Last night a spooky wind blew

And for the first time in about two years my sleep was troubled and broken. At four in the morning I fended off the possibility of evil spirits by trying to recall as much of this as I could; stripped of its christian underpinnings and invoking various sea-entities in a way that could only make sense in those timeless, seemingly endless pre-dawn hours:

Something something, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd'st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!

O Christ! Whose voice the waters heard
And hushed their raging at Thy word,
Who walked'st on the foaming deep,
And calm amidst its rage didst sleep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!

Most something Spirit! Who didst brood
Upon the chaos dark and rude,
And bid its angry tumult cease,
And give, for wild confusion, peace;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!

O something something love and power!
Our brethren shield in danger's hour;
From rock and tempest, fire and foe,
Protect them wheresoe'er they go;
Thus evermore shall rise to Thee
Something something something sea.

Uncannily but unsurprisingly, before leaving work today, a colleague, a former naval officer, sang a brief snippet of this same hymn, wrongly citing it as "Abide with Me".

The Museum of Hope and Loneliness

It brings bad luck for a year to work on your birthday, so I had a day off and went to the National Museum of Australia with four generations of genetic family: my mother, my niece and her baby daughter, who is both technically and in my estimation my great-niece. "We got one in nappies and the other in Depends", as one of my favourite script lines from NYPD Blue would have it.


This was my first trip to the NMA, partly because I spent some significant years of another lifetime living just up the road, before Canberra Hospital got blown to smithereens (see picture) and have been a bit concerned about running into my own ghost if I revisited the Acton Peninsula before it was time. Seems safe enough now, and I'll be back to have a closer look at stuff I could only quickly survey today.

A particular delight was the discovery that the Eternity exhibition had thematically organised historical acounts around a set of ten intense human experiences: Thrill, Separation, Joy, Passion, Loneliness, Hope, Fear, Chance, Mystery and Devotion. Perhaps another example of an idea being far more powerful than its execution: what now fascinates me is what I would include and exclude if I were to curate the Museum of Hope and the Library of Loneliness.

Growlin' bout them dirty little brats!

Today the guy next door threatened to call the coppers on the mob of kids that run riot up and down our street. It's school holidays (Easter), so there are more of them than usual and they are running amok more than usual. Who would let their children stay with the Angry Family, where most but not all of the brat-pack live, is a good question, but it's one that is better addressed to DoCS than to me.

The cause of (deidentified neighbour)'s frustration was that the kids had built a cubby in his front yard while he was out, then trashed it. Unfortunately the trashing involved wrecking a large wattle and dropping the branches on top of some young shrubs, causing extensive collateral damage. And of course, all kinds of wrappings and containers and crap had been spread from arsehole to breakfast- the kind of mess that I have to clean off my own footpath at the end of every weekend.

I've been strategically tolerant of them so far- I win some of my skirmishes with them and lose others- but I am sick of their loud swearing and violence towards each other and rock chucking and insolence and malicious damage and colonisation of our footpaths and driveways and front yards. Cranky old bugger that I sometimes become, I have found myself channelling my dead father by half-wishing that a big truck would come round the corner too fast and collect one while they play (more often they just sit) unlit, in the carriageway of the road after dark.
But be careful what you wish for...
And after all, they are just little kids.

More often, I wish that a respected Elder would turn up and have a word to the Angry Mother, or that someone would turn up early in the morning and drag off the Angry Father, and that one or both of those things would actually have an effect on the parents' custodianship of their children's behaviour. Because I'm pretty worried about what that behaviour is gunna be like by the time they're 14.

When I drove in after a pleasant day out with my niece and her baby, I noticed that my letterbox (which I repaired two days ago) had a brand new big ding in it. As the sun went down, and I was hanging out in the front garden, positioning some new pots we'd selected, I saw Angry Girl (aged about 10 or 11?) beat the crap out of her own letterbox several times with a large steel bar. It made a huge racket, but no-one responded.

Both her adults were home.

Damn clever, those octopods

Confirming my long-held opinion that octopi, having learnt to walk on two legs, will inherit the earth, here is Frida, who lives in a zoo in Munich, opening a jar of crabs for her brekky.

More breaking stories about octopi, squids, cuttlefish and other intelligent life-forms at Cephalapod News.

The high cost of inattentiveness

My neighbour asked if I had a compressor. He just wanted a little portable one to pump up the tyres on his trailer. I've had three or four of those in my life. I used one regularly for years till it gave up its ghost, and the others I lent to friends and never got back. I'm sick of replacing them. I think the most recent got passed around or left in a car and is now somewhere outside Alice Springs. That's all right - it's a known consequence of unshackling yourself from possessive materialism.

