When I moved to Canberra, I discovered that I had come back to the country where I grew up—the dry, high winter country in the shadow of the mountains. But I didn’t grow up in Canberra, but in the dry centre of Tasmania, where the Great Lakes and the mountains of the Western Tiers define the brittle, stony landscape. It’s as if there is a large mirror placed here, duplicating the other place, with the same images appearing again and again. Here I live in the sky, looking down on birds.
Here in the sky country the coastal plains, after rising through the lush, damp forests of the Southern Highlands, have finally given way to the lofty rocky sprawl of the Southern Tablelands, with its stunted trees and thin, shallow rivers.
I can be in several, wildly different places almost at the same time. For a significant birthday celebration some years back, I spent a Saturday night on the balcony of an apartment in Darlinghurst, drinking large quantities of Semillon amongst many friends. The following weekend I was camped amongst massive gum trees in the Snowy Mountains, drinking tea out of mugs next to a smoky, spitting campfire.
In the sky country
For decades I lived with gardens, watering and weeding and inspecting the progress of plants. Since then I have steadily relocated to ever more urban locations. Life as an apartment dweller is the culmination, perched high in the sky, looking down on birds.
People come and go in apartments and no one ever knows – high in the sky, up amongst the clouds, next to the mountain, in country that is already closer to the sky. In this house in the sky, I navigate an ethereal world, adjusting the rice paper blinds as though I was trimming sails on a yacht, using elusive breezes to move air about and cool rooms. I am aware of every subtle change in the weather, clouds, rain and winds. One day, in an instant, a heavy shower of rain surrounded me, the balconies awash, like a car wash or a Manly ferry swamped by heavy seas.
In the kingdom of the heavens
birds, humming like lifelines, abound
coloured, like special occasions
welcome, of every hue
 |
| A torn piece of sky, space with cloud |
Watching the movement of air
like the flow of water
high up, home amongst the clouds
in the sky country
birds swim like fish
in limpid liquid
in warm, sticky air like syrup
looking down on birds
Looking down on birds
It’s like learning another language—the language of apartments. You walk in and shut the door and close yourself off from the world. It is not unlike staying in hotels, something I am very familiar with. If I have to move, it will be easy. Even though people may live in apartments for many years, they are spaces that are ideally designed for transients. Perhaps it's because everything in them can so easily be picked up and moved into another life in another place.
Looking down on birds
a battered Catalina
flying boat
slung below me in
the Powerhouse Museum
metal skeleton and
skin
climbing above bony oceans
swings like a fish on
a hook
aluminium animal,
with heavy wings
rattling in the slipstream of history
along the bypasses
of time
a torn piece of sky
space, with cloud
on a balcony hung
above rail lines
I noticed silence
missed hearing the
sudden thud of trains
saw quiet strangely
descend, like ashes
birds skitter below
like bright insects
rustle through the
light-coloured air
like lizards in long grass
speaking and
living backwards
like a slither of
Arabic script across a page
living in reverse
I escaped to the
sky country
and returned askew
to my native land
moved from an
absence of silence
to a stealthy quiet
each day hidden
like a weekend
venturing down the
blistered gravel driveway
to search for
missing news
in the high up
country
in a brittle,
stony landscape
without much rain
where huge white
birds descend
big enough to carry off a child
lunging like
attackers
from the gnawed and stripped heights of
trees
to a tinkling
metal roof
carnivorous
lizards, turned white glider
Approaching from a distance Black Mountain
On our walk this morning, we were talking about
how the country down near the lake looks like the English Counties and I
thought of Gainsborough. The country squire with his wife and children, cattle,
dogs and land stretching behind him - art as inventory.
Approaching from
a distance Black
Mountain
on foot, across
the brimming lake
through a European
scene – all well-tended copse and meadow
like some
eighteenth century painting
or a portrait by
Gainsborough
some distant Arcadia
of property, land
and family, the women and cows arrayed
all dogs and cattle
and stretching fields
like a checklist of
wealth
art as inventory
below these
slender highland slopes
Black Mountain like a
captured artefact from an earlier time
its summit hidden
by slippery mist
looking much as it
would have looked
to settlers splashing
across the muddy valley
through an alien
land
sloshing around in shallow reeds
pointing and whistling to their dogs
In a thick sea of parrots
On a Yarralumla side street I am awash in a thick clatter of parrots
they clamber about me
a flash of bright crimson and deep sea green
near flats where absentee politicians flirted
and floated away in time
where fat balloons overhead
clear their noses like whinnying horses
gathering hot air like a favour
Sweet like kisses, small like fruit
I eat sweet fruitcake, small parcels like slivers of crumbly wedding cake
our sixth anniversary passes
like the glorious drizzle of rain
a deep heavy mist sets in
even birds are confused
tumbling from bridges
What comes before, like weather
never settles
a changing present alters the past
just as much, or more
as possible futures
and just as the dinosaurs are still amongst us
in the guise of birds
we all still, in a way, speak Latin
Woken by ducks
Watching my wife full of light
wrapped in a
patterned German jacket
slipping into
rococo boots and tattooed coat
transferring our anniversaries
from one epoch to
the next
gorgeous, like
horses
with low-slung buttocks
sleek like a fur
seal
like a flight attendant
on a long-haul jet
you rattle me awake
offering beverages
and shaky wakefulness
sleeping on the
floor
like students
woken by ducks
a world of
shimmering waters
and sheets of
glittering liquid
mist, cloud and
smoke
mingle on the mountains
A stampede of rattling
leaves
rolling across the
street
like a balloon
cutting loose from
its ropes
A steady rain of
claret ash turned red
and oak, like a war
decoration
sidelined by
calendars
a coloured marker
for a different season
with brittle edges
the wind pecked at
the glass
like crazy birds
outside
bucking and mangling in the breezes
looking down on birds
scored like black
letter staves
or vicious statutes
against the
sightlines of shrinking horizons
weather-beaten
the indistinct
division between layers of wood smoke
and thinned out
mist
dumbed down horizons
Working in Old Parliament House
On a high country morning, we woke to a world
covered in mist. Walking in mist is like travelling across snow. The calm
silence wraps everything. You can hear the sharp cries of birds calling to each
other against this blank soundscape – everything else is absent. The art deco
polished dark timber work of Old Parliament House reflects the hallways in the
stone chalets, the snow gums match.
