The dream:
I am exploring the Merri Creek in its pristine
state. Several tortoise
are sitting over a jumble of
riverstones. They form a mosaic. There is
an interplay
between their various sizes and the countering foundation
of riverstones. The roots and lower trunk of a gum
engirdle the scene...
The dry bark, the spare white tufts of grass indicate the
season and
the place. It is roundabout high noon and all
things seem drummed into
their forms. It is the time of
clarity when creatures recognize one
another.
The image is fixed. I wander off. Three lizards rest in file
on a
rockface, in a simple progression of size and in a
clean upward curve.
The Merri is a stream both merry and grave
grey and bright
these are images from its grey grave aspect
its genii locii exposed
as though the blood of the reptiles had itself cooled with
the blood of
the lava flow and now the lizards and tortoise
had taken on a cooler
rocky glow, were clinging to that
first stone, for the first time were
arranging themselves in
recognition of the sun, forms shot from the
earth’s centre
back into the light’s circle...
The Merri Creek
A wise wince in the landscape
A complex cavalcade and gallery folded into the
Melbourne plain
As the moon is really further away from the earth than
the sun
So too parts of Studley Park, the Merri Creek are further
away from
present day Melbourne than Bath or Edinburgh
The meeting of the Merri and Yarra is that of two
powerful wizards:
the active mentality of the Merri Creek
the lugubrious unconscious of the Yarra
The Merri gathered all that palava in the first place from
up North,
Mt. Fraser, and chucked it against the sandstone
hills, Kew. Chucked it
there. Chucked it right across the
Yarra.
So the Yarra collected itself, grew and grew into a great
lake and laid down the flats of Ivanhoe and Heidelberg.
Laid them down.
Laid down those flats.
Bayrayrung the Yarra thought and thought. Thought out
how to cut around the lava tongue, through the softer
sandstone, making the Yarra cliffs.
Making those cliffs
Making them nice
The Merri and Yarra
Together they made this place.
Walk down the Merri, by the stony terraces, ear attuned to
the water
tinkling, to the confluence at the Falls:
the Merri and Yarra have cultivated their differences
and have plenty
to talk about.
The mentality of the Merri
A most precise and pristine place
A world of clear shapes, its clear mind
The stillest park of Melbourne
A still, zero zone
the underlying secret of this region
the state is basalt, themestone of the
Western Volcanic Plains, of that
countryside’s mentality
grey and hard
perhaps the note was struck for an
intellectual, grey suited town
but that seriousness that Melbourne
took upon itself
that erected Melbourne Grammar, Pentridge,
and paved the streets in
sheets of blue metal
replaced that native excitement with
pain
tore the heart out of the stone
Melbourne became John Shaw Neilson’s
“Stonytown”
A sense of wholesale desecration in a Melbourne
streetscape
A denser sense of stone in these compacted cliffs
In this land the stone seems architecturally complete
Still bearing its aboriginal reflection
Dense with centuries of that accumulated attention
Australia a country where the stories
go down to the stones
Where are the stones there follows
an aboriginal art
Merri means stone
This was the land of the Merri Merri people
Stoniness and merriness
twin properties of the Merri Creek
modest in size, companionable
a stoniness that makes for brightness, clarity
the stonework a vehicle for jumping water
a model for the work, the project
that affords rejoicing
this water
steps away from the happiness of a
babbling brook, with its froggy
earthy
and grassy connotations
here in the Merri stream a rarified
merriness, unclinging, tippling
over
the rocks
water and stone each other’s weedless
instrument
water that draws out, races on
stone that draws in, lingering
stones
turned to planetary spheres in the stream
Below hewn cliffs. Faceted. In their station.
...the celestial rivulet
effecting an
effortless flow.
This accessible and pretty stream
A gathering place long before the coming
of the whiteman...
For many of the same geographical reasons
that made the region
attractive for
European settlement.
The tracks crossed here
Tribes gathered from Gippsland, the
Western District, The Goulburn
Valley...
And the Merri rose to the occasion
with great works,
In its Northcote
tract a succession
of arenas and ampitheatres.
Opposite McLachlan St. Northcote
Where Batman signed the treaty
Twin
cupped cliffs
The breasts of two black swans
Why do I think of the
White Cliffs
of Dover?
Essence of those cliffs rounded
in memory and trimmed by distance
The image of one cliff almost
immediately and perfectly repeated
Repeated in memory
This park of memories
A fated spot, where images
of other places and other times are
carried, cross and shimmer:
Those Bonsai cliffs sitting over a little
ocean where the sun sits deep
this same pool where breezes flush the
surface with skirmishes of
waves,
and when the ripples clear white
clouds ride on an occult course
Beneath, the water is black and
still
A black crystal ball
In that complex crosshatch of overlaid
impressions
a profundity
Beside strongly sensed but unfathomable harmonies,
a recollection of
Beethoven’s late quartets
Northeast: the medieval prospect of
Rucker’s Hill or
Montmartre
All around some excitement, some enchantment
in the old brick houses,
with their towers
and palms, standing like churches over the
sacred
spots... The pine tree and the Japanese
footbridge waiting for Hokusai
In Winter, below the High Street bridge, the
Merri, a green stream with
white horses,
Canadian, Icelandic, Pennine, a salmon stream
perhaps
And prefigured in the rock, in the columns,
planes, stepping stones, in
the conglomerate
states of matrix, bubble and lava rope
rock mandalas
Inca stonework
A Durer folio of crocodile tails, fronds of
Norfolk pine, Banksia cone
We are all escapees from Pentridge
is we watch these cliffs
We let ourselves go in the stones
Also by the pool, on the other side, a most
luxuriant bank of
blackberries,
complementary to the cliffs, likewise extraordinarily
shapely and composed
Dream, Kyabram front garden:
Sobbing rends the air. The trees crying. The
sound penetrates the
privet hedge, the
weatherboard, all the familiar trappings. An
ache
rises in my own chest. I feel I am being
cried.
I cross the lawn, am drawn to the pretty spot
under an ash tree, by a
wooden bridge, over
an irrigation ditch.
On a patch of bare earth lie arranged
four or five blackberries
I kneel to inspect them
A presence beside me, female I think, informs
me that these are the tears shed by black women
for their men who lie murdered
by the Merri, in the Gippsland forests
The blackberries are the tears of the country
Its buried black history
They have been here
an Australian length of time
The country is making
something different of all
of us