Point Possession

The fhores conited either of teep naked rocks, or a milk-white barren and, beyond which dreary boundary the urface of the ground eemed covered by a deadly green herbage, with here and there a few grovelling hrubs or dwarf trees cattered at a great ditance from each other. This very unfavourable appearance may not, however, originate from the general terility of the oil, since it was evident, o far as we travered the sides of the hills, that the vegetation had recently undergone the action of fire; the larget of the trees had been burnt, though lightly; every hrub had ome of its branches completely charred, and the plants lying cloe to the ground had not ecaped without injury. Thus entertaining no very high opinion of the country, but in the hope of meeting ome of the wretched inhabitants, we proceeded along the hores of the ound, to the northward, to a high rocky point, that attained the name of POINT POSSESSION... The urrounding country [beyond the point] preented a far more fertile and pleaing apect. George Vancouvers A voyage of discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, and round the world (1798). So much left unsaid: how they followed A winding track of sand that weaved Through charred boles of peppermints: no sign Of the footprints of the wretched. And when They stooped and paused beneath the swollen boughs Of Nuytsia, they could not know the probing roots Were tapping the juice of other plants. They pressed Onward. Did the long-tendrilled Hardenbergia Impede their way? His journal does not say Whether they paused awhile to admire the spray Of purple, or record the gleaming abundance Of sundews, climbing the scorch-hollowed gums. Who stopped to turn a rock, to find this crablike Spider, flat as ships biscuit, flipping its wafered Body away from harm, or tarried long enough To see two geckos slip beneath a stone? Might they have baulked a moment at a ravens Boyish call, and thought that they were watched? The wattle was no symbol for white men then,

And so they passed it by. Then there were Footprints, spaced evenly in the sand: a kangaroo, Traversing the hillside with easy bounds, And the trees opened out into a wide expanse: A wooded sandbank, and the Point beyond. They sat, mouthing hunks of salted beef With scurvied gums. Blue wrens scolded. And when They shouldered their packs and turned to walk The final mile, he caught up with them, his eyes Aflame with excitement: the ships naturalist: A bristling cone of Banksia in his hand. The naturalist on board George Vancouvers Discovery was Archibald Menzies, and Banksia grandis was amongst the botanical specimens he took away from King Georges Sound when the explorers departed from present-day Albany.

Amity
1845 A hundred and forty-two tons of Black Birch, Hackmatack, rope and copper, three times long As wide; named Amity, for an end to war. Thirty years afloat; no time at all to breech Her hull on sand, her sails and spars all flung Into the wind. Her last and fatal shore. 1824 Leg irons, handcuffs, convicts make good ballast, Deep in the hold, where only bilge and rust Destroy, the timbers moaning when she yaws, Her cargo scheming escapes, nursing blisters, Welts from floggings, wanting only rest: Cutpurses, bread-stealers, children, whores. 1826 A city afloat in a wooden womb Seasick, berthed in swinging hammocks, heaving, Clinging in the darkness, as she claws Her way through contrary winds. Shores loom Like monsters, bare skulled, skulking. A boat launched. Albany straining at the oars. The Brig Amity was constructed in Canada just after the end of the Napoleonic and American wars. Her youth was spent sailing the Atlantic, but in 1824, she began a new life in New Holland, as Australia was then known. There, she was used as a convict transport between Sydney and Hobart Town, and in 1826, she sailed for King Georges Sound, carrying the cargo of convicts and military men who were to become the founders of present day Albany. She was wrecked on a sandbank at Shoaly Bay, south-east of Flinders Island, in 1845. A full-scale reconstruction of the ship was built in 1976, and stands in dry-dock on Albany Harbour to this day.

Shark and Cuttlefish

Brown as weed and human-eyed, Skulking in the kelp, she stalks A shrimp, her suckered arms Shooting out of semi-darkness, Then ascends, where sunlight Webs the sea, her grim beak Champing on exoskeleton, Her hue turned luminescent, And is gone in a squelch of sepia: A sharks serried armoury Sinking deep into the calcium, Her eyeballs clouding, And at the stranding, only bone Remains, with a line of holes: A story told by the seas disjecta, Light as balsa, blanched with spume.

Octopus
Because of your catlike eye, I must address you directly, Confess that suppressed terror impeded all attempts At rescue, when you fluoresced in a gush of blue As I lifted you, tenderly, with an oyster-shell, to drop you Back in water. You reacted with a squirt of brine, and a wave Returned you, higher up the strand, entangled In dark brown weed. Your fluorescence ebbed Into sepia in a blinking, and trembling at the thought Of that seeking beak, hidden in the envenomed flower Of your being, I dragged the whole clump of wrack Into a wave, and turned back up the beach, before I should bear guilty witness to your stranding once again, Then went home wondering: were you, after all, benign? Did mercy fail, for fear of your design? The Blue-Ringed Octopus is one of the most beautiful and dangerous creatures of the reef and sea. The blue rings only appear when the animal is sufficiently agitated, so any small octopus washed up on an Australian beach is best treated with caution.