The
parliamentarians have all gone
reclaimed by
jealous electorates
or lingering asbestos fibres
leaving room only for
the miscellaneous
and minute
reliving the
restricted confines
of the chilly 1950s
the empty corridors
like a huge creaking caravan
shadowy passages over
rattling planks
here there are ghosts and fables
a whirlwind of
roses in the sheltered gardens
hot minutes descending into hours
conservative decades mimicking centuries
Walking to Mt Kosciusko, before New Years Eve
It’s Tasmania, with added proximity to the big
Eastern seaboard cities thrown in—that well beaten and increasingly crowded
path between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. I’m making the most of it,
shivering as the thin wind sweeps down from the mountains in winter, looking
out over the slivers of frost in the early morning air, watching the dried
brown leaves rattle along the empty streets, smelling the wood smoke rising
amongst the trees.
Walking to Mt
Kosciusko, before New Years Eve
wheezing trees
above us
filled with the
hoarse trumpeting of birds
stampeding back to
the thin pinched air
walking through
slender, chilly rain
across paths by
high, icy lakes
In a land of clouds
where waters run
like milk
like an unorthodox
baptism
I sink in water
floating in cool
lakes near endless horizons
I take the cold
track by the lake
in country that is closer to the sky
consulting widely
seeking clues to
the future
while whole worlds,
like puffy oranges, peel apart
© Stephen Cassidy, 2012
See also the article 'Looking down on birds'.
For more information about the author see Writing biography.
See also
Island on fire
‘On an island you’re never far from the sea –
that is unless the island is huge, like Australia. In tiny Tasmania,
perched like an afterthought at the foot of Australia, even the
mountains in the centre are not far from the ocean raging around them –
just as in the distant homeland from which those who settled it came. On
the main island, though, everywhere is a long way from everywhere else.
Two islands, very different in size, in many ways with both similar and
different histories. Both on fire. But this not just about the fires –
it’s about what happened in front of the fire, the life lived in a time
of warming and burning, even if it sometimes felt like a rehearsal for
the end of the world’, Island on fire.
I smoke baby cigars
‘Smoking baby cigars in the dark of the backyard. Like some Cuban presidente haranguing the crowd with reminders, I proffer a list of romantic anniversaries, our May 4th movement, our July 12th uprising – our moment when everything became new’,
I smoke baby cigars.
Cut back to black
‘Cut back to black, thin chill drizzle mid-winter – infinite regression on petrol’. Also called ‘Revhead heaven’,
Cut back to black.
Coming back to these stones
‘Coming back to these stones – in the sandy dry reaches of the Coorong in South Australia’s South East birds flicker across the flat water like beads of run-away mercury’,
Coming back to these stones.
Landscapes in a rear vision mirror
‘Heading at a moment's notice into Broken Hill, breaking several traffic laws on the Barrier Highway, in the rear vision mirror the land kept switching colours’,
Landscapes in a rear vision mirror.
Stopping by Lake George
‘Lake George is a vast stretching freshwater lake, with no outlet. It is only diminished by evaporation. Many stories are told about Lake George, a still point of the turning earth, with all the quiet of the eye at the centre of a hurricane’,
Stopping by Lake George.See other work from the Conversations group exhibition, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, 2004 – a collaborative exhibition of writers and visual artists.
State of origin
Multimedia piece developed with visual artist, Deborah Faeyrglenn, State of origin looked at where we come from, where we go next and where we truly belong. In this work the writer and visual artist combined word, image and computer technology to make visual music. Words and images moved across the computer screen, with no fixed address,
State of origin.
The lost art of conversation
Installation, developed with visual artist, Deborah Faeyrglenn, on words, meaning, reflection and infinite (or at least, partial) regression. Three tall thin vertical mirrors stand against the wall, covered in bursts of words. Three matching paper shadows flow out from the wall along the floor. Words on the mirrors flutter and blur into shadows,
The lost art of conversation.
balloon
A fictional narrative work in the form of a website, the website as writing. About the adventures of a refugee from the big city who sets up the High Country Thought Balloon Company. A series of brief vignettes about the characters, situations and stories which intersect the path of the balloons as they soar across the skies of the Southern Tablelands and Snowy region. It is about changing perspective,
balloon.
Malacoota Inlet
‘Shutdown in a flat, wet land, the line beween sea and sky where grey meets grey, where stricken yachts come in’,
Malacoota Inlet.
Sitting on twigs
‘Sitting on twigs in the flat lands, in a piece of country loaded with meaning, like a tightly coiled spring’,
Sitting on twigs.
Signature of waterA series of artworks as part of the Waterworks exhibition at Goulburn
Regional Art Gallery responding to the shared task of facing up to life
on our dry continent. It ranged from short, minimalist animations, using
cartoons, to hyperfiction drawing on the styles of crime novels. It was a
mix of poetry, storytelling, images and sounds which were heavily
influenced by the styles of popular culture and the urban and rural
landscapes around us,
Signature of water.
