Back on the track of ancestors at Millthorpe railway station
I long to wait for the carriage to take me to the Grand Western,
my parasol pointed into the skirted breadth of crinoline
dug out of the costume department
at Channel Nine. Or was it the ABC? More likely
my Victorian imagination ploughed across
the latest drought, land dried to dust.
 
Then to Orange to pick up on the missed focus,
maybe the stunned look of plants burnt by frost
at Cotehele, the first magistrate's house,
up and running as a stylish B&B.
William Lane was the magistrate.
 
Smoke curls from burning stumps and
tree roots. The blackened edge of road
sifts into dust. At La Colline
pappardelle with rabbit ragoût,
the wine a heavy pinot noir,
layers fresh memory
into the history of conquest.
 
And headstones at the cemetery fall sideways
telling the story of infant deaths,
five in one Kelly grave never reaching three
years. Many adults not quite thirty
died of influenza, falls off horses
and misadventure. Did they fail to cross
flooded creeks, survive snake bite, find
companionship? Did love elude them?
Who knows?
 
Under stone standing at ramshackle angles
lie the Lanes Esther, Hazel, Lillian,
Elsie, Leslie and Cleland,
shut-eyed in the underearth where there is no
passageway to the rock-faced quoits and carns
riven with age in the slurry fields  of Edgecumbe.
Do their ghosts seek the house Cotehele
in Cornwall? Or, arms stretched, do  ghouls
lunge to dunk me in the river
winkless with their forgetting selves?

History creeps through the page
stitched into the spine of eternal life,
the tome shut
where the birdbath, damp with autumn leaves,
is sky wrinkling poetry across dry earth.

The Chinese, buried in unhallowed ground,
leave spare trace, jars of ashes bearing
characters crumbled under eucalypts.

 

Copyright © Carolyn van Langenberg, 2005.

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Carolyn van Langenberg's latest novel, blue moon, is the final novel in the fish lips trilogy. In 2000, fish lips was short-listed for the David T K Wong Fellowship, East Anglia University, UK, and sections from blue moon when it was a work-in-progress were highly commended for the Marion Eldridge Award. Set in the hinterland of Byron Bay in Australia and Penang in Malaysia, fish lips, the teetotaller's wake and blue moon embrace Australia's negotiation with the word 'colonialism'. They are published by Indra Publishing. Carolyn lives in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales.