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Author: Geoff Page

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Sixty-five South

    • Geoff Page
    • 09 May 2024

    Today we leave Antarctic proper; /we’ve seen the penguins and the whales, /the icebergs in their convolutions /and thought about the Age of Sail /whose heroes nosed around down here /sniffing out a sort of fame. /Or was it just the golden oil  /that burned with such a lambent flame?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Cruise

    • Geoff Page
    • 08 June 2023
    1 Comment

    We pass North Head, that place of isolation, unspoiled silence still where campfire smoke would once have greeted / Arthur Phillip with his claim. We’re on our second drink by now / and some among us pause, imagining a Gadigal / imagining that we’re / the first ship of some Final Fleet / returning whence it came.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Initiations

    • Geoff Page
    • 09 March 2023

    Filling up the Webster-pak’s / a weekly exercise /  designed to keep me vertical / with sparkle in my eyes. Fresh from Chemist Warehouse as / my tempo wanes and waxes / my pills dispel my latest ills — if not quite death and taxes.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    20/20

    • Geoff Page
    • 14 September 2021
    2 Comments

    Once again we’re forced to think about the ones who’ve kept us going, doctors, nurses, nurses’ aides, swallowing their fear and knowing masks, however good, can never be sufficient, those who check each other’s PPE, all suited-up as if they planned a landing on the moon.  

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    We gather to remember

    • Geoff Page
    • 08 December 2020
    1 Comment

    Twenty-five years from his death we gather to remember, swapping anecdotes like bank notes weathered in our wallets. The one on how as deputy he’d learn, while pausing in a doorway, the names of all three hundred new Year Sevens in a week. And how when actors failed to show for one of his rehearsals, he’d stride the stage himself.  

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    How they floated in the clouds

    • Geoff Page
    • 25 May 2020
    4 Comments

    Ah, how they floated in the clouds, back before the first world war, those decent heady phrases: the common good, the living wage and how they came across the seas, those writers and professors, to study what we’d done down here.  

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The lattes have been had

    • Geoff Page
    • 11 September 2019
    5 Comments

    They feel a shyness and a fear/taking off their clothes. Gravity has had its say/regarding shape and size. Their bodies are a narrative/permitting no disguise. There’s been no rush — or just a bit — the lattes have been had.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The misanthrope on New Year's Eve

    • Geoff Page
    • 29 January 2019
    3 Comments

    Half past ten, I'm off to bed. One more whizz around the sun. Ho hum ... What's the point? If it were the solstice, maybe. All that nonsense on TV. And fireworks, celebrating what? The triumph of chronology? This year maybe I will die ...

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Remember there are sixty million

    • Geoff Page
    • 29 January 2018
    3 Comments

    There must be something in between those world-wide 60 million urgers bobbing in their boats ... Nailing up our own 400, give or take a few, to crosses cut from tropic palms via chainsaws made in China, intending that the westward waft from all the dried and dying will stop those wallowers in Java from putting out to sea ...

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Who was that luckless politician?

    • Geoff Page
    • 01 May 2017
    3 Comments

    Who was that luckless politician, federal, I think, gone now from so many memories, including mine? Male, a sort of suited fledgling, older maybe than he looked, the guy who feelingly achieved, while reaching for the aphoristic wisdom of his people, the verbal train-wreck we remember so much better than than the 'issue' or his features as they pleaded with the swooping of a lens: I'm torn between two places and a hard rock?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Young George

    • Geoff Page
    • 23 August 2016
    4 Comments

    What's he doing in my dream, that cardinal from Ballarat? He's in some sort of seventies presbytery or hardwood hall, shirt-sleeved but with collar on and playing ping-pong like a pro, fully-focused, yet relaxed. Forehand, backhand, lob or smash, nothing is beyond his reach. The other player is unseen but plainly worthy of attack. There's just the click of celluloid foreshadowing the rise to Rome. No ball hit that's not hit back.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Fleeing Syria's pious knights

    • Geoff Page
    • 09 February 2016
    2 Comments

    There were some cheers in Munich station but not all Eden proves to be so free with food and toys. There's something deeper in the blood. They have that sense of deja vu: horsemen, pikes and princes ... The pious knights of 1640, those fine sectarians, who charged for thirty years across the northern sweeps of Europe, are born again in Syria with new nomenclatures; so once again the hapless foresee it's time to move.

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