3. False Idols
It was always wood, wood along the way, and exits went from grove to sacred grove till deeper wood lay beyond the Roman shield and sword; that, though, belongs to another picture book. The lyre-bird mimics the chainsaw and Birds of Paradise spit chips. Along the Hume Hwy. east of Eden, a concrete Mountain Ash dubbed Yggdrasil boasts a wide-screen computer enhanced vista: an arrow-straight monorail running from Uluru clean through the Olgas.
4. Surveyors Party
These twin obelisks which guard the southern entrance to the Great Sandy desert, though partnered to a sun fiercer than anything Egypt had to offer, preside over a millennia of flat emptiness, and attest to the prowess, not of indigent cultures, but the engineering whim of the LAND BARONS who pray that one day, these too, will invoke an air-conditioned resort for the rich to dwell in, amongst hydro- mythological fountains, playing endlessly over sacred-site motifs.
5. Got Ourselves A Convoy!
Hi Ho! Hi Ho! But theyve been laid off. Round Oberon, the town spirit flat as a plank; then fury knots in pubs. The big rigs aim chrome cowlings at Canberra, Convoy! through the ring roads to circle Parliament House wagon-style. Hey, you cant knock it: logging by generations for generations have trod them down. Count the rings of the rigs revving. Each logger raw-red, necks blood-throttled. Say what, anger? You can put a ring around that, champ. Hi Ho! Hi Ho!
6. Cultural Desert
The earth is dismembered & what remains gives evidence; clues: history by blocks displaced as in the Aswan Dam & the Temple of Philae. Osiris rolls in the winding sheet of the Nile (O moisture of the World!) and vainly cry the well-wishers. Richard Burton tracked the source back to Lake Victoria, and back again to the Royal Geographical Society; no gushing waters from the cleft rock, only lameness, fever under the rays of the Sun God, Ra.
7. Down By The Station
Indecision. Doubt. A bungled liftoff, the bumpy landing. Of course, the forest dwellers who continuously run at you from tangled undergrowth onto the stubbled airstrip, dreamlike, dont make it: LAST CANNIBAL WORLD: lithe tribal girl hand jobs hero through bamboo cage. The spiked wooden ball swishes from tree canopy to impale support cast. Sunday matinee in country town. Farm boys lope under dirty clouds to crop-dusted paddocks, and water slips by the BP Service Station, somewhere.