Porcupine Diodon
That all Animals of the Land, are in their kind in the Sea: A vulgar notion, for though the credulous may dredge A seahorse, cowfish, dogfish, monkfish, frogfish from The grim disgorging ocean, and claim similitude, Theyre wrong: a seahorse is six inches long. And yet, when the offending brine throws up A bristling porcupine, goggle-eyed and gasping air, Even a rationalist may stare and scratch his head, Desiccate it, paint it dead, and ponder: Is it frog Or fish, or yet some other natural wonder? There is on land no blenny, wrasse or cod: when we` Abridge variety, it restrains the hand of God. No matter: where the sea meets land, and breakers Wreck the rocks and strand, the Diodon is soft As us, and drowns as easily in air as we in water. Based on the record of the porcupine fish in Nodder and Shaws Naturalists Miscellany, Volume 5, and Sir Thomas Brownes, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Vulgar Errors, 1672), Chapter XXIV. For Brownes original argument against the doctrine that every land creature has its counterpart in the sea, see http://penelope.uchicago.edu/pseudodoxia/pseudo324.html

Frog Chorus
Because conditions are so adverse The frogs have proliferated, perversely Evolving a hundred and fifty species In an arid continent. I sought them all my youth: flopBellied pobblebonks slopping About the sphagnum; corroborees Layered like allsorts, And the thousand little nameless frogs Who called me on, my trousers soggy, Their voices like mirages Dissipating as I neared them. One puddle, and they congregate, Sing out their guts, and mate, Still croaking in amplexus, Groggy, incontinent, Each call broadcast by a male At his loves frequency. Shell flail About to reach him: his calls Advertise his assets, And he is well equipped to clasp Her, with bubble-throated gasp. This cold-bodied yen for sex Is surely what endears them. For an excellent essay on the calls of Australian frogs, see Michael J. Tyler, Frogs, Brisbane, 1976, Chapter 11, Communication by Sound, pp. 142-152.

Paperbarks
As a boy, I stripped parchments from the trunks, Scrawled poems on the bark, which flaked Into layers thinner than filo. I imagined Whole manuscripts of the stuff, with palimpsest Trails of beetle-grubs, and lacunae Denoting the offshoots of branches. Paperbarks are all texture, inviting touch, And in the thickest places, the bark Is spongy as human skin, puckering Down the insides of each palpable curve, Scored with stretchmarks round the outer, Groined with gouges where the rot Has crept up from the lapping shallows, Until the tree is a hollow old man, Holding his pose for a life-drawing In tea-stained watercolour and wax-repel, Traced on quartos of his own paper.

Karri and Tingle

The Tingles bark tangles into burls and knobs, An eddying stream of living wood, branching Into sky-fed tributaries. The Karri: an unruffled Surface of a lake, reflecting a sky cloud-swirled As mother-of-pearl. The Tingle is also a cave, walled and roofed In charcoal, lit through fissures; the twist Of its trunk is sinuous as a python climbing. The Karri: a tall and graceful ghost Letting down her hair. The bole of the Tingle is an ogling man With one eyebrow bulging, as though stung By hornets. The Karri is faceless, Detached. She contemplates The art of grace. The Tingle is buttressed as a gothic choir, And above it, a branching spire, with firetails In the belfry. The Karri has dispensed With struts and stays: throws out her lissom Arms and dances. The Karri and the Tingle are eucalyptus trees which dominate the forests around Walpole, in the south-west of Australia. The Tingle grows to a height of 60 metres, with a girth of 16 metres, and has a life-span of 400 years. The base of the trunk is heavily buttressed, and is commonly hollowed out by fire without killing the tree. The Karri has a thinner, more graceful trunk with no buttressing, has a characteristic mottled, silver-grey bark, and grows to a height of 90 metres. Together, they create a habitat which provides for an enormous diversity of other species.

Pelicans at a Fish-Gutting
Back-lit, pelicans bill-bags are translucent, Slither-slick on the insides, wrinkled Without like scrotum-flesh. Some Have fish-hook piercings, adorned With lengths of line, and brass swivels; A lead sinker donks against ones belly. Another seems to burp, and voids A smelly slurp of fish-white excrement. One chokes on a fish-bone an occupational Hazard and the fish-gobbler is snapped About the mazzard with leather forceps, Battered about the eyeballs. Each rejected fish Sends their necks cazalying skywards, And the gaggle descends on the remnant, The great bills tweezering it away from yawling gulls With ridiculous precision. Each swelling yawn Poises itself with a resonant grunting, And the unkempt wings tremble with Anticipation. Fish guts fly through air, And two pelicans string them out in a noisome, Bloody tug of war, their bulged eyes ogling. But once it is gulleted, they are all etiquette: They shuffle themselves, prod the smallest To the front, and gaze, as if on an altar, Form an orderly, worshipful, expectant Queue. 'Up There Cazaly' is a song about an Australian Rules Footballer (famed for his skill at leaping high in the air to catch the ball) with which nobody of Australian upbringing can escape acquaintance.

