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Point PossessionThe fhores conited either ofteep naked rocks, or a milk-white barren and, beyond which

dreary boundary the urface of the ground eemed covered by a deadly green herbage, with

here and there a few grovellinghrubs or dwarf trees

cattered at a great di

tance from eachother. This very unfavourable appearance may not, however, originate from the general

terility of the oil, since it was evident, o far as we travered the sides of the hills, that the

vegetation had recently undergone the action of fire; the larget of the trees had been burnt,

though lightly; every hrub had ome of its branches completely charred, and the plants lying

cloe to the ground had not ecaped without injury. Thus entertaining no very high opinion

of the country, but in the hope of meeting ome of the wretched inhabitants, we proceeded

along the hores of the ound, to the northward, to a high rocky point, that attained the name

of POINT POSSESSION... The urrounding country [beyond the point] preented a farmore fertile and pleaing apect.

George Vancouvers A voyage of discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, and round the

world (1798).

So much left unsaid: how they followed

A winding track of sand that weavedThrough charred boles of peppermints: no sign

Of the footprints of the wretched. And when

They stooped and paused beneath the swollen boughs

Of Nuytsia, they could not know the probing roots

Were tapping the juice of other plants. They pressed

Onward. Did the long-tendrilled Hardenbergia

Impede their way? His journal does not say

Whether they paused awhile to admire the sprayOf purple, or record the gleaming abundance

Of sundews, climbing the scorch-hollowed gums.

Who stopped to turn a rock, to find this crablike

Spider, flat as ships biscuit, flipping its wafered

Body away from harm, or tarried long enough

To see two geckos slip beneath a stone?

Might they have baulked a moment at a ravensBoyish call, and thought that they were watched?

The wattle was no symbol for white men then,

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And so they passed it by. Then there were

Footprints, spaced evenly in the sand: a kangaroo,

Traversing the hillside with easy bounds,

And the trees opened out into a wide expanse:

A wooded sandbank, and the Point beyond.

They sat, mouthing hunks of salted beef

With scurvied gums. Blue wrens scolded. And when

They shouldered their packs and turned to walk

The final mile, he caught up with them, his eyes

Aflame with excitement: the ships naturalist:

A bristling cone of Banksia in his hand.

The naturalist on board George VancouversDiscovery was Archibald Menzies,

and Banksia grandis was amongst the botanical specimens he took away from

King Georges Sound when the explorers departed from present-day Albany.

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Amity1845

A hundred and forty-two tons of Black Birch,

Hackmatack, rope and copper, three times longAs wide; namedAmity, for an end to war.

Thirty years afloat; no time at all to breech

Her hull on sand, her sails and spars all flung

Into the wind. Her last and fatal shore.

1824

Leg irons, handcuffs, convicts make good ballast,

Deep in the hold, where only bilge and rustDestroy, the timbers moaning when she yaws,

Her cargo scheming escapes, nursing blisters,

Welts from floggings, wanting only rest:

Cutpurses, bread-stealers, children, whores.

1826

A city afloat in a wooden wombSeasick, berthed in swinging hammocks, heaving,

Clinging in the darkness, as she claws

Her way through contrary winds. Shores loom

Like monsters, bare skulled, skulking.

A boat launched. Albany straining at the oars.

The BrigAmity was constructed in Canada just after the end of the Napoleonic

and American wars. Her youth was spent sailing the Atlantic, but in 1824, she

began a new life in New Holland, as Australia was then known. There, she was

used as a convict transport between Sydney and Hobart Town, and in 1826, she

sailed for King Georges Sound, carrying the cargo of convicts and military men

who were to become the founders of present day Albany. She was wrecked on a

sandbank at Shoaly Bay, south-east of Flinders Island, in 1845. A full-scale

reconstruction of the ship was built in 1976, and stands in dry-dock on Albany

Harbour to this day.

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Shark and CuttlefishBrown as weed and human-eyed,Skulking in the kelp, she stalks

A shrimp, her suckered arms

Shooting out of semi-darkness,

Then ascends, where sunlight

Webs the sea, her grim beak

Champing on exoskeleton,

Her hue turned luminescent,

And is gone in a squelch of sepia:

A sharks serried armoury

Sinking deep into the calcium,

Her eyeballs clouding,

And at the stranding, only boneRemains, with a line of holes:

A story told by the seas disjecta,

Light as balsa, blanched with spume.

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OctopusBecause of your catlike eye, I must address you directly,Confess that suppressed terror impeded all attempts

At rescue, when you fluoresced in a gush of blue

As I lifted you, tenderly, with an oyster-shell, to drop you

Back in water. You reacted with a squirt of brine, and a wave

Returned you, higher up the strand, entangled

In dark brown weed. Your fluorescence ebbed

Into sepia in a blinking, and trembling at the thought

Of that seeking beak, hidden in the envenomed flower

Of your being, I dragged the whole clump of wrack

Into a wave, and turned back up the beach, before

I should bear guilty witness to your stranding once again,

Then went home wondering: were you, after all, benign?

