

“are war and peace
playing their little game over your dead body?”
Jorie Graham

If, Eastern Asian time, you arrive
at the cove
to begin your holiday,
small figures camp in ruined hills,
waiting to advance.
Luckily we have
a Western point of view:
all timetables and maps: each hill,
the coordinates to fame
the minefield, the track
to that strategically useless
hilltop village, a tour guide,
and parking for buses.

Now, the snipers (retired codgers
your great-great grandpa couldn’t kill)
fish on the quiet beach, sipping
hot mint tea.
The winning cavalry
ride scabrous donkeys
and  for a nominal sum
escort you through the ruins.

Tides regroup like armies
and the opalescent waters
whet your Byronic taste
for filigreed pistols, severed heads,
slavegirls, broken columns. 

Filling the boats with trench-bootie:
proven property, like heritage,
gorgeous sunsets, or the exact
scent of victory –
too subtle for my words.

Reid Mitchell

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Reid Mitchell lives in New Orleans.  Following Hurricane Katrina, he refugeed one crucial year in Hong Kong.  There he and a Hong Kong poet began work on a series of dialogues, some of which have been published in Admit2, Barrow Street, Caffeine Destiny. Poetry Monthly Magazine, and Poetry Superhighway. [http://www.sighming.com/dialogue]  Mitchell has published some short stories as well as the novel  A Man Under Authority.  He has also published several books on nonfiction.

1. Sanctuary

Two and two-thirds red columns, roofless
House left unfinished?
Mansion in ruins?

2. Singapore River
(An answer to Mingh)

A word misconstrued
does not necessarily lose
all value

a path obscured
by leaves and words
may lead somewhere in the end

two people lost
in dark woods
may wander in circles

two lifetimes.

3. When I Imagine Us

When I imagine us
I see you, golden in Italy,
your small face peeking through Umbrian green, Tuscan dust, Sienna sienna, as
in an excited way, excitable you run ahead, one finger pointing.

Didn’t we walk, hot and dry, between blood orange and olive?

Didn’t we look down on the sea blind Homer promised would be wine-dark,
and the beach that slaughtered Athens,
and where we nonetheless smiled and kissed?

You watched me eat artichokes with garlic.
We strolled from ghetto to Pantheon,
past the Mandarin restaurant
and you announced you would kiss no more foul foreign mouths?

No, sad no.

The South China Sea does not lap Sicily
and those fish will not swim to Hong Kong to be sold in Causeway Bay.

And you? You were fighting with your sisters, washing your hair on the street,
finding out that words, even more than boys, could be playthings.

I was by myself, with passport, poetry I forget, and faint, unquenchable hope.

But when I imagine you,
I see us in Italy, between orange and olive,
your head glistening, your feet dusty.
You run with index finger pointing toward a miracle I cannot yet see
just ahead.

4. Ghost Bodies

Seducing a woman twelve time zones ahead
is like bringing a ghost to bed:
a nice thing to write about

I do not want your body without your mind
nor your mind without your body.
But seeing I may have the attention of one

I would like to swap briefly for one night,
seven years,
or most likely one long sunny afternoon
spent in Singapore or other southern port

“Physical intimacy?” you say.

I don’t want an abstraction.

That patch of dry skin,
the crooked toe,
the ears that don’t quite match,
your breath gone sour, hair hot with sweat.

I want to touch you all the places you hope that men don’t notice

in Saigon, Singapore or some other southern port
one long muggy afternoon when sweat refuses to dry.

I want your body,
perfect in its imperfection.

5. In Praise Of Youth

Show her no mercy,
younger children.
She showed no mercy to us

calling this love dry
and another fat.
Pointing out teeth that have yellowed
worse than old photographs.

Let her be humbled before she turns thirty
by teenage girls gawking on the escalators at Kowloon.

Let them say, “What does she mean by wearing that?”
as she passes down with bare midriff and blue velvet cap.

Let young girls’ eyes be her only mirrors.  

Tammy Ho Lai-ming

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Tammy Ho Lai-ming, aka Sighming, is a Hong Kong-born and -based writer. She is the editor of HKU Writing: An Anthology (March, 2006) and a co-editor of Word Salad Poetry Magazine. Tammy’s creative works appear or are forthcoming in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Macao, New Zealand, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, USA, and Great Britain. More at www.sighming.com.

In This Massive Hallway

In this massive hallway the mahogany
reception desk is guarded by a woman of
mixed ancestry. The owner of a well-trimmed
moustache, an old man, told me he
has been hanging out there for more than five years:
too long, indeed, too long for his original to wait,
and he died of lung cancer. The old man has five
poems: three on canoeing, two
on the Canadian poet-cum-singer Leonard Cohen.
I am newly sent to this New York journal armed
with three petite prose poems: one on fishing,
two on post-postcolonial Hong Kong. My original,
naive and expectation-laden, is sending numerous mes
to different magazines, e-zines and whatnot. Us –
all of her invisible outer doppelgängers –
carry her manuscripts and wait, sometimes for days,
sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months, for
responses from editors. We haunt waiting rooms,
store rooms, nearly-empty rooms, forgotten rooms.

(This poem appeared in a different form in 21 Stars)

In The Summit Of Greying Snow

A poet died in the summit of greying snow.
He wrote about the realistic unordinary angst
of ordinary families, or vice versa,
and the human’s subconscious wish to be short-lived,
fast-mated insect (no mid-life
crises). Some envious poets thought aloud
to each other: oh it was wonderful to die
in the sacred cold, don’t you think? The icy weather
effortlessly formed a natural tomb for the sealed
and healed spirit. Other poets took up the task
to console the poet’s wife: her cream marble face
scarred with two non-parallel one-way tear tracks.
At the funeral, the wife asked the poets
to recite a poem of her husband’s – any poem
from any period of his writing career would do,
she said. Even the insect poems, she added.
The request drained away all sounds in the hall
in which the coffin was appropriately centred.
No one present, except the wife, had read
the poet’s poetry, and they called themselves
members of the same community of practice.

They spent too much time complaining at meetings
about the shrinking of the reading public
in the junk-layered village and being jealous
about other more successful writers –
mortal enemies.

Stephen Oliver

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Stephen Oliver’s latest collection of poetry is titled, Either Side The Horizon, Titus Books, Auckland / Sydney, 2005. His next collection titled, Harmonic is forthcoming from IP Interactive Publications, Brisbane, in 2008. IP is to release his CD recording of poems read by the author, to music composed by Matt Ottley, November, 2007. The CD is titled: KING HIT Selected Readings. 

An Avenue To The Sea

Knowledge comes by indirect paths,
found addresses, by moonlight’s note left on the

back doorstep, molecular puzzle

of pigeons (brown and white potsherd)
in the high air at mid-day over this raucous town.

By panels of light cantilevered off cloud
that signal the departure of angels to earthly realms.

City of property investors, real estate mania.
City of rack renters and home renovators.

City of bladed light and blue-grey harbour.
City of broken contracts and sybaritic compulsion.

City of up-front rip-offs and council rorts.
City of jasmine and the eternal summer party.

City of shimmer dreams-sans-memory.

The most famous of living poets remain anonymous
and unrecognized in foreign towns,
                   ghosts before their time.

An avenue of artists, philosophers, poets, musicians
leads from the city square out through suburbs,

past terra cotta, yellow, and liver-brick villas –
(smoke twists through pine and laurel grove)

an avenue wide enough for a phalanx of soldiers
or two tanks grazing side by side.

Flags of spiritual battles won and lost adorn poles
set at intervals, diminishing
                     whitely into distance,

where it is observed that a central point at the close
of the avenue, bright as diamonds streaming in

the light, (barely larger than your pupil) is the
sea burning in its cauldron of watery fragmentation.

For Night To Roll Its Camber Over

The ruddy glare,
         yellow, blurs its palette in rain,
at the boundaries of vision

flaring to white, blindingly, passes on (reassuringly)
          into darkness, a rubbery hiss.

August is the windiest month,
west, sou’ westerlies rattle the Sydney basin.

Light beams search down through underside
of cloud where planes lower unwaveringly toward

          North East, South West runways.

A machine screams slowly backwards over rooftops
(a sound that moves away-and-toward)

pushing space apart, seemingly swallowing itself.

Reverberations directly overhead wrap around
the room you’re in and rooming under

            for night to roll its camber over.

Gareth Jenkins

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Gareth Sion Jenkins: writer, performer and digital media artist. Gareth currently teaches creative writing at the University of Newcastle, the University of Technology Sydney, and the University of Wollongong where he is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Creative Arts. His theoretical work focuses on art-makers who have experienced schizophrenia and he has presented his research in Australia, Europe and the U.S.A. Gareth’s creative work explores poetry, prose, digital media and performance. He has performed and been published in Australia and internationally.

