Carolyn van Langenberg -#9 - tweed (iii) and the richmond

Carolyn van Langenberg - #9 - tweed (iii)  and the richmond

old relatives, those square and collapsing wooden houses, tiny and naked, the gardens of lemon trees and blue hydrangeas gone, the  secrets creaked into verandah boards, the loneliness wept at indifferent walls, the doubt discarded under and behind lattice and ferns,  rats scuttling away from deft  snakes under tankstands...,

the massive sweep of new roads ignores them, those diminished timber farmhouses dissolved into the remnants of gardens. the wide spread of new housing  shines with rude indiscretion. large remote-controlled doors brandish the wealth to own a fleet of cars. the swimming pools lap the horizon, remembered bald, lately cultivated with plantations of avocados or macadamias...,   and that's an  improvement...

(is it? plantations mean fertilisers, aerial sprayed insecticides...)

horses are back. several graze on river flats where

where herds of cattle,  dairy mixed with beef, some wagyu. the churches are not neglected. the art galleries vibrate with ingenuity. restaurants thrive. business names mix sikh with irish. italians serve coffee with flourish - prego. indigenous people are part of the street scene, not relegated to Cabbage Tree Island,

nothing stagnates in a  backwater of misguided purity. regenerative life quivers and flows with the strength of deep river currents, but, ....such a but! oysters, mullet, water hen, platypus dead everywhere,  the chemicals from cudgen to the belongil kill places sacred to women, and

bangalow palms replace hydrangeas, live everywhere at front doors...

where the white-ringed mouths of the St Helena Tunnel hollowed under McLeod's Shoot beckon a pagan kind of worshipping

..... and the dance leaps away from nothing to everything clasped in a tight embrace.