We speak of beginnings. Yet if we spin that thought like a roulette wheel, chances are that sooner or later it will land on zero; and the end of us all will be - if not boredom, which is the constant reminder of nothingness felt as something that won't go away (like traffic noise) or bugs:- Bacterium and viruses; ebola, flu, bubos, malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy, AIDS, tetanus, et al., to mention the bleeding obvious but tired death cliches. There are others, too innumerable or erstwhile under manufacture to chart, and still others not yet known or named though about to make their stage appearance before incessant environmental degradation; unnamed but we suspect, assiduously at work in our entrails. And therein lies the doubt, the silent workings of Bacterium and/or viruses. It is we who, usually at the end-game of disease play audience to the deus ex machina; a chorus of wailings, groans, dire-curses, screams and lachrymose, unedifying gutturals, until we subside (thankfully, but to whom?) calling for the priest and bank manager into a comatose lull, or collapse jelly-like into the all absorbing earth, home to the very bugs which did us in - in the first place. And dirt is the stuff of Nations. 

To paraphrase Acquinas; nothing is the absence of something; nothing, a word: for that is what a word is, a compaction of meaning; and the sound of that word is the memory of that word. We address nothingness on a day to day, nay, moment by moment basis in all our intramundane activities, decisions, notions, distractions, etc., in ascribing value to all action, 'this gesture means that', and in one's promotion of this particular course of action, 'I have justified and possibly for the umpteenth time given value to my existence, at least, in my eyes and to the extent that I have gained the attention of others'.

Our guarded motto in this timeless activity is: 'Be Aware, Beware, Be Wary'. The executive code of existence. We are too busy with each other, perhaps, and given the greater magnitude of physical universe(s), these considerations hardly seem important, and are only defined as having any real significance as they may or may not be related to personal survival. The only way an endangered species can speak, or draw attention to itself is by disappearing into oblivion while we, as 'self-elected' arbiters of the food chain insist upon making as much noise as possible in the interstellar warehouse, vis a vis, the most vociferous planet in the solar system.

II

The year is 1988 (or even 2008) about a third of the way through autumn, say. The Yellow River in China has stopped flowing for 70 days so far this year, last year it was bone dry for 226 days (records verify this - for the first time.) Meanwhile, in Australia, the mouth of the greatest river system on the continent, the Murray-Darling is, for the first time, blocked and silted up, closed off in fact, no longer flowing into the sea. The verbs, 'embogue' and 'debouche' can no longer give dignity or effectively be applied to this 'embouchure'; whereas, a bull-dozer could: a pragmatic declension peculiar to the Australian way of doing things. Off the east coast, vast tracts of the Great Barrier 'minor' Reef have suffered 'bleaching' which coincides with the rise in sea water temperatures by a degree or two, and Australia's hottest January-March on record. The world takes another tug and turn and in the year 2000 (or thereabouts) massive fire tornadoes will again erupt over the sun's surface irradiating out into space and disrupting earth's magnetic fields, not to mention the havoc of severe disturbance to our telecommunications systems (analogue & digital) 'where don't you want to go today?' The moon eternally looks on; its face a picture of pewter indifference. And somewhere, at the heart of our galaxy, in the region of the Giant Magellanic Cloud, a black hole clears its throat of planets and stars. We are now capable of observing vaster cycles of activity in a time-space-continuum and have yet to work out where our number is placed on the roulette wheel - become fully aware of the process begun (some of which have yet to complete their first cycle) long before we get started as breeding, sentient motes of dust caught up in our own glare. 

Can the Hubble Telescope give us 'God Enhancement' (relayed through CNN) and is a black hole no more than staring down the gun barrel of creation itself, waiting for the flower burst of stars? The curdle of galaxies aside, proof of nothingness may be found in a simple, though more banally mundane little test: read the week's TV guide through once. Now try to recall one interesting programme in its appropriate time-slot. Nothing comes to mind? Your mind in reality has been sucked into a vacuum. A state of vapidity. Nothing has been retained as opposed to forgetfulness. Television is an act of cheap voyeurism; a view out onto a de-valued world.