I lugged my big compressor out onto the verandah, where its long hose could reach the neighbour's driveway. Trouble is, I was half asleep, and the compressor (which is quite heavy) is terribly unstable when tilted even a few degrees from the vertical. So I dropped it through the lower pane of my front door, the same pane that I had to replace when I first bought the door. Not even spectacularly: just nudge...smash. All over in half a second. I cut an artery in my finger prising out the shards. Now that was spectacular! The bugger of it is, that, being Easter Sunday, I am two days away from being able to replace it, and it will have to be done the morning my old Mum arrives to stay for an indefinite while. A morning I was preferring to reserve for calm and mindful preparation for the visit.

I still have the measurements from the first replacement, and that's what hurts most about this incident: I do not like to repeat myself! The door thing is yet another reminder that I do... over and over again, with the characters cast in a slightly different alignment and the sequencing reconfigured, almost imperceptibly. Sometime soon, the phone will ring, and I will pick it up...

Still, the neighbour's happy, and pleased at my generosity, and that's all that counts.

The Library of Dust : retention and relinquishment

The Library of Dust, by David Maisel, documents a collection of human ashes stored in an American hospital:

Inside a dusty room in a decaying outbuilding on the grounds of a state-run psychiatric hospital are simple pine shelves lined three-deep with thousands of copper canisters. The canisters hold the cremated remains of mental patients who died at the hospital from 1883 (the year the hospital was opened, when it was known as the Oregon State Insane Asylum) to the 1970’s, and whose bodies remained unclaimed by their families.

The beautiful verdigris patterns that distinguish the canisters in Maisel's photos are caused by age and oxidation, no doubt enhanced by the release of salts and acids from the once human contents.

A few of my favourite gothic cliches converge in this project: mental patients, abandoned sheds, lonely deaths, institutionalised neglect... but I'd like to consider the collection as a collection.

It is by definition a collection of the uncollected. The bodies not claimed by loved ones or other responsible adults to be returned to earth were cooked and canned and shelved in the shed. Maisel's documentation suggests that they were catalogued:

Numbers are stamped into each lid; the lowest number is 01, and the highest is 5,118.

Are they held 'pending collection', on the off chance that someone might turn up one day with a writ of habeas corpus? Was there an intended date of disposal / dispersal? Or was it someone's best effort at the orderly preservation of identity for perpetuity?

I have combed through the sheds of dead collectors: classifying, evaluating, discarding and preserving the stuff they had stored because 'it might come in handy one day'. I'm cautiously watchful of the point where my own tendency to collect the potentially useful might tip into compulsive hoarding of the kind that, as a government gardener, I have, in the past, had to remove from public housing tenancies: the kind that provides outraged voyeur's fodder for Today Tonight: rooms filled floor to ceiling with bundled newspapers, shoeboxes filled with human excrement, dehydrated and dated.

When I sorted through my father's shed after his death, I removed items that, appearance-wise, were not dissimilar to Maisel's canisters. Leaking oil-filled transformers, unmarked containers of corrosive god-knows-what, verdigrised copper tanks and windings, pre-war Ovaltine tins etched with rusty tide-lines and sludgy growth rings. I threw so much out; I saved so much. My inheritance fills my own shed: the drum full of half-inch washers, the bakelite voltage meters, the plastic handles and ex-PMG exchange counters. You can't keep everything, counselled my brother, and I haven't.

When I was in the bush I composted a journal recording 15 years worth of dreams - my own and those reported by loved ones who trusted my custodianship of such intimate information. Without ceremony or sentiment, I burned significant photographs that can never be reproduced because they contained images of people who are dead or otherwise unavailable to me. When I disposed of a redundant computer I temporarily agonised over archiving three years of an email exchange that documented one of the most significant relationships in my life - then arbitrarily wiped it. Non, je ne regrette rien, the decision rests easily; though from time to time I wonder about the ease of those relinquishments and what it might mean for the mementos that are retained and carried from place to place, but are too excruciating to look at.

I guess they attain a kind of beauty when, transformed, they too begin to leak from their canisters.

Be alarmed #1

About three weeks ago I bought a little cheapie MP3 player, the first music playback device I've owned for at least 10 years. Since I have heard "London Calling" in my mind at least once a day, every day, for the last 20 years, and the bass-line has boomed its way silently (to anyone else) through some of my most significant life events, it seemed only natural that it should be one of the first things I loaded up... along with 'Guns of Brixton', the Saint's 'Know Your Product' and Iggy's 'Passenger'.

