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Late gales from eastward
unfurled sails,
like bosoms full,
push forward
through wind-whipped waves
high as her mast.

Ghostly wails
breach ropes taut tight,
the tempest vents,
mustering fury.
In this Stygian gloom,
she is restless.

In vain her crew,
skilled and gallant,
heave hard on helm
to hold her course.
In this ornery ocean,
she yields.

Her wooden thighs
rise
then fall.
Slap the sea.
Slap the sea.
She murmurs,
she groans…
Awash.

She founders down
in surly murky misery.
Follows Hastings, Spurwing, and
Bannockburn.
Tallow casks strewn,
give a beach a name.

Red Gold

Night’s dark lifted,
curtain raised
reveals Dawn.
She lifts her head
and across the sea,
she sees.

Red gold
stands grand,
her colossal girth
nourished
by Mother’s pantry
in favourable years.

On tickets of leave
they headed north,
convicts who’d served their time.
Hewing their way
through hostile brush,
of leeches and lawyer vines.

She heard them
with their cussing,
vile voices in the vale -
scattering the wallabies,
roused from their repose,
athwart the grassy dale.

They stood below
breaths full of lust,
caressed her scaly bark,
admired her magnificence
and gazed
in awkward silence.

The cold blue metal
penetrated,
pierced her fifty years.
Intoxicating,
every blow
slaked the axman’s thirst.

Selector’s Wife

He had gone selecting,
seeking cedar in the hills.
Left his young bride keeping vigil,
in a cold and lonely hut.
The scrub, alive with creeping reptiles,
prowling dingoes, and blacks.*

Winter’s wind
drew breath from west
and sighed
at the setting sun.
Gilded light,
like honeycomb shards,
splintered the wood-smoked air.

Fire’s warmth
gave comity to cold
and settled
in hypnotic crackle.
Stoked embers,
like the Phoenix rose,
reborn in resurrection.

Night’s disquiet
tugged her dressing gown
and scratched
the window’s pane.
Shadows skulked,
like harbingers of dread,
rattling the bolted door.

Fundraiser

Gathered ‘round the cedar table,
top adzed smooth and polished.
Minutes managed,
motions moved,
pencils tapped
to the Buzacott beat.

Said Edna Ritchie,
‘For civilising influences,
we need a School of Art.’
‘Raffles, and supper too,’
Alice Egan added.
‘We’ll have to
darn-well advertise!’,
voiced Vincent Rendell-Wright.

Lord Chelmsford attended,
entourage in tow.
The gentry, quite generous,
raised a thousand pounds.
‘A bright spectacle,’
The Beacon wrote,
‘credit to all involved!’

Whalesong

He breached
his barnacled body,
lifting,
shifting,
slapping fins and fluke.
The big wing of New England
has been fattening in the floes.
Harpoon released,
the iron impaled,
now the whalers wait.

He arched
his plankton’d pleats,
lunging,
plunging,
thrashing the red.
The magnificent cetacean,
flailing in his throes.
Exhausted giant.
‘Wood to black skin!’
The lance delivers death.

They hauled
the mighty mammal,
unflinching,
winching,
flensing the flesh.
Townsfolk in their finest,
take pictures of the show.
Boiled blubber,
whale oil,
soap and margarine.

* ‘alive with creeping reptiles, prowling dingoes, and blacks’: Reported in the Tweed Daily (newspaper); 12 October 1938, cited in Ryan M and Smith R (2001) Time and Tide Again – A History of Byron Bay, Northern Rivers Press, Lismore.