Now, let's take a continental view of these principals at work; comradsat weather satellite 78/-642 is in position. A pin-ball in the round of space within the earth's orbit. Click. Digital flash. Transmit. And the continent is Australia (come on down!) an applique of city lights about its rim (bring up on screen) taken from a 'dreaming perspective', that is, vertical and down: the metallic 'spirit' assemblage hovers, registers, and passes on and around. What does it see? The 'old red sandstone of Europe:' correction by 5 ° - Australia:- resembling a shape similar to the medieval halberd, its irregular axe-blade face toward Papua New Guinea and S.E. Asia. Weatherwise, an incoming 'H' maybe, a departing 'L'. The standard evidence of aridity and ubiquitous drought. A few wisps of what might be bush fire or smoke stack disturbance (the economic growth factors at work) which we shall call mare's tails if only for reasons that the country doesn't have a romantic rock in its entire geological body. The Great South Land, not Europe - at least, not under the present conditions of continental drift; terra developus: when in doubt, build a holiday resort. Anyway, as long as the 'air-con' works, one could be anywhere. No worries. The four-wheel drive takes care of the outback, the Big Dry, the Rainy Season, the Big Muddy, and the moon is a large and as yet unclaimed opal. Outlook: friendly. Not a problem. And what do our heat detectors tell us? Colour-coded phenomena. The spectrometer grades 'blue' for homicides; 'red' for traffic fatalities; 'yellow' for births; 'maroon' for environmental degradation; and 'green' for corporate takeovers. Statistically, the most consistent growth-curve is 'green' rising with Himalayan ascendancy. For the nationalist philosophy is 'what matters is matter' the trenchant belief of the hylomorphist. And disappears off the screen.

And what does our bullshitometer tells us? More of that in a moment. But first, a few comforting examples of our colour-coding system form sponsors. Lock on and enlarge. Menu: tropical forests. Roll through. The east coast, essentially a conurbation from Cape York Peninsula through to say, Eden on the South Coast of NSW, through and beyond to Victoria and points further south. Scan and rotate. Lock in. Enlarge sequentially. No reality news is good news. In each case, the same old story. Roads cut into old growth forests: deduction: roads take things in (machinery) and bring things out (sawlogs) 'integrated harvesting', conclusion: a diminishing and eradication of native timber allotments to manageable 'tourist rest-stops' within foreseeable time-frame: ENVIROCENTRES complete with video facilities screening 24 hours a day, panoramic digitally animated nature documentaries: forests to the horizon, pristine streams, and contented furry creatures, etc: colour: 'maroon' blending into 'vermilion' saturation. The satellite link drops out, our booking time has expired; the screen blank (consciousness) light shrinks to a 'singularity'.

III

Our bicameral legislative system is not to dissimilar to the workings of a sewerage treatment plant; there are at least two primary stages (the upper and the lower house) in the passing through of policy into law, and these latitudes represent the Ultima Thule of the Westminster 'outfall'. Of course, beyond the cloacal, it is worth being reminded here that this system is in no way autonomous, and is served and modulated by global economies which in turn are directed and controlled by the international corporate agglomerations. However, the vagaries and machinations of global trade and its workings is not the focus of this discourse, and so we shall move on: where the satellite has dropped out (not the failure of Galaxy 1V a $395 million three-metre by three-metre cube powered by solar panels fanning out 15 metres which lost antennae focus and the resultant electronic links to 45 million pagers in America, plus innumerable electronic links to thousands of retailers, news organizations and broadcasters) right on cue, the bullshitometer is plugged in. The problem about living in this part of the world (the antipodes) is that you don't really feel as though you are. Or too much so. Regardless of being at one remove Australia belongs in kind to the Western Democracies run not by governmental ministers (dictators do that) but by corporate executives. History begins in the conference room, and profit is the measure of the Common Good. Success simply means you can afford your own personal brand of inadequacies - public absurdities in multiples - for example, cars, bad taste, whatever. The freedom to download the Australian dream; a quarter acre block with the blond(e), please, is now the townhouse with a central security system and personal PC. Relationships can be had online. Yes, and success too, that concentrated level of commitment, always lives next door.

In a country where you can put a 'docking date' (Lloyd's Register of Shipping) to its white settlement phase of recorded history, on which topic Auden said: "History to the defeated can say alas, but cannot help or pardon", though lived to regret this statement and had the poem in question expunged from later editions, considering the sentiments "dishonest" - what else then, can be expected from the country's intellectuals, cultural ambassadors, prose writers and poets (the last always on the back foot in social prestige and who, at best and in desperation, take the '50s 'cool' to new uptight lows) but mere abstracted cleverness or contrivance parading as originality and wisdom; it is more an insight into a corrupt and self-deceiving psyche: selfish, self-serving, and guarded against any challenge to its authority: the exclusive clubs of the cultural 'cool' which is usually little more than a regurgitated version of its (last stop French Cultural theorists) American model. * As Joseph Brodsky said, "Save your cool for the constellations". An ideal climate, of course, for the emergence of the cultural supremacist, parading as free lance academic on loan from the Corporate University System a.k.a. UNICORP; this new breed of academic now incorporates into his deportment well-honed entrepreneurial skills, ideally suited to the private sector or market place; a new take on the old tradition, 'Town and Gown'. Anyhow, there is the underlying danger that these platforms for 'New Idea' become launching pads for a trajectory of culturally supremacist notions, a very concentrated camp for the elitist, an ideal breeding ground for the literary theoretician. 

Those self-nominated guides of literary taste exist in one guise or another; editors of small press literary publications, personal agenda merchants, and the self-perpetuating arbiters of cultural hegemony. What results from this is an intellectual and artistic climate of alienation and a narrowing of boundaries. A lowering and homogeneity of standards if left unchecked. Our radar for what is truly original becomes jammed through abstraction, our ability to emerge from this lost in the briar-tangle of literary and cultural theorising (conveniently tied up in a bundle and called 'post-isms') and invariably borrowed to build quasi-European models from. In order to court originality you must first put yourself on the line, or beyond the line - and move with confident abandonment of models close at hand; this avoids any likelihood of traffic pile-up: the moon is high, the air crisp, and the empty road stretches before you into the compounded night. A shift into an entirely other intelligent gear, intelligence being as much a part of confidence as it is learning, the energized and sustained expression of it. For the 'self-starter' or autodidact nothing is allowed though everything dared. With each new beginning he regards himself as a tabula rasa onto which he inscribes his hieroglyphs and reference points - knowledge becomes a deliberate and conscious act and each acquisition, no matter how insignificant, is savoured for its own sake. 

He operates toward self-definition and self-affirmation. That (again) Kierkegaardian 'leap of faith'. The confines of any one endeavour belong to anticipation; the vast expanse from which he must first locate the surveyor's pegs and then perhaps set about shifting and rearranging his horizons into workable distances. A perceptual shift, then. Emotional changes in state are a not so deliberate psychological attempt on the part of any given individual to shift mood and therefore perception toward a reinterpretation of one's immediate surroundings; the same bridge or viaduct, that hedge, the constancy of flowing traffic (though this is to be avoided in the interests of meditation) disposition of tree, hill-fold and contour - all now visually appearing 'glossed' as if one were seeing these things for the first time, participating in an entirely new (though, somehow familiar, and this sense of nostalgia is the corridor through which history passes) landscape. Objectively, of course, all identifiable features remain as they are. For instance, you can make of death a metaphor, but this does not change the fact - death in immutable, the deprivation of meaning; just as life vigorously attempts of re-create itself in all manner of social and cultural guises - to escape that which is inescapable. The world the way you want to see it, or to coin a phrase: perceptism; the ordering of the senses into a self-sustaining value-system. But not quite. To conquer your fear is to say 'life eats up death'.

'O Solipsism! If I must with thee dwell ...' (my apologies to the shade of Keats.) Log on and welcome aboard the assembly-belt (online) movement of post-consumerism; the ghosts of O'Hara, Olson, Duncan, Ashbery, Bunting, Chips Rafferty, Yagan, Cook, Ruxton, Bidwell, Leichhardt, et al., blur and segues into the 10 second sound grab and cools into the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E eXpressionists and the Next Big Thing. This is all about the Self-At-Bay School or should that be E=S=T=R=A=Y; disjunctive metaphor (a trash & treasure vigilance) plays out as the ultimate expression in neo-materialism, trading off on the Futures Market in the discounted truths of our time. Yay, America, land of the historical by-pass. Sure, we can do the language, the music, the marketing, the movies, the cool, the hype, the hip, the fashion, we can do the informal, - but America can do the world. We, however, as a first world Pacific nation cannot, except by becoming an imitation of an imitation; we can't nor can we admit that we can't, and therein lies the deception. 

We are but poor, pale riders in comparison without any firm notion, especially in our foreign policy, what our role is in or out of Australia (Timor paternalism v fear of Indonesia) and if we are to become a Republic it will be done in the spirit of moral isolationism and fundamentally at base in a confirmed gesture of doubt, non-identity - rather than as a fully paid up (historically patched up) independent, confidently assured nation though these will be the reasons claimed by the exponents of Republicanism, an ignoble abstraction when regarded in the light of an Australian 'white-washed' cultural imperative. A very healthy leaning toward entrenched self-deception: a corporatized, national identity for the New Millennium as articulated in the manifestoes of the chartered accountants and merchant bankers. And the sign that will greet you at Mascot on your arrival (or departure will read: Welcome to Software City, Australia, the Continental Warehouse 'Storage & Retrieval' Capital of Oceania'. And that's God's own virtual truth!

IV

The early '50s. Our newly arrived man in Australia (just a little too late for the Snowy River Scheme) and, if we were beginning a short story - might describe him thus: "his pants fell to regulation refugee length (his ankles showing pale and grey) which gave him a discarded, scarecrow look; an ersatz suit buttoned tight across sternum". Or again, it might be a family photograph. Anyway, when that immigrant first landed did he immediately love 'this sunburnt country' - what did he see or rather, what did he imagine that he saw? Rectangular buildings, many and squat, even the skyscrapers (when he got to see them - for perspective distorts fragility) looked like larger structures of the same rectangular and regular-sided buildings. Nothing baroque or rococo (isn't this what all big cities were like?) no piazzas here, only square, open car-parking spaces, mostly empty, as though waiting for history to fill them up.

Space and opportunity greeted him. Stretches of unworked hillside unrolled before his eyes like banknotes. Our man is many men, a composite figure and we shall call him, "Babo" felius terrae, grew up in traditional poverty and he could be from any one of a number of small villages in the mountainous provinces of Barbagiaseulo and Gennargentu in Central Sardinia, or Campidano in the south. The family estate (small) a few impoverished rocky acres, a handful of ancient olive trees, which he will vow to hold onto - though eventually sell off in his old age. So what he sees is not so much a new land of unlimited agrarian potential (partially, perhaps) he sees, in fact, his own land, the village and countryside of his birth transformed (terra cotta to brick) fecund, endlessly more productive by the sweat of his brow. In his mind, he will be respected and honoured in his own village, even if the spirit of that village is encoded in such names as; Bundaberg, Innisfail, Caboolture, and the tropical hinterland of Queensland.

Babo is cane-cutting in those early, hard years, not harvesting olives. He is learning what it is to be Australian; pragmatic and 'blokey' as his new-found mates; to shout a round or two at the outback veranda pub and to rip the 'scabs' off beer bottles with his teeth. (The veranda: that enduring feminine principle of Australian architecture). He is accepted on this basis and thus left alone. Nonetheless, he would save his earnings while the rest of his 'anglo' mates pissed it away. He is learning to conceal his contempt under a clownish eccentricity and to break his back, and his teeth, to secure his tenure and survival in 'this wide brown land'. Babo and his young wife (she is from the northern province of Gallura) plan for the future and a move to one of the southern states. Our man in Australia, who saw it not through rose-tinted spectacles nor a theodolite for that matter, but through a banknote held up to the mid-day sun. Aleatory fortunes ahoy! Ah, but to choose the right moment, throw the dice for NSW, and the '60s! 

First stop Griffith, country NSW. Babo spent the better part of two years working the tobacco farms in the district before heading for Sydney and its environs. In the city he found himself an assortment of menial employment; street-sweeping for the Sydney municipalities and crane-driving at Mascot, Sydney airport. Around this time he bought himself an old wooden cottage on a triple-block at Enfield, sufficient to grow a few flowers for market; a case of rus in urbe. The early '60s. And so began the long and arduous penny-pinching trek toward the unassailable heights of wealth; a millionaire and a single minded pursuit to which every other consideration, family and modest comfort, was subordinated. Babo in the best peasant tradition was loath to spend money, except in the interests of his burgeoning flower growing business. Centuries of grubbing around on unyielding rocky soil with a mattock had taught his kind this, 'generations have trod thee down' subservience inculcated in the privations of daily necessity. To spend money is to make a sacrifice. This does not enter into the equation. 