This is damn fine, I was thinking, as I wore my pod into the office and the supermarket, evoking the times when I could walk around the bush screaming:

...but I have no fear
cos London is burnin, and I...
I live by the riv-ver

at the top of my lungs, and it was not only literally true, but out of earshot of anybody else, no matter how loud I screamed. And baby, I can scream!

So I was more than a little disconcerted by the timing of this:


Man held as terrorism suspect over punk song
Wed Apr 5, 2006 11:12 AM BST171

LONDON (Reuters) - British anti-terrorism detectives escorted a man from a plane after a taxi driver had earlier become suspicious when he started singing along to a track by punk band The Clash, police said on Wednesday.

Detectives halted the London-bound flight at Durham Tees Valley Airport and Harraj Mann, 24, was taken off.

The taxi driver had become worried on the way to the airport because Mann had been singing along to The Clash's 1979 anthem "London Calling," which features the lyrics "Now war is declared -- and battle come down" while other lines warn of a "meltdown expected".

Mann told newspapers the taxi had been fitted with a music system which allowed him to plug in his MP3 player and he had been playing The Clash, Procol Harum, Led Zeppelin and the Beatles to the driver.

"He didn't like Led Zeppelin or The Clash but I don't think there was any need to tell the police," Mann told the Daily Mirror.

A Durham police spokeswoman said Mann had been released after questioning -- but had missed his flight.

"The report was made with the best of intentions and we wouldn't want to discourage people from contacting us with genuine concerns," she said.

© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.

The Lads, and their love

These are my hounds, Rin-Tin-Tin and Salty. They rumble and growl, they snarl and they sneer, they love each other dearly. Salty has a particular squeal that Rinny respects as a safe word.

Rinny grooms the little bloke's skin, and fleas him with his teeth; Salty stands on the couch, or on a log to reach the big bloke's eyes, so he can gently lick them clean.

Rinny is a stick-man, Salty is a ball-boy. They share a bed, and in winter Salty colonises the big heaving arc described by Rinny's sleeping form. I have, however, arranged their living space so that each has zones where the other cannot go.

There are many dogs in my neighbourhood, and they all bark from time to time, mostly when the creepy guy up the road walks past. I like that about them.

One day a note arrived in my letterbox, written in capitals in thick blue texta with some (seemingly random) words underlined several times.

You're dogs tare each other a part!!!!!!
All day.

it said.

You are crule!! to put a small dog with a big!!
Separaite them or get rid of them!!!!

I built a higher gate and put the note in my expanding file, under 'T' for 'trouble', where I keep such things for future reference, just in case I ever have cause to show the police. A few weeks later, my nice neighbour, who drives a tow-truck, told me of an anonymous note that seemed to be about his young blue-heeler and his girlfriend's fox-terrier, written in angry blue texta.

Toppin up the sweet peas and hangin in the garden

The front garden is my sanity saver and new addiction. Converting it from drought-stricken suburban dust-bowl to bird and butterfly attracting cottage-garden has become quite a consuming and satisfying project.

I am very conscious of the knock-on effect: two of my nearest neighbours have recently started to plant, and passers-by comment on how much my flowers and effort cheer them. I bought my house from the Department of Housing as a run-down wreck, in a neighbourhood where many of the front yards are full of dust, junk and broken down cars.

The previous tenants were violent to each other and the house. Restoring the place to a simple worker's cottage has a subtheme of erasing the marks of their moods and behaviour, not so that it will be forgotten, but so that the environment doesn't perpetuate it in others.

On St Patrick's Day I planted sweet peas. I thought the strike rate was unusually poor, and indeed, it seems as though the moggy who lives with the Angry Family across the road may have shat in the bed. So the weekend involved topping up- that exercise in patience and resilience that gardening, especially in public spaces, as I have for much of my working life, trains us in while we have our hands in the dirt, focussing on other things.

In this climate, we have until Anzac Day to complete the planting of the sweet peas, or so the story goes. I love that about gardening folklore- there is such a rich calendar of seasonal awareness, and a repository of ecological detail so missing in the lives of my new colleagues who move from overheated house to overheated office and wear their boots inside.

Complete quotation from 'Arctic Dreams'

I found a cryptic epigram about 'light' to sit under the title, but it was truncated by a 500 character limit, so here it is in full:

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams