The 1st of March, the first day of Autumn here in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia).

lopped tree
first day of autumn 
state of mind           🌵

I read an article the ABC in 2019 that talks about how common plane trees are in Melbourne, and the plans to massively reduce their number by 2040. You can fine the article here.

Aaand . . . we’re back . . .

Spring is here, the slough of winter all-but-forgotten and my writing hiatus is done.

Father’s Day here in Australia is on the first Sunday in September, so right at the start of spring.

Honestly, Father’s Day isn’t usually celebrated all that much in Australia, but this year I did manage a haiku:

      dew on dry grass –
a man holds
     a new-born baby 

Hot summer days in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia) are often accompanied by an oppressive hot north wind.

Often, the wind changes direction in the mid or later afternoon, and the heat is broken by a lovely cool sea breeze.

If the change doesn’t come you’re in for a hot, uncomfortable, sleepless night and, almost certainly, a stinking hot tomorrow.

     Thin cypresses
faded Australian flag –
     no cool breeze today. 🌵

Read my other posts and haiku, here.

References:

Melbourne weather: How winds from the north and west create ‘change days’, Belinda Smith, ABC News, 13-Nov-2018.

This post was originally drafted a month or so ago.

At that time Melbourne was coming out of a very long COVID lockdown (our sixth). The formal restrictions set by the government were being eased, but many of us continued to live mostly-isolated for fear of catching the virus and passing it on to older or unwell relatives. Kids were going back to school, but because of the risk of catching COVID on public transport, we were dropping our kids at school each morning in the car, and picking them up each afternoon.

My daughter’s school is a castle of concrete and brick on top of a steep hillside in Footscray. It overlooks the flood plain of the Maribynong river. The “hill” is actually the old Footscray tip; who knows what archeology, and what toxic slime, is buried under its clean modern buildings and the neatly mowed turf of its playing fields?

Beside the school, Farnsworth Avenue winds down the slope of the hill to the brown curve of the Maribynong, and lining the side of the avenue are the inevitable purple and green agapanthus.

On this particular morning I’d just dropped my daughter at school, and the car was starting to gather speed down Farnsworth Avenue toward the river and the bridge, when I noticed a couple of cabbage moths fluttering across the road, only a metre or two above my windscreen. Cabbage moths, usually in pairs, are a common sight at this time of year in backyards and vegetable gardens all over Melbourne. They remind me of my childhood, and long hot afternoons, and having nothing much to do. A lepidopterist would probably inform you that cabbage moths are not actually moths at all, but plain white butterflies with black spots on their wings, but I’m not inclined to be too be so scientifically minded. Fixate on the fact that cabbage moths aren’t really moths and the next thing you know someone will be trying to convince you that Pluto is not a planet.

     Two cabbage moths
twirl above
     the double white lines.  🌵

Fast forward, and here we are in the first days of 2022: test cricket is on TV; the number of case of the Omicron variant are growing exponentially; social events are being cancelled; and the government is starting to reimpose restrictions.

Read my other posts and haiku, here.

Melbourne’s COVID-19 lockdown is staggering towards the finish line. The case numbers are as high as they have at any time during the pandemic, but the vaccination rate is rising steadily, and I think there is just a general realisation that many people have given as-much-as-they-had-to-give and have started . . . not-to-comply.

So back to work, in dribs and drabs, we go. Back to our commutes, our shopping centres and our offices. Our parking inspectors. Our microwave-reheated lunches. Our bosses and our subordinates.

We’ll have to leave behind our new cavoodles, our business-shirts-with-PJ-bottoms, and the rainbow lorikeets squawking, squawking in the plum tree out the back.

     Walking with my brother 
after lunch - a young dog 
     behind a window.

Note: I wrote this haiku with my youngest brother Eveready.

Read my other posts and haiku, here.

Is there a more haiku-worthy Australian bird than the tawny frogmouth? They look like bits of broken branch on trees, or stone gargoyles on a church, or maybe a very grizzly looking great uncle who has fallen asleep while sitting on the couch.

One of these amazingly grumpy-looking birds has recently made a nest, and has a baby frogmouth, in a tree near the dog park in Travancore just near the Moonee Ponds Creek.

Any time of the day you walk along Mooltan Street in Travancore you’ll see a little group of people, hovering quietly around the base of one tree in particular, hoping to catch a glimpse of the baby frogmouth.