It was impossible for Babo to entertain such a thought. However, if he were offered a scheme whereby he could add an additional (say) $15,000 to his capital base and, no matter how long it took, further add to his fortunes then he would not hesitate even if this involved further personal hardship to himself and his family. His tenacity cannot be underestimated. Every activity presupposes an inherent process of bargaining. Bunch by bunch of flowers, week by week, his fortunes steadily grew. Of course, his life style such as it was remained that of a peasant - how else could it be? and this desire to communicate with his neighbour operated at a minimum within the bare, and civil restraints of proximity. Eventually, he would impose these self-same conditions upon his 'second' wife or partner. But she, too, was accustomed to the monotony of hardship and expected no less - after all, she gained provisional security in this mutual arrangement; and, if she could outlive Babo (she could wait until the mountains moved) his fortune - or at least half of it - would go to her two daughters by a previous marriage. She could take further hardship - whatever it took. So what else is life!

She has seen as a child the German soldiers enter her village and desecrate her family hearth - oh, she knew patience all right! Hatred and denial drove her. And focused, critical cunning. Babo's second 'wife'- a big-boned Slovenian whose first husband had maltreated - an alcoholic bricklayer who would regularly beat her, who had finally left this woman stranded high and dry with limited resources. She slummocked through fifteen years of single motherhood endorsing her bigotry and embittered Weltenschauung through a number of the more fascistic radio talkback hosts warping the city airwaves. And she with two daughters to support on her own (she instilled into her children the self-negating virtues of suburbia and drummed into them the imperative of securing a man with money). Patience! Babo and his Slovenian wife were, in effect, ideally suited to each other in the best of utilitarian worlds. He went out into the garden and worked. She washed and cooked, and waited. 

Babo's first wife, innocent girl from the mountains of Sardinia didn't want to work the farm 24 hours a day, she wanted to rejoice in her new found freedoms, the heady atmosphere of an adventurous young Australia in the '60s; simple things, shopping, a few new bright dresses, taken to a dance in the weekend at the Italian club, maybe? Babo wouldn't budge an inch. Slowly, by degree, her colours dulled and she faded, become more depressed and non-communicable. Imperceptibly, her sanity became enclosed and she retreated into a world of her own. A world of fantasy; manic-depression and anger where the distinction between life-affirming dream and negative recall inevitably blurred and her spirit broke; the dignity of dream lay in a smoky haze, shattered, and she could not gauge the distinction (a destroyed person, a destroyed people, what's the difference?) Babo could do nothing for her and she refused all medical help.

Thus his intractable attitude subservient to money and hoarding ultimately drove her insane. She would end up, years later, hugely overweight, toothless, and blithely out of touch with every day reality. A 'bag-woman'. Her home a housing-commission one bedroom unit in a brick wasteland out west near Punchbowl. For company, she had her occasional eboulement; sudden and brightly falling dreams of childhood in mountainous Gallura. Outlook: condition black. She bore him one daughter only - a deep and protective core of sanity at the centre of her being. She would eventually die in the knowledge that her daughter was safe and secure in her own life - a life that would over-compensate for the security neither had.

So Babo took on another life partner, but only because he was in need of someone to wash his soiled work clothes and to feed him. He was looking for a workhorse who would stand by him without question; and he anticipated complaint. A harridan. And he found one (there were numbers to choose from, and here we must remember that feminism, being largely a white, bourgeois and therefore privileged phenomenon, did not in any measure affect these immigrant women or their disadvantaged lives - the media appeal was absent) yes, contracted a partner from the principal multi-cultural or 'ethnic' centres in the far western districts, the Italian Marconi Club. But long before any of this came to pass, Babo had found a house in Enfield with a small patch of ground to cultivate in a time when Sydney still knew the clatter of trams. Every day by tram with his 'carry-box' of flowers to the old Paddy's Market, every day for years, making his few pennies by the bunch, 'firsts' and 'seconds' though he mainly made his money on 'seconds'. A dollar here, a dollar there ....

