Looking down on birds

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 water
A 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.