Traditional haiku poets in Japan went moon-viewing or to see the cherry trees in bloom. Here we gather to look at tawny frogmouths.

When I was down in Travancore the other day there was a photographer with a telephoto lens. We got into a (quiet) conversation and he told me that he’s set up a website called “Travancore Tawnies”. So, go, check them out.

If you’ve lived in Melbourne for a while you’ve probably noticed how many different sorts of native birds there are around these days.

Up until about 8 or 10 years ago the only birds I remember seeing in the inner suburbs were blackbirds, Indian mynahs (mynas), sparrows, pigeons, ravens, and the occasional lost seagull.

But back then, when I was growing up, most streets had no street trees; parks were mostly dead grass and dust, with one or two scraggly trees if you were lucky; and planting native trees in gardens was only just starting to be trendy. Lots of people had pet cats that they let live outdoors, no bells on collars.

The increased number of native birds in the city that we’re seeing now is not just because there are better habitat trees (and less stray cats). Other factors push birds towards the city like drought, and climate change, and loss of natural habitat in bushfires.

I can remember when I’d only heard a currawong a few times in my life, and then only on hikes or bush walks, far away from town. Then, ten or twelve years ago, when I was a grad nurse at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, there was a currawong that used to sit on the top of one of the shorter (4-5 stories high) sections of the hospital giving its haunting, abbreviated, early evening call. Now you can hear currawong all through the inner northern and western suburbs of Melbourne.

Australian Magpies used to be the sound of the morning when we went on holidays to the country. Now I hear them almost every day. These days magpies are the sound of work-days in the city too.

Wattlebirds are everywhere. Noisy miners. Rainbow lorikeets. Crested pigeons. The occasional sulphur-crested cockatoo. I even saw blue wrens when walking up beside the Maribynong the other day.

     Tawny Frogmouth –
I will be here
     Long after you are gone. 🌵

Read my other posts and haiku, here.

References:

Rare visitor excites Melbournians, yet it’s presence is a sad sign, Miki Perkins, The Age, 30 May 2020, https://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/rare-visitor-excites-melburnians-yet-its-presence-is-a-sad-sign-20200530-p54xxp.html.

Travancore Tawnies, https://travancoretawnies.com.

It’s a strange feeling:

Cooped-up, finding it hard to remember what you used to do for fun, unable to go anywhere or see anyone (except for the occasional trip to the shops for “essentials”).

But also:

Seeing so much of the people that you live with that you’re seriously starting to get on each other’s nerves, tension, simmering resentments, and hard words being said.

No end in sight.

     Cut the engine
sit in the car
     enjoy the rain.

Read my other posts and haiku, here.

Here in Victoria, Australia, we are in our 5th COVID-19 lockdown. *sigh*

The 4th volume of R. H. Blyth’s Haiku, the Autumn – Winter volume, has a section devoted to dragonflies.

In Japanese haiku dragonflies are an autumn kigo (season word), so dragonfly haiku might not be entirely appropriate reading at the moment, given that here in Melbourne we are currently in the depths of winter.

He has dyed his body

with autumn, –

The dragon-fly.

Bakusui (trans. R. H. Blyth)

Whenever dragonflies are given a colour in Japanese haiku they are always red.

The beginning of autumn,

Decided

By the red dragon-fly.

Shirao (trans. R. H. Blyth)

Several of the dragonfly haiku in Blyth mention late afternoon or early evening. Do we notice dragonflies more often at that time of the day? Or is it that there is a parallel between the colour of the dragonflies and sunset colours?

Between the moon coming out

And the sun going in,-

The red dragon-flies.

Nikyu (trans. R. H. Blyth)

Some of the haiku focus on other characteristics of dragonflies, like the size of their eyes:

The face of the dragon-fly

Is practically nothing

But eyes.

Chisoku (trans. R. H. Blyth)

About this haiku Blyth notes:

This is what any child might say, but for that very reason, near to the kingdom of poetry.

Dragonflies fly with abrupt changes of direction as though they are constantly changing their minds.

The dragon-fly,

Swift to the distant mountain,

Swift to return.

Akinobo (trans. R. H. Blyth)

A number of the dragonfly haiku quoted in Blyth mention graves, stones, walls (and an “uneventful” village) presumably as a point of contrast to the busy flight of dragonflies.

Old graves;

Red dragon-flies flitting

Over the withered shikimi.

Anon. (R. H. Blyth)

In his notes on this haiku Blyth states:

The shikimi or Chinese anise has a small white flower in summer. The flower smells sweet, but is poisonous. Nevertheless, sprays are offered before the Buddha. The old grave, the withered offerings, the dragon-flies rustling to and fro, - what a scene of thoughtless significance?

“Thoughtless significance” . . .? Sometimes Blyth’s prose is quite poetic and you need intuition, rather than analysis, to approach his meaning.

These haiku seem to establish that in Japan dragonflies are red, but here in the south eastern part of Australia I think most of the dragonflies I’ve seen are blue. Maybe some are yellow and black? Or yellow/green? But mostly blue.

Note: I do not have a good source for identifying Australian dragonflies, but a quick scan of the internet shows some have evocative names like: Swamp Bluets; Blue Skimmers (the female of this species is greeny-yellow and black); and the Tau Emeralds. The name Tau Emerald conjures something of the jewel-like appearance of many dragonflies.

My skim of the internet also revealed a few red species of Australian dragonflies but I don’t think I have ever seen any. So, here is a blue, south-eastern Australian, dragonfly haiku:

     Home, where I grew up –
swans are black
     dragon-flies are blue. 🌵
                           

Read my other posts and haiku, here.

References:

Haiku, Blyth R. H., The Hokuseido Press, 1949-52.

Warning: post contains generalisations, misleading statements, false attributions. It is basically bull-twang.

Australia is divided by an invisible line.

North of the line, in Queensland and most of New South Wales, people play rugby, a game that is not understood by, and is of no interest to, the people living in the rest of Australia.

In the rest of Australia (the southern part of New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory) people play and watch Australian Rules Football, often called “AFL” or just “Footy”. Australian Rules is extremely chaotic game, brutal and graceful in equal measure.

I have previously posted a haiku I wrote about AFL football here, but writing haiku about the footy is a far from new idea. A haiku poet called Rob Scott, AKA “Haiku Bob”, has been doing it for years. He also helps organise a yearly AFL Grand Final Kukai which is basically a bunch of haiku writing footy fans, composing haiku and posting them to a shared thread, while they watch the AFL grand final. Things can get a bit ragged as the game goes on.

Here are a few of the haiku I contributed during the 2020 grand final (for context Victoria was then in the middle of a months long COVID lockdown, and no one was allowed to have guests to their houses to watch the game).

     The afternoon of
the first night grand final –
     bugger all to do.

     The Tigers win again!
watching a replay
     of last year’s game.

     The 2020 AFL grand final –
the 1st grand final he’s watched
     all by himself.

And to finish up here is a footy haiku I wrote in cricket season:

     the off season -
nothing to do
     but write haiku

Post Script: there was a rumour during the Second World War, when a Japanese invasion of Australia was thought to be immanent, that the government had a secret plan to abandon the rugby playing states in order to defend the rest of the country. This rumour has never been substantiated.

Read my other posts and haiku, here.

References:

The Footy Almanac, https://www.footyalmanac.com.au/author/haikubob/

The 2020 AFL Grand Final Kukai, https://australianhaikusociety.org/2020/10/12/the-2020-afl-grand-final-haiku-kukai/#more-13608

The Australian War Memorial, https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/homefront/brisbane_line

     Winter sun –
the dead heads on hundreds
     of agapanthus plants. 

This is the second agapanthus haiku that I’ve written and published to this blog this year (find my previous effort here).

To be honest I’m not-too-fond of agapanthus. They’re bloody everywhere. Agapanthus must be the all-time most popular flower for councils, and corporate landscapers, to plant. In parks and formal gardens; on median strips and traffic islands; beside wide concrete driveways leading to twin car garages; showing through the safety fences of in-ground pools; and surrounding the car parks of tilt-slab retail barns, growing out of the scoria, next to low treated-pine log fences: agapanthus.

Oh God, I’m a completely obnoxious snob.

Agapanthus are obviously cheap, widely available, pretty hardy and low maintenance, and hence . . . everywhere. They’re overexposed. A bed of agapanthus essentially means: just make it look OK, and have it done by tomorrow, and, oh yeah, our budget is half what we said it was going to be. But this isn’t what agapanthus have always meant.