The day came when he had enough capital to move out of the city (which he detested) to a larger property. He chose 'the hills district' northwest of Sydney at Galston. Babo bought five acres and began farming flowers in earnest, five acres of virgin native bush in Galston that had to be cleared regardless of objections from the several hippy communes which had sprung up in the district in those days, or from his pottery 'whole earth catalogue' making neighbours. He cleared the land right down to the last waratah, and he cleared it right down to the last square foot that his deeds of title legally allowed. His was the 'scorched earth policy' and the most effective agents which allowed him to utilize every square foot of his land were the insecticides (more correctly, defoliants) "phosderin" and "arsenic". While one portion of his land (so treated) lay fallow, another would be under active cultivation through a system of continuous rotation. Babo made his fortune growing: chrysanthemums, carnations, caldenula, daisys, roses (most varieties) gypsophila, everlasting daisies, candytuft, sunflowers, stock, statice, cornflowers. Late night 'bunching' and early to market, from 4am to 7am, three days a week.

In the early '70s, he sells up and again relocates: by this time the trams are long gone (he has owned a truck for some years) and Paddy's Market has moved to Flemington. Babo buys another five acres out at Arcadia and begins the whole process of land clearing over again; stripping the native bush, laying traps for neighbourhood animals unlucky enough to have strayed onto his property, plus the generous application of "phosderin" and "arsenic" to destroy the insects. Arsenic by now has been banned as a highly toxic substance but this makes little difference to Babo's time-honoured farming practices and he continues, surreptitiously, to use it. He is a man set in his traditional, diurnal ways (with a little help from his poisons) and he has no intention of changing - not for anyone! what do they know about hard work, eh? Australians are a lazy lot by nature; they drink, they boast about what they are going to do, they do nothing, these 'anglos' believe their own lies as truth and that is why nothing gets done. No traditions, that is why! Life has got to be hard otherwise it's not worth it. What else can you do? Australiani sono poltroni!

Our man in Australia will hold to these views throughout his long, monochromatic, peasant life. He is, without apology, an arch-conservative and progressively right wing in exact proportion to his accumulating wealth which is his only yardstick to personal achievement. Babo is 'blue-ribbon' and a staunch Liberal Party supporter in a brave new world, all the way to the bank, though, in his case a foreign bank. He is the property of no-man; he came here with nothing but a suitcase. He made something; and he thinks, 'So what if my story is told a thousand times - who cares if people laugh, what I have done is original, and that is because I have done it and felt it. Laugh if you must! you are nothing to me'.

What is style? Style is polished anonymity. What Babo had wasn't style but given his assured metier, the next best thing; denial, that is, a single-minded dismissal of other people's sensitivities in the pursuit and execution of his objectives; a razor-sharp survival instinct which promised success as its own reward (though translated into hard currency) denial as motivation, a peasant farmer with corporate attitude. When Babo bought into Arcadia, it was already a going concern, an established orchard farm: fig, orange, peach, plum, nectarine, etc., the land had been 'civilized'. His previous property at Galston was an entirely other, 'barbaric' proposition. The transition from comparative domestic ease of Enfield to Galston coincided with the deterioration in his marriage, and the ensuing divorce (unofficial) during the progressive move from relative security and comfort, to pioneering hardship; however, before the 'divorce' Babo irrevocably 'down sized' his Sardinian wife to rank of drudge. Yet, the new world and its sudden freedoms drove her into isolate madness.

The native bush and scrub on the property at Galston in those early days was so thick you couldn't walk through it; mature blue and ghost gums, and an impenetrable understorey - his property a habitat to wallabies and all diversity of smaller creatures, from possums, bats, rabbits, to an army of funnel-web and red-back spiders, black and brown snakes, red-bellies, and the harmless green tree snake. Everything that grew, moved, flew or crawled was heaped upon burning pyres until the entire five acres lay stripped bare and smoking as if the Roman legion had passed that way in an orgy of plunder and devastation. A land ready for tillage, excoriated. So too had his original wife's personality been 'levelled'. No Eden here, just end-game: Babo, the power of one. 'This land is your land, this land is my land, from the Gulf of Capentaria to the Great Australian Bight, from the Riverina to the Malle ... this land was made for the likes of you and me, mate!'