Corfu

Swallows loudly in ancient architraves wake me
diving onto cobbled stones washed each morning.

The motion of my mind towards you,
lips bent and feeling no thing, no thing
finds me.
Swallows loudly.

I remember every dream in which you sing,
your voice a hedged rustling;
aural snow drifting into the Pyrenees rift,
your breath moves me breathing –
breathe,
breathe me in.

I remember every dream in which you say:
“My heart is four chambers singing your name.”

Come stand with in me.
Watch the morning light bright with Swallow’s wings uncoiling.

Premonitions

I looked for you on the subway and in Washington Square;
thought I saw you wandering through Central Park
as the light fell into the ice.

In Brooklyn there were rumours of your movements
spoken at the edges of basketball courts,
amid the crumble of brownstones.

I waited for days outside Printed Matter at 195 10th Avenue,
I was sure you would come and read their hand-made books.

Descending into Tahir Vintage Clothing Boutique at 412 & 9th St
I thought at last I had found you
chatting with the warm-smiling creature behind the counter.
You turned and morphed, striding away into another life,
leaving me seduced by a loosely-woven scarf.

“Premonitions,” said the psychic at 1091 2nd Avenue,
her ringed finger coiling the curtain.
I listened to the passage of feet on the pavement outside,
hearing you again and again stop to check your watch, straighten your hat.

I have left my breath for you in Manhattan’s subterranean steam,
my fingerprints in the American Folk Art Museum,
my footprints in the tangled subway,
my laughter in the budding Central Park trees.

Skin Drink Rain

I ask her if she minds me smoking, holding before me a packet of rolling tobacco
as explanation. She holds up her own and as the carriage blunders the length of Spain
we fill the air with smoke. It soars forth between lips parted as if to speak,
though silence reigns;
clouds of silence fill the air, more convincing of a union than any words could be.

She runs out of paper and I lend her. Each time I set out to smoke I offer,
each time watching her hand as it reaches over,
veins rearing up under her skin.

Morning comes with mountains, waking me from an unknown sleep.
The wind is back, drawing dead leaves from trees.
Rain, hard against the metal roof, blurs and magnifies the world.
After the changeless weather of near Sahara, upper Africa – this blessing,
the air is laced with ice.
I take off my shirt and press my chest against the cool of the glass,
hang my head out of the window,
                                    let my skin       drink           rain.

She sleeps, immersed in a pool of dreams. “Come in the water’s beautiful,” she says
without moving her lips.

I wake later and she is gone.
Not even the depression of her weight marks the spot where she sat.
I run out of paper and curse her for hours, trying to read –
                                     trying to ignore the tapping of my foot,
                                     voice in my mind, restless tight rasping
                                     demanding to be fed.

Heng Siok Tan

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Heng Siok Tian has published three collections: Crossing the Chopsticks and Other Poems (1993)My City, My Canvas (1999) and, Contouring, (2004). She has been published in Harvest International (2006/2007), Idea to Ideal (2004), Love Gathers All: A Philippines-Singapore Anthology of Love Poems (2002), No Other City: An Anthology of Urban Poetry (2000), More Than Half the Sky (1998), Journeys: Words, Home and Nation (1995), The Calling of the Kindred (1993), Singapore: Places, Poems, Paintings (1992), New Voices in Southeast Asia (1991) and Words for the 25^th (1990). One of her short stories has been translated into Italian for a collection of Singapore short stories published by Isbn Edizioni (2005). Her short play, The Lift, staged in 1991, was selected to be read at the Third International Women Playwrights’ Conference in Adelaide in 1994. Siok Tian holds a Master of Arts in Literature from the National University of Singapore and a Master of Science in Information Studies from the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore. In 2000, she attended the Iowa  International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, USA on a National Arts Council Fellowship.

Sayang Airwell 

Airwell
in the centre of a baba home
shows me
a mosaic of blue.

Like a pre-hologram,
glimpsing an early sky:

I see amahs in samfoos
in their time and space
squatted here,
washing, working within the marbled tiles,
for big master and mistress who slept above,
for little masters they would sayang and love..

Where was their half of the sky?
next to babas and nonyas twirling, whirling with a gramophone in an upstairs dance studio
which became the play den of fruit bats when owners upgraded,
now
layered with droppings, so decomposed they become
earth.

To first lose the turquoise of mosaic-blue, then the shapes of carved zodiac animals,
to leave them with the wings of bats,

to touch again these losses
as I linger on the airwell,
so sayang,
sayang.