Did mercy fail, for fear of your design?

The Blue-Ringed Octopus is one of the most beautiful and dangerous creatures of

the reef and sea. The blue rings only appear when the animal is sufficiently

agitated, so any small octopus washed up on an Australian beach is best treated

with caution.

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Porcupine DiodonThat all Animals of the Land, are in their kind in the Sea:A vulgar notion, for though the credulous may dredge

A seahorse, cowfish, dogfish, monkfish, frogfish from

The grim disgorging ocean, and claim similitude,

Theyre wrong: a seahorse is six inches long.

And yet, when the offending brine throws up

A bristling porcupine, goggle-eyed and gasping air,

Even a rationalist may stare and scratch his head,Desiccate it, paint it dead, and ponder: Is it frog

Or fish, or yet some other natural wonder?

There is on land no blenny, wrasse or cod: when we`

Abridge variety, it restrains the hand of God.

No matter: where the sea meets land, and breakers

Wreck the rocks and strand, the Diodon is softAs us, and drowns as easily in air as we in water.

Based on the record of the porcupine fish in Nodder and ShawsNaturalists

Miscellany, Volume 5, and Sir Thomas Brownes,Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Vulgar

Errors,1672), Chapter XXIV. For Brownes original argument against the doctrine

that every land creature has its counterpart in the sea, see

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/pseudodoxia/pseudo324.html

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/pseudodoxia/pseudo324.htmlhttp://penelope.uchicago.edu/pseudodoxia/pseudo324.htmlhttp://penelope.uchicago.edu/pseudodoxia/pseudo324.html

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Frog ChorusBecause conditions are so adverse

The frogs have proliferated, perverselyEvolving a hundred and fifty species

In an arid continent.

I sought them all my youth: flop-

Bellied pobblebonks slopping

About the sphagnum; corroborees

Layered like allsorts,

And the thousand little nameless frogs

Who called me on, my trousers soggy,

Their voices like mirages

Dissipating as I neared them.

One puddle, and they congregate,

Sing out their guts, and mate,Still croaking in amplexus,

Groggy, incontinent,

Each call broadcast by a male

At his loves frequency. Shell flail

About to reach him: his calls

Advertise his assets,

And he is well equipped to clasp

Her, with bubble-throated gasp.

This cold-bodied yen for sex

Is surely what endears them.

For an excellent essay on the calls of Australian frogs, see Michael J. Tyler,Frogs,

Brisbane, 1976, Chapter 11, Communication by Sound, pp. 142-152.

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PaperbarksAs a boy, I stripped parchments from the trunks,

Scrawled poems on the bark, which flakedInto layers thinner than filo. I imagined

Whole manuscripts of the stuff, with palimpsest

Trails of beetle-grubs, and lacunae

Denoting the offshoots of branches.

Paperbarks are all texture, inviting touch,

And in the thickest places, the bark

Is spongy as human skin, puckering

Down the insides of each palpable curve,

Scored with stretchmarks round the outer,

Groined with gouges where the rot

Has crept up from the lapping shallows,

Until the tree is a hollow old man,

Holding his pose for a life-drawingIn tea-stained watercolour and wax-repel,

Traced on quartos of his own paper.

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Karri and TingleThe Tingles bark tangles into burls and knobs,

An eddying stream of living wood, branching

Into sky-fed tributaries. The Karri: an unruffled

Surface of a lake, reflecting a sky cloud-swirled

As mother-of-pearl.

The Tingle is also a cave, walled and roofed

In charcoal, lit through fissures; the twist

Of its trunk is sinuous as a python climbing.The Karri: a tall and graceful ghost

Letting down her hair.

The bole of the Tingle is an ogling man

With one eyebrow bulging, as though stung

By hornets. The Karri is faceless,

Detached. She contemplatesThe art of grace.

The Tingle is buttressed as a gothic choir,

And above it, a branching spire, with firetails

In the belfry. The Karri has dispensed

With struts and stays: throws out her lissom

Arms and dances.

The Karri and the Tingle are eucalyptus trees which dominate the forests around

Walpole, in the south-west of Australia. The Tingle grows to a height of 60

metres, with a girth of 16 metres, and has a life-span of 400 years. The base of the

trunk is heavily buttressed, and is commonly hollowed out by fire without

killing the tree. The Karri has a thinner, more graceful trunk with no buttressing,

has a characteristic mottled, silver-grey bark, and grows to a height of 90 metres.

Together, they create a habitat which provides for an enormous diversity of other

species.

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Pelicans at a Fish-GuttingBack-lit, pelicans bill-bags are translucent,Slither-slick on the insides, wrinkled

Without like scrotum-flesh. Some

Have fish-hook piercings, adorned

With lengths of line, and brass swivels;

A lead sinker donks against ones belly.