Babo has owned his 'car-space' or slab of concrete where he sells his produce at Flemington market for about twenty years; perhaps he is the oldest flower grower still active in the business? And his car-space, were he to sell it, would fetch upwards of $80,000. He has made his fortune (mainly from 'seconds') and is close to the end of his working life though gnarled and strong like an old olive tree at 74. But to stop! to retire! Such a prospect produces rising waves of panic and sleepless nights, even the regular evening (and morning) shot of scotch doesn't seem to help, and his blood pressure rises like his profit graph. To stop perchance to spend? there is no alternative for Babo, it is not within the peasant code, for what else can he do but work, it is the whole 'transplanted' Sardinian raison d'etre.

He will go on as long as he is able and probably drop dead in a paddock which is fine by him. Even in retirement he will tend his farm and return it to natives and gums. The completion of a life - 360 degrees back to the original, arboreal state. The overriding fear is that if he stops work he is finished - dead. The system, therefore, he has had in place over the years must be maintained. Sufficient capital on record to run the business for which he keeps $100,000 in the local bank is regularly topped up. Otherwise, monies are buried in tightly sealed glass jars all over his property. Thus at the end of each fiscal year he takes out large sums undetected and certainly unknown to the inland revenue department. His first stop without fail is always Roma. A simple and most effective system of transfer - he hides money belts about the capacious person of his Slovenian work horse. 

This practice has been going on for decades regular as the seasons. In this way, Babo is able to lodge small amounts of monies under different names in a dozen or so accounts belonging to non-existent relatives. Some investment goes into property and his village in Sardinia, but the greater part is lodged at international banks in Roma on long term healthy interest rates. His Arcadia property is now worth around half a million, yet there is no money in flower growing any longer and Babo is advancing now well into his seventies: relentlessly fit, taciturn, deeply suspicious of his fellow man, and as tight as ever. 'Let them fight amongst themselves for the spoils after I am gone', he reasons, 'but for now I will do precisely as I have always done as long as I am able. The rest is not my concern.'

Yet he will unshakeably honour the traditions and sign his assets over to his one daughter in return for securing him (with his Australian pension) in his dotage - if it comes to that. 'She can deal with the claims and counter-claims. She will deal with the legal wrangles'. Meanwhile, dear reader, spare a thought for his original wife, the lost and innocent one finally ignored by Babo and her own relatives alike. She will dream of stone bridges, valleys. Something glowering, or should that be lowering? Shrouded, anyhow. Many times she has conjured up her curse.
 

V

If Babo, either by blood or choice, did not truly belong to this country - what settler in any historical time-frame did? When does history and ownership begin? Who are the legislators of place and belonging? Long before bigotry and prejudice kicked in (if ever there existed a pre-racist phase in the development of homo-sapiens) these propositions flooded on the currents, those migratory questions in the blood of man, if you will.

Let us suppose the existence of a conscience as blank and flat as the interior of this country, a people without any historical conduit, devoid of introspection or subjective reckoning. And where a country is without history, the only course open to it is to build and building as we are all aware involves first the removal of pre-existing structures, people and cultures; large volumes of earthworks (building sites, trenches) a material ideally suited to erasure and burial. 

And for a folk who possesses neither conscience nor history, language becomes the tool of rationalization, a device expedient in maintaining the necessary conditions of denial or emptiness. What is not realized of course, is that most mistakes mature into present guilt. What evolves is a culture of forgetting, founded not in measured historical etiquette, but in a centrifugal dynamism, a speedy lifestyle in other words. Momentary retention is the name of the game, what was once termed the 'thirty-second grab' mentality, which these days is pretty much down to 'five' seconds. A culture of amnesia taken to its logical extreme within the precincts of its mercantile centre, Sydney; and Sydneysiders possess an endless capacity to promulgate and believe in their own mendacity. In short, they believe their own bullshit.

If there is one distinctive feature or characteristic of this people - it is that; borne out of a non-confidence (parading as youthful confidence) and non-history (parading as economic rationalism.) Youth, as a prototype, may be generally regarded as the purveyors of pretentiousness, shape-shifting, and mercurial-mannered disposition toward the external world - out there. The much vaunted brashness of youth is no more than an inherent reality-check, a mechanism designed to facilitate self-doubt or questioning and, therefore, change. Youth is indefinable aside from the hyperbolic mannerisms claimed by the advertising industries who regard this demographic as their own private investment portfolio. Nonetheless, in national terms, that change is recognised as projected economic growth, yearly treasury forecasts and the lurid glare of fiscal entitlements. Welcome the emergence of a new tribal grouping, not only the 'dot commas' but the 'bankophiles'. 