Sunset at Cheynes Beach

I comb the beach for relics of a grisly trade: The remains of whales, bone worn to the trabecular, Ocean-rounded, like petrified sponge. Humpbacks were hauled in here, and sperm whales From beyond the continental shelf: murdered, Factoried, flensed and rendered. Here the sea would churn with blood, the strand Clotted with it; great steel boilers bilged out The stench of flesh and blubber. Now, the dry-docked whale-chaser lies Stranded, its belly exposed, the rudder Like a flailing tail, the harpoons rust-blunted, And the spent breakers sigh their way to land. Gulls and oystercatchers paddle the littoral And only sun pinks sand and sea. Whaling stations sprang up in Albany soon after the establishment of the town in 1826, and in 1952, the Cheynes Beach Whaling Company began killing Humpbacked and Sperm whales with the aid of three whale-chaser boats and a whale-spotting aircraft. Public outrage only reached proportions significant enough to close the station in 1978. The spot is now occupied by a museum ironically popular with whale-lovers - and the Cheynes IV chaser is in dry-dock beside it. This poem was inspired by a conversation with a sailor who was involved in the Greenpeace protests against the whaling station which included steering boats deliberately between the chasers and the whales - in the 1970s.

Wreck of the Elvie

Scuppered in sand, like the upturned ribcage Of a whale, awash at high tide, her rivets Pocked with concretions, the Elvies weathered Framework, hewn out of Jarrah, seems Half petrified: a fossil from the days Of whaling. Her bow still points to sea With something akin to yearning, as though Her deep-grained ghost might sail out, laden With the oil of whales, and not return. No sailor died at her wrecking, in the southeast gale That swept her neglected hulk to shore. It was not Water that rushed above her gunwale, but sand, Claiming her for land. No voice is raised to mourn, Save the sighing of a whale, and her bow-post Is rooted to her keel: the tree within Kedging her to ground. The wreck of the Elvie lies in sand at the north end of Vancouver Beach, Frenchman Bay. In the early twentieth century, Frenchman Bay had a Norwegian whaling station, and the Elvie, a 30 x 4.5 metre flat-bottomed wooden lighter, was used to transport barrels of whale oil from the station to ships moored in the bay. She was constructed out of Jarrah, one of the more common eucalypts in Western Australia, with extremely durable timber. She was abandoned at her moorings when the whalers left in 1917, and washed ashore in 1921. The level of the sand is subject to the vicissitudes of the sea, so that more of the wreck is visible at some times than at others.

Vancouver Spring
With constitutions enfeebled, Ravaged by flux, we sought harbour, Beyond a point like a bald mans skull, Submerged to the eye-sockets, The granite steep and naked, warted With protuberances, lofty edifices in ruin, The vegetation scorched with fire. We rowed for a white ribbon of sand, Our stomachs sluiced as bilge, Craving fresh water, and found it, Draining through the beach, Coloured like brandy, browned With peat and sea-grass, yet Unstained to taste. The trees beside it filled our hold With fuel, pungent as peppermint; Beyond them, a hovel, just deserted: A dogs spoor, a leatherjackets skin. We climbed a hill beyond the burning, Where forests grew, luxuriant From slope to shore: an estuary And an island, the herbage Beautiful. Green. We sighed, Unscrolled Our weevilled Union Jack, And took Possession.

My source is George Vancouvers A voyage of discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, and round the world (1798), and I have left some of his phrases unchanged. The spring where Vancouver watered his ship is on Frenchman Bay, and still exists, although the water often runs clear. The myth that Vancouver thought the area around Albany, Western Australia, to be barren and inhospitable, has arisen out of selective quotation from his account. The bleakest part of the description is, in Vancouvers own words, that which depicts a part of the coast which had recently undergone the action of fire. His description of his view from Point Possession of Oyster Harbour - and of Green Island in the centre of it - is much more favourable.

Postscript (Sydney, August 2011) Cockatoos at a Drinking Fountain

When they imported the classical gods, and cast A nubile Diana in bronze, that men might watch And not be turned to stags, they should have known A cockatoo would drink there, clawing The apex of her fountain, and tweezering The bright skin of water with his bill, His blunt tongue probing, while all the bats In Sydney stirred in sleep, the skyscrapers Nimbus fringed by sun. And on a branch Beside a gaunt Euphorbia, would perch A second, his own tongue dry and grey As a gum-nut, waiting his turn. You laugh To see a bill - that can rip through tin as sure As pliers - testing the water so delicately, and say Hes bright enough to tweak it so the spray Will drench us here below, and as though He hears you, he obliges, dousing my camera With a spurt, directed with a skill So exquisite, your laugh turns like a maenads in a wood. The art-nouveau statue of Diana is part of the Lewis Wolfe Levy drinking fountain in the Botanical Gardens, Sydney, erected in 1889.