Trove is a wonderful website where you can access digitised copies of old Australian newspapers and other media, and there I came across a black and white photo of five agapanthus stems in a glass vase from the Rockhampton Morning Bulletin, dated 4-Nov-1938. The caption on the photo reads: “AGAPANTHUS – the flower of love, a winning entry by Mrs M. Burton in the cut bloom section at St Paul’s Caladium Show” (the name Agapanthus come from the Greek agapē, love, and anthos, flower).

Another find on Trove that mentions agapanthus in the context of love is the following article published in the Brisbane Courier-Mail on 29-Dec-1939:

YULETIDE WEDDING

Sexton–Dempsey 

BLUE hydrangea and white agapanthus decked the Albert Street Methodist Church on December 22nd when Miss Margaret Dempsey, only child of the late Mr J. J. Dempsey, and Mrs Dempsey formerly of Junction Park and later of Southport School, was married to Mr Cecil Sexton of Cairns. 

GIVEN away by her uncle, Mr H. Rennie, the bride wore a street-length frock of aqua blue broderie Anglaise made with a swing skirt and finished at the neckline with a spray of tuberoses. A large white picture hat and white accessories completed the ensemble. 

Mrs Frank Daly was matron of honour, frocked in lemon floral sheer, finished with a spray of mauve agapanthus and white gardenias, and she added white accessories. Mr Frank Daly accompanied the bridegroom.

The Rev. H. M. Wheller officiated. Mr Archie Day was organist, and Miss Firth Edmonds sang. 

At the Hotel Canberra, where the reception was held, Mrs Dempsey received her guests wearing a tailored bolero ensemble of navy and white, with a white hat, and she pinned a spray of crimson rosebuds on the corsage. 

Leaving for the honeymoon, before proceeding North to her future home in Cairns, Mrs Sexton wore a frock of floral germaine with a honey-toned hat.

Side Note: Agapanthus are apparently often called African Lily or Lily of the Nile in the old country (who knows why, because they aren’t lilies, and they come from South Africa which is nowhere near the Nile).

Here is another agapanthus haiku that wrote back in summer when their flower heads were green and purple, instead of dead and brown, and waiting to be cut back, as they are now:

A single agapanthus head 
     growing through
          the wrought-iron fence.

Read my other posts and haiku, here.

References:

Agapanthus, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agapanthus

Brisbane Courier-Mail, (accessed via Trove, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/40891356#)

Rockhampton Morning Bulletin (accessed via Trove, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/55999372?searchTerm=Agapanthus)

     The leaves are yellow,
and the lemons are all green –
     O Australia.

Here in Australia headlines and social media news feeds have made for grim reading over the past few weeks: men’s sexual violence against women (and in particular the Brittany Higgins case); the Australian Government cutting welfare payments; rising tensions with China . . . the USA approaching and then surpassing 500,000 COVID-19 deaths . . . and conspiracy theorists protesting the roll-out of COVID-19 vaccinations . . .

. . . but, especially . . . and the role of . . . and our collective failure to . . . and . . . and . . . and . . .

. . . how long can you keep your mind fixed on massive amounts of trauma that you feel powerless to change? After some hours, or days, I felt the need turn my mind to things safer and more mundane.

I switched off my laptop, put down my phone and took Barney, our cavoodle, for a walk.

We walked down through some areas of Flemington where the footpaths and nature strips are not-too-well maintained; past odd-shaped little corners of land where people dump the rubbish they can’t be bothered taking to the tip; and along the railway line where the weeds grow waist and chest high.

     broken thistle
milk sap wells
     to the surface     

On Milk Thistles

What we call milk thistles here in Melbourne, Sonchus oleraceus, are commonly called sow thistles elsewhere in the world. When we were kids we used to put their milky sap on warts. Apparently their bitter leaves can be eaten in a salad (I’ve never tried).

Often you find milk thistles growing next to another very similar plant. This second plant has tougher, woodier stems; tougher, darker green leaves; and more (and smaller) flower heads.

One other distinctive feature of this second tougher plant, is that it has round white seed heads like a dandelion’s puffballs, but whereas a dandelion’s puffballs are dense with feathered seeds and almost opaque, this tough milk-thistle-like plant’s puffballs are compromised of just a few feathery seeds and so appear translucent and lattice-like.

For a long time I’d assumed examples of this second plant were just older milk thistles, perennials rather than annuals, left alive for a second season to grow old and tough.

