Dear Kevin,

You can’t imagine how good it was to get back! The weather was so beautiful the first afternoon that I decided to sit outside and sun myself, my only distraction being the rich semi-tropical air as it slowly bathed my body. It was the kind of day only dreamed about in the South.

As I was sitting there, have awake, my mind far off in some rapturous state, I happened to notice a gleam of light from the thick bush at the back of the allotment. Hardly in a curious frame of mind, I nonetheless rose and wandered over to the source of the distraction. Behind and between the overgrowth of ancient banana plants, vines and tropical weeds I saw a window. Most of the glass was gone but there had been enough to reflect the sun and attract my attention. My landlady - hardly the correct word - had made no mention of another building on the property so I decided to investigate.

I went into the house and picked up a large kitchen knife. I'd seen it there before and had thought of it more as a machete than a culinary implement. But it was the perfect tool. In no time I had hacked away sufficient of the brush to enable me to open a smallish but serviceable door just below and to the left of the broken window. I forced the door and found myself in a dimly lit room which had an overwhelming smell of age and decay. There was enough light to see that the room had been an office of some sort and from the apparent age of the desk and the other fittings I judged it to date from the middle of the last century - about the time that the area had first been settled. The smell was too much for me so I took a pile of interesting looking ledgers from the old desk - the only portable items in sight - and pushed my way through the cobwebs and accumulated rubbish out into the fresh air.

I was still too enchanted with the day to worry about the ledgers so put them aside for a later examination. The rest of the afternoon was passed in blissful solitude. You can’t imagine how lovely it is here, Kevin, the flowering plants, the ubiquitous song birds and the polychrome insects. It is easy to understand why so many from the South having once arrived here never return.

That evening after a long, slowly consumed meal of my favourite tofu and locally grown vegetables, and a few, necessary but unduly protracted phone calls, I decided to view the ledgers. Unfortunately they had been left on the desk with no covering or other efforts to preserve them. The ledgers, the desk, the entire office in fact, had been left as though their proprietor had gone off perhaps only for a smoke, intending to shortly return. But somehow he must have been cut off, perhaps dying with everything under his care left to gradually rot into the fuse of what once had been a plantation. How strange it all was.

The ledgers were bound in leather, good solid hide unlike the imitative synthetic materials used today and though damaged were still intact after all those years. Remarkable! The paper was also of very high quality almost like a vellum and to my delight, the writing had been done in a beautiful hand with a quill and India ink. It was faded and mould stained but still quite legible.

After a short time I accustomed myself to the antique script and was able to read the text as though it were print. Interestingly it was not the type of material one would expect to find in such tomes - accounts, records of sales and purchases etc. but a collection of tales or stories. None of the writings were titled but before the beginning of each - all were approximately the same length -were double rows of odd symbols. I’m afraid I had no idea what these were but assumed they were either in some sort of code or an outlandish language that I’d never seen before. It was strange, Kevin, very strange.

The first and perhaps titular page in each ledger had apparently been torn out but with the aid of some old letters stuck in the back of what had been the uppermost book I was able to discover the author’s name. It was a Graeme Headers, apparently a very well-read man and either the owner or manager of the plantation on which the old office had been built. From my reading of the letters I learned that the man suffered from a rare and debilitating disease of some kind and that his left index finger had, from birth, been severely deformed. Though this deformity was relatively minor the man had obviously been obsessed with it, mentioning it quite frequently. How odd.

But to the ledgers. I have already - out of sheer enthusiasm - one of my characteristics you will remember, Kevin - summarised one of the tales which I append for your interest.

I trust you and Hannah are enjoying as well as profiting from your literary soirées at Mietta’s. I enjoyed being at the inaugural one and when time affords I hope to visit you once again in the South.

Addendum: The first tale takes place in the future. No date is indicated but from the context I would estimate the time to be somewhere near the present day. The tale is written in the form of a letter from a Mr James Wilson to a friend in a southern city - it may be Melbourne - named Curzon Peterson, a publisher and patron of the arts.

Curzon has sent his friend a book of short stories for comment before final editing and publication. Evidently he has some admiration for this friend in ‘the North’ and values his opinions even though he considers him to be somewhat eccentric.

What follows is a series of epistolary exchanges about one particular story. In this story, a man, also a publisher sends a story in unedited and semi-complete form to a friend Jake who has recently removed himself to a small but thriving town in ‘the North’. A state of acrimony develops between the two because of the story. It is in the form of a letter from a man called Jacob - though he is often referred to as Jim - to an intimate in a southern city who is named Groggon Hanson. Hanson has among his literary circle a certain Grotman Hand who is an incurable drinker and opium addict. Grotman has written a long piece of fiction about a man called William Jameson who goes insane and destroys himself. Jameson is an avid reader and gets hold of a novel - actually it is comes to him under somewhat unusual circumstances but that is not relevant here. The novel is so complex with diversionary tales within tales and characters that resemble other characters in their names and actions that the whole narrative dissolves into a literary hall of mirrors. Jameson becomes obsessed with the novel thinking it must be an anagrammatic interpretation of his own life. He spends days, then weeks and months desperately trying to understand the novel, even going so far as to write the names of the characters on bits of paper moving them madly about on his desk like so many chessman but to no avail. In the end he becomes certain that he knows which of the characters must in fact be himself. This particular character has an ugly, misshapen face and in the end Jameson dies horribly whilst trying to alter his own with oil of vitriol! A bizarre ending to a bizarre tale.

I can’t tell you, Kevin, how much this story disturbs me because I have the uncomfortable feeling that I am somehow not unlike that Jameson myself. By the way I have read that copy of The Mountain by Graham Henderson that was given to me by a friend who, in turn, was given it by a retired gamemaker. The gamemaker had the idea of using it as the basis of a literary board game but became quite ill and had to be committed to a psychiatric hospital.

I’m already on my third reading - intriguing, most intriguing.



Dear Jennifer,

It’s been some time since I last talked to you. If you remember the occasion was Hannah’s party. Not being used to such goings on and her cordial but rampant hospitality I’m afraid I nearly exhausted myself. But the worst of it was the evening at the restaurant. Graham was listening to one of my more lucid raves when we received a phone call from Hannah inviting us to join her and Kevin at Clichy, a cosy little restaurant in Collingwood. We got a cab and were soon there. Upon entering the establishment I had barely time to say a word of greeting when I was dashed to the floor by my own momentum and an inclemently positioned pool of water. I am still recovering from the resultant tendonitis but I also have a scar! Dear Hannah in her enthusiasm rubbed essence of capsicine into the wound that the fall produced on my hip! The resultant blister and necrosis is still visible. Ah for the days when medicine was only practised by properly attired doctors and their subordinates! All this democracy wears a bit thin. And where will it lead? Here, in the ‘Golden Triangle’, there are more back yard therapists and hoodoo merchants than anywhere else in Australia. But maybe there’s a reason for it.

The other day I drove into Byron from my home here in Suffolk. I had prepared some sheets of poetry on my computer and took them in to be laser printed. Rainbow Dreaming is a computer and electronic business run by Ray Latter who is from Ballarat and the nephew of a woman I once taught with. I always enjoy having a chat with Ray. He’s enthusiastic and unlike so many of the denizens of this area fairly down-to-earth.

When I entered the shop Ray was engrossed in sorting out a customer’s notebook computer. Ray jokingly asked me if I knew any German and as I looked over his shoulder I could see some phrases in that language on the screen. My German is pretty minimal but I did catch the words Fuzzlogische Objekt Entziffer... something or other. Before I could read any further Ray changed the screen and the subject. It had nothing to do with me but I did feel a bit annoyed that he’d engaged me in something and then dropped it. But I was there to get my laser printing done and after a few false starts we managed to get my sheets printed.

As I paid Ray for the printing he made some comment about being able to buy his lunch now. All very light-hearted. But then I let my curiosity come in and asked him what he knew about fuzzy logic. It’s all the go now in engineering and I think it might have some connection to poetry. After all words are ‘fuzzy’ and when a poet uses them she relies on that property for many of the effects that she creates.

Ray suddenly looked very serious but said nothing. I had to go anyway and could see there was some problem, so I started to leave the shop. Just as I raised my hand in farewell Ray motioned me back. He asked his assistant to look after the shop and he led me into his back office. I was quite mystified but Ray looked so earnest I just went along.

Then he started. He made me promise never to tell anyone what he was about to say. My first thought was ‘What is this nonsense?’ but by the intensity of his look I could see that he was totally sincere so I agreed. He said that he’d been doing some work for a secret government project that seconded specialist computer scientists from various countries including Germany. Ray’s role was a relatively minor one: keeping their equipment in order and occasionally ordering in and calibrating updated instruments. He told me that the work paid well but that he was uneasy about aspects of it and, frankly, just wanted to get it off his mind by talking to someone. For some reason my ‘discovery’ of the few words on the computer screen was all it took. I was it.

Basically the project is a refinement of work that was originally done for the development of ‘over the horizon’ radar arrays in the north of Australia. The details are well and truly beyond me but as Kay explained it computers are used to extract from masses of apparently meaningless signals those that have some pattern. These are then compared with known patterns and ‘objects’ are then treated from the data. At first this technology was used to identify the radar images of ships, planes and other military objects. But ili.it was only the beginning. The same techniques were soon applied to the extraction of information from the enormous amount of coded and uncoded signals sent around the globe by radio, telephone etc. It soon became possible to ‘read’ the output of virtually every government and private communication anywhere in the world. The ultimate spy machine. Because of the great advances in computer chip design these machines are now totally portable and indistinguishable from the typical home computer.

But back to Byron. Some years ago, Ray wasn’t sure, but possibly as early as 1973, specialised surveillance equipment was installed in the Cape Byron Lighthouse. The location was ideal. The lighthouse is on a promontory and scans inland as well as out to sea. It was already there, was in a relatively unpopulated area and the locals were used to the constant rotation of the light though no one became concerned that the lens began turning during the day as well as after dark.. The initial experiments were relatively crude but were an attempt to build up a profile of every ‘object’ in an area extending twenty to thirty kilometres from the light.

As time went on the technology ‘caught up’ as it were with the project and is now highly refined. A constantly altering signal is sent out from the light as it scans the countryside. Reflected energy is picked up at the lighthouse and analysed by computer. This is where the fuzzy logic comes in. As information is fed into the computer, it defines ‘objects’. These objects might initially be a scan of someone’s arm or the bonnet of a car but once the object is created additional data can be assigned to it and eventually the ‘object’ becomes something that is intelligible in terms of a person, a car, a house or whatever. Naturally the stationary ‘objects’ are usually defined before the others. Fuzzy logic provides a means of assigning data to an object especially in the early stages when there is very little corroborating information.

The end result is a database that can be used to trace the movements, past and present of anyone within the scanned area. When this information is integrated with bank, taxation, teller card and other digital data an excellent tool is available for a wide variety of governmental purposes from crime prevention and detection to the preparation of employment suitability profiles and the resolution of societal problems. Civil libertarians might raise an eyelid at this but the history of technological innovation shows that if something can be done it will be and Luddites have been and are just that.

Until we got to this point the conversation had been intense but almost detached. It was like the death-toll in Rwanda or the number of poisoned lakes in Sweden, awful in the true sense but distant, intangible. Now the tone in Ray’s voice changed, the feeling in the room became almost dramatic.

Ray was concerned because the entire project was, in effect, an experiment on a civilian population. Just recently he’d been reading through a report that he’d come across almost inadvertently. It had been written by a medical specialist whom the project had hired some years before but had dispensed with after a relatively short time. His report was disturbing. It indicated that the particular wavelengths used by the project for its scans could be detrimental. He listed a number of possible effects some of which were quite minor such as itchy rashes and depilation but the one that Ray was most concerned about was a form of dementia. After all his wife and children lived in the scanned area. I asked him what this dementia entailed. He told me that the sufferer could be expected to have wild delusions, such as talking to beings from another world, thinking he could see into the past, and ascribing magical properties to common and even toxic substances. Other possible effects were dressing in inappropriate and bizarre clothing, being in a constant state of anxiety about one’s health and having desperate fears about the environment.

After almost an hour of listening I was tired and, assuring Ray that I’d tell no one, I left. As I went home I kept thinking that the whole thing might just be the product of an over-active imagination. Hut even if it is true no one would believe it. And as for those insidious effects who would notice them here anyway? So I don’t feel that I’m being dishonest by relating all this to you.

That damned scar on my side is itching something awful again - hope it isn’t cancerous - perhaps I’d better go back to the homoeopath.

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