Carnivalesque

My noise won’t stop.
Elephants howl for no reason
I could not get
my clown-act right
and the master trainer
threatens to whip me.
I fear so much
I wish so hard
he begins to change from pumpkin to marsh-mellow

I stop believing I have a wand
to magick away
unpleasantries
baking them into cup cakes
which I serve my audiences,
as they reach for them,
the cakes become bubbles,
they become angry at my alleged deceit.

Did I ask
to cruise into midnight
to meander into side-alleys,
to be led
into labyrinths
where cobwebs become
fishing hooks
that sink into dry flesh,
shooting stars
cannon balls
running through my head
lines of a chair
become dancing skeletons
that slip near to me?

I lost my posture as a chimpanzee,
broke my brittle back with stilettos,
rectify with surgery, pilates, yoga…
only to find myself
fetal-like in bed,
licking words off the edges
cursing Caliban-fashion
the knowledge of names.

Margaret Bradstock

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Margaret Bradstock is a Sydney poet, editor and critic. She is an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the University of NSW, a long-term committee member of Poets Union and co-editor of Five Bells. She has published four collections of poetry, the most recent of which are The Pomelo Tree (Ginninderra, 2001), which won the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry, and Coast (Ginninderra, 2005). She has also won Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson awards. Margaret was Asialink Writer-in-residence at Peking University, Beijing, in 2003.

The Butterfly Effect

(after Decompose, by Gaye Chapman)
‘Is the moon not there unless I can see it?’
                                                       – Einstein

Back home, but never back,
     exploding like ectoplasm
across the empty rooms,
     the decomposed gardens.

Old responsibilities, seasons
     rise up, numinous
as Christmas ghosts, this space
     that once took us in.

For the cabbage nymph, or neophyte,
     it’s chaos theory.
Dust on the snooker balls
     might change

the moment of collision,
     the dense stars wheeling
in the firmament,
     or the response.

In Albert Brown Park

The night-stroked suburbs,
      flare of occasional street lights
            holding us in shadow,

and drought-starved gardens.
      Downhill, past the Alsatian
            revving up behind meshed wire

patrolling his square of concrete,
      past the corner park, more
             strip of green than park.

On the signpost
      something hunches
            (frogmouth or nightjar),

a soft churring
      shaping its gentle breath.
            We douse torches, so close

I might have touched it,
     flight-feathers pinned,
            waiting for prey.

Light plane over Sydney Cove
(after Brett Squires)

Crossing the Blue Mountains
                        soon after dawn

the air like torn canvas
you stretch the limits of reflected light
promontories reaching out
                        the Harbour glimmering.

Those Dubbo mornings
flying back from Emergency
the nightshift routine
of work, sleep, eat, repeat . . .
         broken and restless for harbours.

Cupping the city
in the curve of your hands
you photograph the moment
                 the propeller’s beat.

Brenda Saunders

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Brenda Saunders is a Sydney writer and artist. She is a member of the Poets Union NSW and the Round Table Poets. As an urban Aboriginal artist and activist she is also a member of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative. Her poetry and articles have been published in journals like Thylazine and Poetrix as well as being broadcast on ABC Radio National. Brenda was selected for The Red Room Company’s Poetry Crimes, and more recently for Poetry Without Borders ( National Poetry Week 2007).

Dark Secrets

Truth can spill out
with little hooks
of questions,

caught in photos
stuffed at the back
of a drawer.

Families of black people
camping in tents
faded to sepia tints.

A loving couple
one white, one dark
uneasy in a boat on a lake.

And the negatives
give nothing away.

Vanished frames of secret lives
pale squares on wallpaper
whisper denial.

In the silence of the old house
my fingers leave traces
in the film of dust.

Untitled

Dark hands
beat the silence.
Curled tight they hold
the anxious moment,
let others slip by.

Years of blackness
spread across the palms
– rivers dispossessed,
tributaries
going nowhere.

Time runs out
with the present fear,
a lifeline held
in metal cuffs
caught at the wrist.

Black-out

‘Sista girl    need money    to get home    Native title
case   ‘Big time!’   she raps, edgy.

Some story.

She’s young, black and living in the city:

‘Gimme a dolla
Pay the Rent
whitey guilt
easy street’

Up in court, on the run. Stealing stuff,
could be.

‘This is a refuge’ I say, ‘OK? For Koori women at risk
Rape and violence, you know.’