But over the past couple of days, while I have been avoiding social media news feeds, I have been filling in my spare hours comparing photos of milk thistles online, and I’ve come to the conclusion that these tougher milk thistles are a whole seperate species, Lactuca serriola, sometimes called Prickly Lettuce or the Compass Plant.

Read my other posts and haiku, here.

A week or so ago I went to the 8th Koorie Art Show 2020 at the Koorie Heritage Trust at Federation Square. 

Lying on a low dias when you enter the first room was a fabulous, glistening sculpture of a Red-bellied black snake by Charlie Solomon, made from what looks to have been a single large twisting limb of a gum tree.

I’ve seen red-belly black snakes a number of times when bush-walking in Victoria. Their backs are usually shiny black like patent leather although they can get a bit dusty sometimes. Their undersides are sometime bright red, as depicted in Charlie Solomon’s sculpture, but other times more as a dull pink colour.

Black snakes get a few mentions in Australian literature, for instance it is a black snake that invades the house in Henry Lawson’s famous story “The Drover’s Wife”, but the only work I know of that refers specifically to a red-belly black snake is this poem by Judith Wright:

The Killer

The day was clear as fire,
the birds sang frail as glass,
when thirsty I came to the creek
and fell by its side in the grass.

My breast on the bright moss
and shower-embroidered weeds,
my lips to the live water
I saw him turn in the reeds.

Black horror sprang from the dark
in a violent birth
and through its cloth of grass
I felt the clutch of earth.

O beat him into the ground
O strike him till he dies,
or else your life itself
drains through those colourless eyes.

I struck and struck again.
Slender in black and red 
he lies, and his icy glance 
turns outward, clear and dead.

But nimble my enemy 
as water is, or wind. 
He has slipped from his death aside
and vanished into my mind.

He has vanished whence he came,
my nimble enemy;
and the ants come out to the snake
and drink at his shallow eye.

The snake, no longer a physical threat, moves inside the poet’s mind (becoming a memory and a symbol). Wright’s poem reminds me of this haiku by Kyoshi:

The snake slid away,

But the eyes that stared at me

Remained in the grass.

Kyoshi (R. H. Blyth)

… the article “Forgive, but Do Not Forget: Modern Haiku and Totalitarianism” on the Haiku Foundation website discusses Kyoshi’s collaboration with Japan’s totalitarian government during the Second World War, a government that persecuted, imprisioned and tortured free verse haiku poets that it considered insufficiently patriotic.

No shade on Charlie Solomon; or on Judith Wright, although the Australian Museum would not approve of her destruction of the snake; or on Henry Lawson, although I know there have been some recent negative critiques of him; but Kyoshi on the other hand . . .

     Didn't Basho say
go to the snake
     to learn about snakes?     🌵

Read my other posts and haiku, here.

References:

Red-Bellied Black Snake, Australian Museum, https://australian.museum/learn/animals/reptiles/red-bellied-black-snake/

Haiku, Blyth R. H., The Hokuseido Press, 1949-52.

The 8th Koorie Art Show 2020 (exhibition), The Koorie Heritage Trust, 5 Dec 2020 – 21 Feb 2021.

Henry Lawson’s Mates, The complete stories of Henry Lawson, Henry Lawson, Currey O’Neill, 1979.

Red-Bellied Black Snake (sculpture), Charlie Solomon, 2020.

Forgive, but Do Not Forget: Modern Haiku and Totalistarianism, Udo Wenzel interviews Ito Yuki, Juxta 1.1, March 2015, The Haiku Foundation, https://thehaikufoundation.org/juxta/juxta-1-1/forgive-but-do-not-forget-modern-haiku-and-totalitarianism/

Collected Poems, Judith Wright, Fourth Estate, 1994.

I spent the last week on holiday with my family in the Ovens Valley, in the little town of Porepunkah. It was hot all week so much time was spent swimming.

While my brother and sister-in-law, my niece and nephew, my son and daughter, and my wife, were all swimming in a deep hole in the Buckland river, I sat on the bank wondering to myself what the river might have been like prior to European settlement. The river looked like it had been dredged, and probably dynamited, in the search for gold. The bed of the river was large fragments of stone – no sand. The banks of the river were steep, made of uneven jagged bits of rock, and overgrown with European weeds: purple-flowered scotch thistle, the rusty stems of docks, and blackberries just coming into fruit.

