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| '... our borders are marked by fencelines, Changes in roadmarking styles and how the weedy verge is mown'.. |
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| Photo by Merrill Findlay, 1996. |
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In this green land, our borders are marked by fencelines,
Changes in roadmarking styles and how the weedy verge is mown:
On the roads outside Penola and Nelson, and even Bordertown,
There are no boomgates, no huts painted in red stripes or a sign Toll,
But the cars are of different makes & models, more provincial,
One might also remark that the sky looks different, sweeter,
Or that the cattle are plumper: but on which side of the fenceline?
On some roads, caring governments have set up hoardings
To extol the virtues of their estates and produce-for-export,
Warning against the import of forbidden thoughts, naughty books,
Yet the same species of grasses grow and the very same ants wander
Past concrete and tin, quite unanxious with all these goings on.
I remember how for a fair half-hour of driving beforehand,
Peering through concealing scrublands, watching for twilight,
Kangaroos and stray deer: I had no wish to become roadkill
Like the broken bodies scattered between Casterton and Penola,
Enough to feed all the Gunditj-Mara.
A cartographer's line
Is an act of estrangement, an admission of fear, like the Great Wall of China:
The First Ones knew better, stepping out their boundaries
With different speeches, piles of pebbles and obsidian, a tie of fur,
Exchanging women like trinkets at the Temenos edge. They went
Down into the world's deep belly to name the unnameable,
And where the Buandig would not bear to live, so the Gunditj-Mara
Took themselves to southern shorelines each year, and fought Whalers.
Now I can discern a pattern of clearances, plantings, styles of houses,
Mark out the distribution plots of Irish, Scots and German names,
Watch how plain folk approach that fenceline, invisible to cosmonauts,
Straightening down from River Murray to our Southern Ocean,
An inkmark of unstated implications and consequences: whatever.
Fixed March 19, 2003
Copyright Edward Reilly 2003
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