fleurieu geography

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Fleurieu geography
for Susan Dowie


Lie on your back in a field.
Lie ’til the clover peeks from your eyeholes,
And the capeweed strangles your curved white spine.
Then you can know.
Then you can feel.

Kulultuwi the songwriter tracked an emu,
unaware that behind him was Tjirbruke,
- his mum’s heavy magic brother from the Rapid Bay granite -
following that same special bird for other reasons.

Tjirbruke surprised his nephew - his Njengari - singing
as he cooked that emu with herbs in an earthernware
pressure cooker, a wintjimi.

Suddenly embarrassed that this was no ordinary bird,
Kulultiwi apologised and offered the feast to his uncle.
But Tjirbruke said no thanks,
he had sufficient roo meat,
moseyed on,
and sent back a message of forgiveness,
unaware that Kulultiwi had been blinded by steam when
he opened his wintjimi,
giving his greedy half brothers the chance to kill him
on the excuse that he’d transgressed.

Hunting the wrong bird.

Which they ate.

When he heard the terrible news,
Tjirbruke walked all the way to Gawler searching for them,
then came back south to check out a big show he’d heard
about at Brighton,
where he found them and killed them,
and many of their clan, for lying to conceal them.

He found Kulultiwi’s body, half-smoked,
and took it to Kingston Park to finish the job.
Once it was compact enough to carry,
Tjirbruke took that body down the coast past Scalloway,
weeping fresh clean grievings along the salty gulf to leave
life-giving faucets for travellers.

Then he stowed Kulultiwi in the cliff north of Morgans
where they’d netted snapper as young ’uns,
entered the earth’s crust to emerge at Mount Hayfield,
sealed up his exit hole and walked down to Victor.

There, he became Glossy Ibis on The Bluff,
showing Christ the way by soaring heavenward
where he left his Njengari as a glittering star,
and in an eternal triumphant stoop
plunged headlong into the Tapanappa schist over my
side of the range;
deep and hot and passionate and futuristic enough to
make iron sulphide - pyrites; firestone - at Brukunga
so folk should always have the warmth of fire.

Heaven and Hell in one fell swoop.

His water you watch became Golf Josephine, after their
Emporer’s mistress when Baudin and the post-
revolutionary Frogs arrived some millennia later.
By the time they got home Napoleon had a new girlfriend
who wanted it renamed after her,
and while Josie was growling in her empty salon,
perversely, lonesome Matthew Flinders called that same water
St. Vincent, after his sponsor First Lord of the Admiralty
the Right Honourable John, Earl of St. Vincent,
which Saint turns out to be patron of vinedressers and schoolgirls.

Carrying a name my mob took for their sub-arctic Ness with no hue,
I find myself living by Brukunga,
where Tjirbruke buried his bruke, his firestone.

In China I am Golden Dragon.
They know I don’t know what that means
- I don’t know what any of this means -
but I sport sulphur feathers in my carburetor;
and exude acrid waftage, or moist.

In the land of my clan you dowe, or wilt,
while your highland mob took dowie
- melancholic, dismal, dreary -
from dollie, doll, dull.

Yet you are music-filled champers-fuelled bikini-clad
body-surfing sandfish with little rage but a canny
placitude as thick as syrup,
and certain distance that disappears and you’re perfumed and close.

I risk my feathers to plunge dry through rock and fire to come
out your side and sizzle your fizz and freesias.
You risk steaming away your fishy water through stony fire to be here.

Or by sexy whisper on the phone.

We’ll learn about it all by bone.


Philip White












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