There is a much larger dredge hole at Eldorado near Beechworth. There the dredge is still sitting derelict in the middle of the flooded dredge hole, like a strange castle that has subsided into its own moat. Eldorado was deserted when I visited.

The Tronah Dredge Hole at Harrietville, “Lake Tronah”, on the other hand is a popular place for swimming. It’s probably about as big as the playing surface of the MCG and there is no rusting machinery (at least, none visible above the surface of the water). On this side of the dredge hole there is a little jetty that a bunch of people, kids and adults, were jumping from into the cool dark water. On the far side a rope hanging off a tree that was preferred by a group teenagers, loud music playing from a speaker. Out in the middle, groups of people were floating on lilos, inflated rings and paddle boards. God only knows how deep the thing is.

  Drop slow gum leaves
to the surface 
  of the Harrietville dredge hole

Actually, an environmental history of bucket dredging in Victoria published in 2018 notes that the Tronoh dredge could go as deep as 130 feet. Despite disrupting 156 acres of the Ovens River, and creating extraordinary quantities of tailings (much of which has never been remediated), the Tronoh dredge barely broke even.

Read my other posts and haiku, here.

References:

The Environmental History of Bucket Dredging in Victoria, Davies P., Lawrence S., Turnbull J., Rutherfurd I., Grove J. & Sylvester E., The Journal of Australasian Mining History, Vol. 16, October 2018.

The City of Melbourne has a wonderful website called Urban Forest Visual where you can look up the species of all the trees planted in the streets and parks of Melbourne. Browsing this website the other day I was surprised to find that there are paulownia (or pawlonia) trees planted in Chelmsford Street, Kensington, only ten or fifteen minutes walk from my house. A paulownia tree was referred to in a haiku by Ransetsu in my post on Japanese Death Poems.

Here is a slightly different translation of the same haiku from The Classic Tradition of Haiku edited by Faubion Bowers:

A leaf falls;

Totsu! a leaf falls,

on the wind.

Ransetsu (trans. William J. Higginson)

Bowers offers the following explanations:

Just as “blossom,” when not modified, means cherry flower in haiku, “one leaf” is code for kiri. Kiri, a member of the figwort family, is the Pawlonia or Empress tree, named after the daughter of Tsar Paul I of Russia (1754 – 1801). A fast grower, it reaches a height of 20 feet in two seasons. The faintly perfumed wood is used in making clogs and clothes chests. The leaves drop throughout the year. They shrivel, turn yellow, and yield to gravity. Their falling symbolises loneliness and connotes the past. The large purple flowers in early autumn are deeply associated with haiku because the three prongs hold 5, 7, and 5 buds respectively. The blooms and their bracket of leaves form the crest of the Empress of Japan. Totsu is an exclamation supposedly uttered when a Zen student achieves enlightenment. The sound also imitates the dry crackle the pawlonia leaf makes as it scratches the ground on falling.

Paulownia is also mentioned more than once by R. H. Blyth, in his famous four volume work on haiku. Blyth seems to disagree with Bowers’ interpretation of the word “totsu”. When discussing the Rensetsu haiku in his first volume, Eastern Culture, Blyth writes: “Totsu is a Zen exclamation, expressive of grumbling, of anger”.

In volume three, Summer-Autumn, Blyth has this to say on the paulownia: “The flowers of the kiri or paulownia have something in them harmonious with what is old, low, spread out, peaceful, monotonous”. These haiku by Shiki are given as examples:

Flowers of the paulownia blooming;

Old mansions

Of the Capital.

Shiki (R. H. Blyth)

The low roof

Of the store-house;

Flowers of the paulownia.

Shiki (R. H. Blyth)

There are no old mansions in the area of Kensington around Chelmsford Street, but there are plenty old store-houses and factories (mostly being converted into residential apartments), and at the bottom of Chelmsford Street runs the Moonee Ponds Creek. The Moonee Ponds Creek … it sounds like an idyllic little waterway doesn’t it? And probably it was before the European settlement of Melbourne. Now, for most of its course it is a concrete drain; poisoned by the tannery that used to be at Debney’s Park and other heavy industry; and overshadowed not by ancient gum trees, but by the massive concrete towers of the the Citilink overpass.

Paulownia trees 
near the Moonee Ponds Creek –
no leaves left at all.          🌵

Read my other posts and haiku, here.

References:

Haiku, Blyth R. H., The Hokuseido Press, 1949-52.

