Paintings circa 1995.

Ravensthorpe

Ravensthorpe road



A paddock of rape stems.



A not-so-beautiful replanting in ravensthorpe.

Mt Barren Ranges from the highway.

Palimpsest

I
Driving back from Denmark on Wednesday morning I recognised for the first time the relevence of the word "palimpsest" in the landscape architecture discourse: along the road corridors, suddenly in the middle of a mound of rocks in a paddock, in the riparian zone suviving under bridges are thin, very thin strips of native vegetation. Perhaps a single line of marri trees, an occassional stand of coastal jarra, a patch of complex riparian community surviving at a river mouth...These are the tiny lines remaining when you rub out a page of writing. Carelessly you've failed to remove a whole line of letters at the side of the page or a few strokes stay where you pressed harder to make a point and the pencil cut a little deeper into the paper; maybe the indentation of the marks remains without the lead.
So it is that a little bit of bush remains in the landscape rewritten as agriculture. Tiny remnants of Australian vegetation - or should it be pre-Australian vegetation? - these thin marks allow you to imagine a forest, a complex of interactions and timeframes and you could dream the dots and lines reconnected as a whole system. Each fragile moment hints at a vast swamp of time that it might be possible to recreate. But the new story written on the palimsest is fences, sheep and tail-docked dairy cows, an old man tinkering under a Fordson tractor, a patch of bright green sub-clover in kikuyu grass, thin and brown come summer. Try rubbing that out with jarrah and marri and Acacia accuminata.

II

...Anyhow, I was talking about writing to create the new story of talking to someone about something, making a story of a happening or an event then constructing a theory of the event, constructing a palisade on a palimpsest. Re-writing a notional contrivance to dredge up a forum of time that could conclude the swampish indulgence of and fulgence in the swamp of morass of tears. Does it come from having nothing to do; or does it come from not having anything to do?

"He told me, I must sit here and do nothing. That is what I am doing."

"I ask you again, have you nothing to say of any use?"

"Nothing doing!"

"There is nothing here."

"I don't think it'll be able to support anything now."

"I sat all day, in the sun, by a window, warm, because I did not have a thing to do."

"I did not have anything better to do."

"I have nowhere I would rather be."

"I am here because I don't have anywhere I would rather be."

"I am sorry for you."

"I wish you weren't."

[But I didn't say "I have nowhere to go," I said I have nowhere better to go.]

Buckets of Rain, Buckets of Tears

I know it's depressing and unproductive to talk about it, but i just need to say how depressed I am and how completely sick of it I am. I thought I could manage it, find a way through it without anti depressants and for about 6 weeks I did feel heaps better, but now I just seem to be back to the old pitch, crying all the time, not able to find a programme to occupy myself with during the day. Etc etc etc. it's so very boring.
Maybe there is a solution. Maybe I just need to wade through the floods of tears and eventually I'll come out the other side. But right about I am just nearly prepared to give up and get back on the drugs.
Hope everyone else is having a better day than me!

Eucalyptus platypus platypus

Have been measuring trees for 4 weeks, and just got back from Ravensthorpe. One of the favourite sites we measured was a large stand of mort, on a farm just below the Lake Magenta Mallee Fowl Reserve.

Last night lasted an hundred years

emptiness found a thread of hopeless desire pull me
from one room to another
following human sounds
while I was not.

But only a hopeless knot of self pity.

Enough! I
will not go down that too-well
trodden path again,
because of my laziness
and self hunger.

I will not tell you how I feel
nor feel like this.
nor return,
trying to drag you along in my wake of tears.

I do not even ask that you forgive me,
I ask that none forgive me.
I practice this act of newness to forget,
and to be new.
This guilt shame is wearing a shirt too thin,
I will simply to be anew
and so the practice of this I will
is to use to simply be

another

self-death for the death of self pity,
this hopeless one whom i disown,
disavow,
and what is it? Excommunicate.

For a church of the new world
I will build from canvas on the shifting sands
that it be strong,
knowledge-renewable
infinitely flexible
and allow the passage of the winds of change
eternal
happy
joyous.

Do not forgive.

I will it.
then I am so
other.

If I could tell you...

If I could tell you
the laws of my longing
you would be here
on behalf of your greed
the witness of a hungry man
who does not care
if you are naked or shy

Because now that I
can't use it or feel it
I know for a fact
that I am beautiful
and more than anything
you want a beautiful slave
to make you cry

And long after that
whenever I touched you
whenever you undressed
you would need to know
what I was thinking
and you could be as treacherous
and you know you are
you would be a spy

And then something would happen
that would crush us
and free us
and destroy completely
whatever had been
and we would have begun
to signal one another
each time before we lie

p46 Leonard Cohen, 1972, The Energy of Slaves. Jonathon Cape Ltd. London.