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ARTS AND CULTURE

City of steel and jaded bricks

  • 02 February 2010

Enduring things After Jack Gilbert

The small animal in my head at night hesitates, then picks up the scent of an ancient route and another place in me: the city of steel and jaded bricks, of mills, foundries and furnaces, its locomotives grunting, whining on tracks that sliced through the hearts of the sweat-shiny, blackened men whose households were regulated by the whistle they woke or slept by. The BHP, like a bulker tethered amidst chimney stacks and luffing cranes to a bollard on the Hunter, rising out of the river mist, silhouetted against a broad sky, is now a thing of air,  a transitory room across the birds' flight-path. The coke ovens and furnaces are now quenched, levelled. Platt's Channel reclaimed by water-hens, plovers, the mangroves in the tide's ceaseless swell. The last workers? Retrained, shunted into retirement, or an early grave. And what about the housewives whose lives hinged on too much work, or too little, on soot and the wind's direction?  They hold fast to family heirlooms lest they break or are lost in the bumpy transition. Their weekend children rubbing the sticks of themselves together, igniting the flame that generates new life, at the Town Hall, or the Palais. Their children's children have grown, moved away: on the web trafficking the atmosphere, on the back of coal, Hospitality or Tourism, in service, or drifting into the harbour on luxury liners that look like sleek white albatrosses.

Perhaps this land wants its ancient self back: the alluvial soil, the rocks (their art intact), and the beach where I'm now strolling. I think I understand how the elephant felt, the one photographed for the National Geographic as it tracked through the lobby of the Luangwa Valley Lodge in Zambia, on its way to its favourite mango tree. My ancient routes have been criss-crossed and disturbed. Nevertheless, I'm listening for the tribal sounds, the South Pacific's breeze through the bush, the soft brush of percussion and indiscriminately above that, the wind free as the Whistling Kite above the foliage, and then above the valley. The animal in me thrives among the natives and the sound of sunshine in this pleasant place my solemn heart has made.

Unhinged Me and a stranger clutch prawner's poles that hammock a net. Dark's spangled hair is tressed on the Watagans. Streetlights fasten long hinges on the lake where, stride after stride, we scissor its black satin; the cool fusion is riding my ribs to a halter, my mind's parched country.

We circle back moon-walking, buoyed in