The Classic Tradition of Haiku, Bowers, F. (Ed.), Dover Publications, 1996.

Urban Forest Visual, http://melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au

As the Melbourne COVID-19 lockdown drags goes on and on, I’ve been finding it less easy to follow my own advice about how to live a happy balanced life. Instead I’ve found myself: exercising little; drinking more than the Better Health Channel recommends; and staying awake long into the night “doomscrolling” (when you keep scrolling through all of your social media feeds looking for the most upsetting news about the latest catastrophe).

Days seem to blur into each one another.  Dietary choices becoming less interesting, less healthy, and at times … bizarre. 

A couple of nights ago, with only a handful of ingredients left in the house, we found ourselves sitting down to a cobbled together meal of takeaway BBQ chicken, steamed dim sims, and a lovely plate of the first new season’s asparagus blanched and dressed with a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar. 

I drank two or three beers and fell asleep early while the rest of the family watched a movie. 

I woke, as the others were going to bed, and I took myself off to read on the couch in the lounge room. Soon enough I found myself browsing the Twitter feed of podcast host Cam Smith (@sexenheimer) who posts selected highlights from the most deranged Australian conspiracy theorists. Amusing highlights included:

• A rough looking fellow, with a shaved head and a handlebar moustache, who claims to be an ex-professional wrestler and who was challenging Shane Patton, the Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police, to a bare knuckle fist fight in the middle of Federation Square, “one on one”. 

• A rather dishevelled character, who is apparently the lead singer of a INXS tribute band, who when confronted by police at a protest against the Melbourne lockdown, leaped into Albert Park Lake to escape … only to find the lake was less than waist deep and so had to make his escape by wading. 

• A man from Tasmania with scraggly facial hair, who had made himself a top-heavy Ned Kelly helmet out of corrugated iron. 

• A woman in a headdress, who was claiming that she and the “other witches” she knows have work permits to allow them to pass through police checkpoints during the lockdown, and also that she has made a spell using her “womb blood” which will cause Daniel Andrews to resign (so far ineffective). 

• And a very earnest young man, who was claiming that his father had attended the St Kilda Road police station and charged “the entire Victorian police force with criminal fraud and misprison of treason”.

Of course, not all of the conspiracy theorists were as benign or amusing as these examples, but still I read on, and on, late into the night …

I woke up suddenly, sometime in the early hours of the morning, befuddled, anxious, uncomfortable from sleeping on the couch, and needing to pee. This presented something of a dilemma to my fuddled brain: 

Should I try to sneak into the ensuite without waking my wife? No, I’d inevitably wake her and then she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. Then in the morning I’d take her a cup of coffee and say, “how are you”, and she would reply, “tired”. After a meaningful pause she might add, “I didn’t get much sleep”. Best avoid the ensuite.

The other option was to use the main bathroom, but the problem with the main bathroom is that this is where the puppy sleeps. If I woke the puppy he’d be full of energy and want to play, and honestly, that was the last thing that I felt like I could cope with.

One other possibility suggested itself … I remember when my brothers and I were kids that Mum would say that it was OK for us to go outside and pee on the lemon tree (is uric acid good for lemon trees?), but some things that were acceptable when you were seven are not so acceptable when you are in your forties, and trying to maintain a last few shreds of dignity.

     Peeing in the garden
I recall
     Asparagus for dinner.          

Read my other posts and haiku, here.

References:

Better Health Channel, https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/HealthyLiving/alcohol

Urban Dictionary, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=doomscrolling

The daffodil is recognised internationally as the symbol of hope for all people affected by cancer. Cancer Council chose it as our emblem as the bright yellow colouring heralds the return of spring, representing new life and growth.

To Cancer Council, and those affected by cancer, the daffodil represents hope for a cancer free future.

daffodilday.com.au

Cancer has been in my thoughts a lot since my cousin, Dave Sheehan, died of lung cancer earlier this year (it is always in my thoughts to some extent because I work as a cancer nurse), and it is probably because of Dave’s death that the titles of a number of poems by Philip Hodgins caught my eye when I was browsing the Australian Poetry Library recently:

Room 1 Ward 10 West 12/11/83

Room 3 Ward 10 West 17/11/83

Room 1 Ward 10 West 23/11/83

Cytotoxic Rigor

Here, if you can bear it, is the one of Hodgins poems that really got to me:

Leaving Hospital

There was no joy in leaving. Nothing was resolved.

