I stand there, motionless, waiting for the prevailing west wind to trouble the branches above and lure away their progeny. Like a pied piper of the woods.
I come here to play a game, and to remember the friend with whom I played.
We were just eleven when it began.
Winter crept in while we slept.
With stealth it skulks, that cunning frost.
A dark new season draws first air,
Then vomits forth its bitter breath.
It’s Monday morning and I’m trying to not look tired or hungry because if teachers think you are hungry they might think you are not being looked after properly by your parents and they might phone Dad. Miss Chapin is just the sort of teacher who notices things like children being tired or hungry
Marj stands at the borderline, mustering the courage for what she must do. She has endured enough: The growling diggers uprooting her world, the concrete monstrosity growing up in its place, the arrogant tradies stomping over the strewn entrails of her former life.
Culturally significant days, such as Australia Day and ANZAC Day – intended to unite us as a nation – bring into sharp focus the growing divisions between us. For many, it is becoming increasingly difficult to stay silent in the face of apparent hypocrisy, which remembers so vividly one part of our history, whilst attempting to completely erase another.
Hamish glanced at the bag I had set down as I entered the staff lunchroom, and reacted apparently without engaging a single critical faculty:
“That looks like a female bag”, he offered, immediately followed by a minor facial spasm, which suggested that his brain had just caught up with his inane verbiage.
I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would choose the tedious complexities of a conversation about the trans-generational trauma unleashed by colonisation and the 250 years of subsequent oppression of First Nations Peoples over a simple, reassuring narrative about dole-bludgers desecrating our national heritage with their Marxist filth.
I have yet to see so much as a brass plaque commemorating the unsung heroines of motherhood, to whom we are all indebted for whatever approximation of human civility they manage to wrest from the delinquency of our self-absorbed adolescence.
“Nothing about us without us”, he spat, flicking the words in my direction, like holy water intended to burn holes in my heathen postulations. We were discussing the plight of Queensland’s Queer communities and the challenge of building and sustaining support systems in regional outposts.
A belief in God assigns one to a life of deep contemplation or no contemplation at all, depending on one’s disposition.
