Old Australia, Old Nat Geogs
[Capitol Hill, Seattle]
Sipping hot chocolate in Top Pot,
Summit Avenue, near our flat,
I let my eye rove over
their side walls all covered
by old books, worthless reference
books, long-outdated encyclopedias
dark ceiling to polished floor,
someone’s idea of cheap décor.
‘Good riddance to this rubbish’,
the dealers who helped them furnish
the place must have told themselves
ranging yards of dead reading on the shelves.
(Doughnuts are the Top Pot specialty -
‘hand-forged’! antiquated novelty?
Everyone but me there at Top Pot
is deep in cellphone, doughnut, laptop.)
My book-curious eye falls straight
on a gilt-lettered spine which said:
AUSTRALIA all in capitals.
Oh all its exotic animals,
scarce worth a glance, I guess,
reaching for it nevertheless.
How old can this worthlessness be?
Opening it, I see - 1916.
An old National Geographic,
perhaps a bound year of old pix -
no - other mags bound in behind:
The Mid-Pacific, The Independent,
The Landmark, The Pacific Review,
or articles torn from them for
having reference to Australia.
It might be all ephemera,
but still assuage nostalgia
for my second patria
(New Zealand having been my first,
my alma mater too-soon lost).
Australia! where I worked, and paid
my tax, brought up two kids, retired,
expecting to live out my days
some-place near where the Yarra flows,
surprised to find that life packed up
till my wife’s studies get racked up.
I sample the old Nat Geog maps,
paragraphs and photographs…
key words are Isolation, Dryness,
Blackfellows - ‘savages, lowest
in intelligence of all human
beings’. ‘Like kangaroo and tree fern,
the aboriginal is a remnant…’
When food and water are abundant,
the blackfellow’s ‘kind to the infirm’
(and when not, not). Australians affirm
their ‘ideal is a continent of whites...
of British origin.’ In the world’s fights
Australia joins fully - ‘women spend
hours cutting up rags for the wounded.’
Mm, that could be my Grandma. And:
Colonials are marching down The Strand.
‘Anzac troops: off to the firing line.’
They could be my uncles - who came home.
Later Nat Geogs here show new War
Memorials, new factories for cars.
Everywhere kangaroos - the wool clip -
and war eternal on the rabbit.
Then who would want to live there?
Children - for the open air.
Sportslovers, the well-paid labourer.
They benefit from this Australia.
They’re getting a capital to live in
designed by Walter Burley Griffin
so far off the beaten track,
once there you fear you won’t get back.
A place the bright young might despair of,
decamping to New York, London, Europe.
Journalism requires ‘however,
the future looks bright for Australia.’
Mm, that future is when I got there,
the sixties, far-off then, far gone now.
It prospered. (I prospered.) Whatever
ailed the old world has come to ail her.
Now I’m on the shelf, antiquated,
in a scatterbrained world, decentred
as any doughnut. 'Walk from here' -
apartment ads say - to anywhere! -
'Google, Microsoft, Amazon,
Facebook', our near horizon.
Why walk? Why submit to air travel?
Faces down, scan screens that don’t unravel
as these outmoded paper blocks
along the walls have done. One lurks
to quench nostalgia, the rest themselves
whisper: ‘Once we worked from real shelves,
now we get mere backward glances,
merely for retrospective fancies.’
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