You the too curious gringo left behind you the coasting steamers & pink squared plazas to forget the taste of warm beer in dreary cantinas.
You headed for the high ground of Tabasco & the country of ruined churches. Back at the beginning
of those lawless roads lie the dingy houses smearing out onto silver sandhills.
Wardrobe Drinkers
is what they are in Austinmer. Yuppies from the North Shore, $300,000 homes on the beach front, sending the RSL broke & the greenies blocking development for a few birds up an estuary. Could be worse, given the Japs on the Gold Coast going off like mobile phones. The miners & cottages are long gone & so is full employment. In 1941 as a telegraph delivery boy I made 13 shillings 10 a week. Across the Harbour Bridge to the North Shore on a regulation red bike. Sunday was the day for casualty messages, the dead & wounded delivered all over Sydney except Vine street, Darlington, where Darcy the Crim lived & the most dangerous place in town. I came to Austinmer 30 years ago before the Wardrobe Drinkers in the days of the miners & cottages. Take those grain & coal carriers upwards of 250,000 tonnes with a 12 man crew, anchored stern to wind, off Hill 60 out of Port Kembla navigated by satellite direct to Japan. You want the best view? Sublime Pt. Lookout, right down the coast, the Pacific ironed flat far as the eye can see, a sky expanded metal-red nightly.
Girl. Gold. Boat
out of Port Moresby. The obese Oxford villain tumbles overboard speared by the fuzzy-wuzzies. Our hero, Captain Singleton, finally
puts his shirt back on and tilts his cap to the sunset. He places one arm around his sweetheart and the other at the helm. The sea falls into
suburbs of light, a topiary of Islands could be mist. He is American and at home in the world as he moves forward on the celluloid tides.
He came out of sickness country (sic) he came out of the Holy Land.