Here there is no history, if by history you mean the soul fired in the kiln of time. Here there is only the compilation of event in a scrap-yard of days & kicked aside incident.

You can still hear the settlers squeeze box & fiddle in suburban settlements & tavern, the landscape-flat accents, the Sky Channel applause and throat-clearing of smoke exhaust.

We remember the po-faced poets who went away never to return from the Ambition Wars & Success Sorties.

As always, cars chittering in long queues in the persimmon light of dusk, on freeways dreary with drizzle and distance, at the encoded city-bound intersections.

He makes his heroine his addiction and vice versa, becomes the object of obsession into which safe-zone he precipitates himself, unmanned.

Away now from that well worn cliche, the crazy party hat of Sydneys Opera House / the bat-eared shells

& clouds that muscle reflective buildings

to the O so cloacal coil of green hills round the rectangular cattle, prominent as so many out-of-town acts in provincial centres.

You pass smoothly in your car the valley below & there - an intimate scene: a family gathered shock still: the overhanging forest imaged on the coffin-lid,

momentarily, then lowered into shadow. The town lies behind you.