          – RIGHTS FOR WOMEN  pinned to the wall,
          a poster men don’t read,
          (after the rage he’s blotto on the bed.
          She plays dead.)

I give her money, refer her on.

Now I hear she’s working
on the Block,

tradin’ for cuz
speedy in the fast lane:
Live for the day.

Locked in jail,
singin’ up country.
Dreamin’s free

… cuz: cousin, friend, singin’ up country: remembering tribal land

Carolyn van Langenberg

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Carolyn van Langenberg is the author of the novels fish lips, the teetotaller’s wake, blue moon and sibyl’s stories (Indra Publishing).  In 2000,  fish lips was short-listed for the David T K Wong Fellowship, East Anglia University, UK. After many years of writing prose, she has returned to poetry, recently publishing on the net and print journals like Shearsman (UK), Cordite, Aesthetica (UK), Antipodes (USA), Staples, Macau writing and Poetando. She is co-poet with  Shé Hawke of the chapbook tender muse (Picaro Press, 2007).

The Tricky Light
Coles Bay, Tasmania

i) At Freycinet National Park
unusually bathed in sunshine
how I stood on the rough path
above the still composition

–aquamarine fastness,
ochre rocks and rubble,
brown tussocks bristling up
sand like pale, crushed shells.

Time stopped where my heel sank.
When I pointed my camera,
how I clicked the shutter on beauty.
Or was it breath taken away.

ii) Home with holiday snaps
how I studied the nature pics –
white banksias  and orange moss
under whisked shadow of flight,

wingspan wide across sunned air –
then her face staring, straight
hair pinned off broad forehead,
hand shielding eyes from glare,

dressed in a calico pinny, black smock,
body wedged between rocks and grass
below the high-tide line of the cared-for shore
fetched up in conjuring gold.

Saucer
(for Leonie)

White saucer snagged in reeds
gleamed under watery green
for the slide of long-fingered curiosity
to fit with story and cup.

A mouthful of sky empty of nothing,
it leads an unremarkable life,
no name to lose in riversand,
no dream to hold in mud.

Vanished for years without a word,
the flooding currents of the river
sank unwritten history
at the bend near the big red house

where the date palm widened midday shade
and pink begonias flushed the lawn, the favoured spot
for the clean-up blitz when orange flames licked
waste paper, empty tins, cracked saucers.

Dumped, eventually, in the back of a boat
with scavenged things, it found
a mismatched cup, but no cloth spread
over the roots of  a sprawling tree,

no table set for afternoon tea.
An oar knocked silence. The saucer trembled.
A cow with its tail frisked flies from its back.
And a spoonful of sunshine slipped upstream.

David Murray

January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments

Dave Murray, 44 yrs old. Still studying (Masters at Newcastle Uni) between full-time work as a Public Servant. Married to Michelle. Two children:  Joe, 24; Shani, 11. Two Russian Blue cats. Likes reading Shakespeare for the words, gardening, drinking beer on Fridays and  supporting The Sydney Swans. Dreams of surfing the North Coast one last time. 

from "The Passenger"

The photos are mostly from my mother’s side: cousins, a great-grandmother, aunts, uncles with half-remembered names grouped in backyards or on “days out” at the beach. The eyes have a trapped-animal-gaze, caught in that moment freezing out death. Some of the faces are beautiful, some contorted from squinting against the sunlight. I look for inherited noses or lips, any gesture connecting the silence of ancestry – but find black & white uneventfulness rather than any dark secrets: labourers, compositors, housewives, nurses, teachers. Teetotallers or drunkards, prone to underachieving. All British, all intimate with depression and wars. The great-grandfather and wife in a Tasmanian portrait after the ship from Ireland in 1802; he was a shoe-maker. His face is severe. Victorian. His grandson (Mum’s Dad) followed the Newspaper trade to Newcastle after returning from French trenches dragging a six-pack Catholic family and a body (like so many) restitched and recycled in a front-line field hospital. He survived with medals and a belief in struggle, worked hard and gambled, a long shot in the 4th at Broadmeadow covered a cash down payment on a Blackalls Park block – a quiet Lake Macquarie backwater, protected by eternal gums, the penultimate stop on the Toronto line. The house my grandfather built sloped gently all the way to the forty-foot long jetty, that through certain angles disappeared into the still water, broken only by silver mullet flashes, confused by predators in the shallows. As these things go, it was sold after Nan carked it, the new owners replaced it with a terracotta, two-storey, mock Italian seaside villa, with uninterrupted water views.