Blood and bone were shot and death had shown

a way with words beyond the usual sophistry.

Wounded by prognosis I had brought people together

and encouraged conversation. It didn’t help.

The right debates were held alone each night

After the chatter of the last drug trolley down

the polished corridor. It was impossible to match

death’s vocabulary. I gave up and got ready to go.

No amount of speachmaking could reassemble

those disparate friends or justify all that fuss.

On the steps I felt the hospital’s immensity

behind me. I thought of how this blood, this

volition would bring me back here to die

in stages of bitterness and regret. I turned around.

The doors are open.

Philip Hodgins

Very grim. 

“ . . . the hospital’s immensity behind me.”

Blunt, three or four word sentences, as brief as lines from a haiku, but with no images from life in them: no birds; no sun or rain; no daffodils.

The abrupt change of tense at the end. 

The Australian Poetry Library says that Hodgins was born in Katandra West, near Shepparton, in January 1959, and died in Maryborough, in August 1995, of chronic myeloid leukaemia. Among his poems there are some about farming; and few about AFL football; and quite a lot, like those mentioned above, that are based on his experiences with cancer . . .

. . . but, those of us with kids can’t allow ourselves to wallow in such thoughts too long. It was the first day of spring. The sun was out. I tied a green hanky across my nose and mouth (COVID restrictions) and set off to supervise my 10 year old son Wes, and his best friend Beth, as they walked to Footscray Park and back for exercise.

Footpaths, and front gardens, bike-paths, the banks of the Maribynong, and Footscray Park were full of people enjoying the sunshine and fresh air.

Neatly mown lawn -
daffodils
push through.               🌵

Read my other posts and haiku, here.

References:

About Daffodil Day, daffodilday.com.au

Australian Poetry Library, https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/hodgins-philip

What is a box tree? Good question. Until recently I had no idea.

About half-an-hour’s drive west of Melbourne there is a small area of remanent grey box (Eucalyptus microcarpa) forest at a place called Eynesbury. 

In mid-May, a couple of weeks before the start of winter here in Victoria, my brother Theo and I, and our kids, drove to Eynesbury to explore (the lockdown for the first wave of COVID-19 had just been relaxed, and the second wave had not yet started). We parked our cars, scoffed down the bacon sandwiches we had packed, and headed off along a path into the scrub. 

To my untrained eye the grey box trees looked just like normal gums: tall, with pale grey-brown leaning trunks, twisting branches, and scraggly clumps of dull green leaves.

About five or ten minutes into our walk we came across a surprise: a baby snake. This was the first time I’ve every seen a baby snake and the first time I can remember seeing a snake of any kind this close to winter. It was, I reckon, about a foot long, maybe a little bit more; its head was dark, almost black; its body was light brown, almost translucent. It moved quickly, whipping and curving itself across the gravel, twigs, and fallen leaves by the side of the path.   

A short way further on I found a twisted, pale grey piece of branch to use as a walking stick.

     Kids, look here
a baby snake! And here's
     a good stick.              🌵

“I wonder why box trees are called box trees?”, I said as we walked along, not really expecting an answer. 

“Probably because the early settlers used them for making boxes,” Theo deadpanned. 

It turns out this was not the silliest suggestion: Australian box trees were probably named for their similarity to European box trees (such as Buxus sempervirens) and European box trees do have very dense wood that is used by cabinet makers, wood turners, and in the making of musical instruments. The words “box” for a wooden container, and “box” for a kind of tree, both trace back to the same Greek source word (via Latin). So, box trees being called box trees because they are “those trees that are really good to make boxes out of” is not that much of a stretch.

I’ve always wanted to know how to identify different kinds of gum trees and other eucalypts, and despite a bit of research over the years I’m still not much good at it. This much as I have worked out (with the help of EUCLID, a database of Australian Eucalypts): gum trees have (mostly) thin, smooth bark; box trees are usually covered in fibrous, mat-like bark; and iron barks have hard, brittle, deeply-furrowed bark that is impregnated with resin.

Read my other posts and haiku, here.

References:

EUCLID, Eucalypts of Australia, https://apps.lucidcentral.org/euclid/text/entities/eucalyptus_microcarpa.htm

Shorter Oxford Dictionary (5th Ed.), Oxford University Press, 2002.