Pre-historic man may have built bonfires on promontories as beacons to guide migratory ancestors from beyond the horizontal cloud. Today, in a comparable atavistic gesture, we build 'holiday-resorts' and signal to our fellow investors that the soul's magic has ceased to be a threat, and is now dead. Here the predisposition is toward the factitious, rather than the fictitious mind. Nonetheless, we first built churches at the beginning of the medieval era in memory of the already fading forests that we were then despoiling - hill folding upon hill in 'mast heads'. Standard church architecture is build around the design of the cross, [or cross roads] yet at one pagan level, the layout pays homage to the forest canopy and the interlacing of branches over ancient grottoes, as the 19th century English poet, George Darley, illustrates in his long symbolist poem, Nepenthe:
 

Shadowy aisles of pillared trees
Now my errant fancy please,
Dim cathedral walks like these;
Nave by numerous transepts crost,
Each in his own long darkness lost,
Cloister and chancel, thick embossed
Their roofs with pendant foliage, thro'
Whose fretted branchwork richly pours
The sun, in golden order due,
His bright mosaic on the floors.
 

IV

Ley-lines? 'there's a rumour in the bush as the optic-fibre goes around', the spinning, tourbillion sun, signs and portents, good snake-oil obsessions, the vanishing-point of the super-highway vis a vis cyberspace clicking-on to create a brand new 'inscape' (an endless roll through menu) and an environment plenty more habitable than the cindered interior of this country. Salute the mid-morning glare of the Techno-mythic Age. Most of the ancient mythologies, that is, the greco-roman polytheism have ceased to exist as a belief system (acid rain and oil spillage played its part) a classicism re-routed into a multiplicity of sub-academic disciplines; Christian monotheism (aside from its latter day incarnation as TV 'Game Shows') has become increasingly unsubstantiated and somewhat opaque, an unworkable proposition on a walk-through-the-mall-of-life basis; eastern religions, especially a nuclear-capable Islam, gathering its skirt into a knot of fanaticism, hard-pressed and up against the adamantine demands of western materialism.

And in the western democracies, the individual is forced into a position pointedly of needing to believe in (at least) something which invariably proves false (a marriage, a job, relationships, a lottery or even in the existence-period itself, thus - the overvaluing of choice as a commodity; and like most unfulfilled expectations is left with a residue of guilt and subsequent loss. 'A Big Thirst, in fact, I think I've got it now!' blears the beer commercial, filling up our screens with the hard-yakka, sheep and four-wheel-drive blokey-loving bustle under a red and muscle-bound sun. This has more to do with slapping an intractable landscape into shape than with the cool fountains of Apollonian reason and the slaking of thirst. 

If there were two Uluru rocks, you can bet your euro-dollar one would be intagliated with the patrician faces of founding fathers and politicians - accessible via mono-rail, of course! with a plague boasting "Our fathers of the Desert": Leichhardt, Sturt, Yagan, Ruddock (Commissar of Desert Compounds), King Wally Lewis., et al. Homage to God as Stockman; optional extras, corporate cowboys and media barons solidly merchandized. 'Take one home as a paperweight. Your very own pet rock'. Not quite sacred-site calibre but nevertheless a fine beginning toward a utilitarian mythology. A flat land in search of elevation, a dry continent seeking out the cultural sweetmeats as we stomp off into the next chiliad, digital footprints kicking in the door of the solar system and feeling, in the depths of our mainframe, that we may have passed this way before.
 

Advance: O Let us boast a standard gauge, one rail one nation; applaud a Republic on track, a history laid to rest optically; a white picket fence for every home; a bar-code for every gene; the Blackfella Hall of Fame: Australia. 
 

(c) Stephen Oliver.  All Rights Reserved.

Stephen Oliver's new book is titled, Night of Warehouses: New and Selected Poems 1978-2000, HeadworX, 2001. ISBN 01473-07388-9. This selection covers five volumes of poetry and spans two decades.