THE SURF CARNIVAL
It is a bright and sultry day and the sea is a wild animal chewing at the land and the sky. On the beach older men in white cotton shorts and shirts are tapping red pencils on blue clipboards and looking watchful. It’s alright for them to smile and laugh amongst themselves because they aren’t the ones who have to enter the raging surf. ...read more
JUNGLEWOMAN
I live by the lush edge of the hot red continent next to the sea. The house my grandmother left me is old and painted the blue of Greek shutters. One of the poles it sits on hangs into blue space where the land has washed away and grey casuarinas grow on the slope that leads to the smooth grey boulders and the green blue sea. The yellow beach runs south for five hundred metres, backed by high, white dunes. ...read more
SNAKE LAKE
My life has turned to shit again.
It is midnight and I am looking at a brightly lit rural shack on stilts in a brightly lit paddock and about fifteen surf clubbies are looking for me. They are going to bash me if they can find me. The clubbies are swarming around the house and they are all dressed in dark blue football shorts and white T shirts with a postcode printed on their shirts. Some of them have a postcode tattooed on their amazingly large biceps. Their postcode is 4217 and mine is 2107, which means that I’m about a thousand kilometres from home. It’s an away-game with the usual disadvantages. ...read more
BAD DOG AND THE STRANGERS
When l was a ten year old kid at the beach there was a local hero called Duff who fished from his surf ski on a distant reef a half hour paddle from the beach.
Sharks often grabbed his fish as he hauled them up from the deep and all he pulled up was fish heads. He became angry with the sharks. He was not a reasonable man. He decided to counter-attack. ...read more
BILLY BOB PLANKTON AND THE SHARK
Billy Bob Plankton wears, on a salty leather thong, a tiger shark’s tooth around his neck.
It all began one summer, not so many summers ago, when Billy Bob Plankton decided to catch a big shark, just like Duff did, but with far less personal exposure. ...read more
THE SHITVILLE PUB
It's a hot blue blue day and weakness prowls my soul.
I think of a long cold swim but turn magnetic north, called by siren images of cold beer and swinging breasts. Magnetic north leads to the pub, called the Shitville Pub, copying the nick-name of the village and living as a rickety presence on the other side of a high and grassy dune. I trudge up the dune towards the Shitville Pub, flinching from noises in the dry grass thought to be infested by red bellied black snakes. ...read more
|