Another seems to burp, and voids

A smelly slurp of fish-white excrement.

One chokes on a fish-bone an occupational

Hazard and the fish-gobbler is snapped

About the mazzard with leather forceps,

Battered about the eyeballs. Each rejected fish

Sends their necks cazalying skywards,

And the gaggle descends on the remnant,The great bills tweezering it away from yawling gulls

With ridiculous precision. Each swelling yawn

Poises itself with a resonant grunting,

And the unkempt wings tremble with

Anticipation. Fish guts fly through air,

And two pelicans string them out in a noisome,

Bloody tug of war, their bulged eyes ogling.

But once it is gulleted, they are all etiquette:

They shuffle themselves, prod the smallest

To the front, and gaze, as if on an altar,

Form an orderly, worshipful, expectant

Queue.

'Up There Cazaly' is a song about an Australian Rules Footballer (famed for hisskill at leaping high in the air to catch the ball) with which nobody of Australian

upbringing can escape acquaintance.

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Sunset at Cheynes BeachI comb the beach for relics of a grisly trade:

The remains of whales, bone worn to the trabecular,

Ocean-rounded, like petrified sponge.

Humpbacks were hauled in here, and sperm whales

From beyond the continental shelf: murdered,

Factoried, flensed and rendered.

Here the sea would churn with blood, the strand

Clotted with it; great steel boilers bilged out

The stench of flesh and blubber.

Now, the dry-docked whale-chaser lies

Stranded, its belly exposed, the rudder

Like a flailing tail, the harpoons rust-blunted,

And the spent breakers sigh their way to land.

Gulls and oystercatchers paddle the littoralAnd only sun pinks sand and sea.

Whaling stations sprang up in Albany soon after the establishment of the town in

1826, and in 1952, the Cheynes Beach Whaling Company began killing

Humpbacked and Sperm whales with the aid of three whale-chaser boats and a

whale-spotting aircraft. Public outrage only reached proportions significant

enough to close the station in 1978. The spot is now occupied by a museum

ironically popular with whale-lovers - and the Cheynes IV chaser is in dry-dockbeside it. This poem was inspired by a conversation with a sailor who was

involved in the Greenpeace protests against the whaling station which included

steering boats deliberately between the chasers and the whales - in the 1970s.

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Wreck of the ElvieScuppered in sand, like the upturned ribcage

Of a whale, awash at high tide, her rivetsPocked with concretions, the Elvies weathered

Framework, hewn out of Jarrah, seems

Half petrified: a fossil from the days

Of whaling. Her bow still points to sea

With something akin to yearning, as though

Her deep-grained ghost might sail out, laden

With the oil of whales, and not return.

No sailor died at her wrecking, in the southeast gale

That swept her neglected hulk to shore. It was not

Water that rushed above her gunwale, but sand,

Claiming her for land. No voice is raised to mourn,

Save the sighing of a whale, and her bow-post

Is rooted to her keel: the tree within

Kedging her to ground.

The wreck of the Elvie lies in sand at the north end of Vancouver Beach,

Frenchman Bay. In the early twentieth century, Frenchman Bay had a Norwegian

whaling station, and the Elvie, a 30 x 4.5 metre flat-bottomed wooden lighter, was

used to transport barrels of whale oil from the station to ships moored in the bay.

She was constructed out of Jarrah, one of the more common eucalypts in Western

Australia, with extremely durable timber. She was abandoned at her mooringswhen the whalers left in 1917, and washed ashore in 1921. The level of the sand is

subject to the vicissitudes of the sea, so that more of the wreck is visible at some

times than at others.

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Vancouver SpringWith constitutions enfeebled,

Ravaged by flux, we sought harbour,Beyond a point like a bald mans skull,

Submerged to the eye-sockets,

The granite steep and naked, warted

With protuberances, lofty edifices in ruin,

The vegetation scorched with fire.

We rowed for a white ribbon of sand,

Our stomachs sluiced as bilge,

Craving fresh water, and found it,

Draining through the beach,

Coloured like brandy, browned

With peat and sea-grass, yet

Unstained to taste.

The trees beside it filled our holdWith fuel, pungent as peppermint;

Beyond them, a hovel, just deserted:

A dogs spoor, a leatherjackets skin.

We climbed a hill beyond the burning,

Where forests grew, luxuriant

From slope to shore: an estuary

And an island, the herbage

Beautiful. Green.

We sighed,

Unscrolled

Our weevilled

Union Jack,

And tookPossession.

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My source is George Vancouvers A voyage of discovery to the North Pacific

Ocean, and round the world(1798), and I have left some of his phrases unchanged.

The spring where Vancouver watered his ship is on Frenchman Bay, and still

exists, although the water often runs clear. The myth that Vancouver thought the

area around Albany, Western Australia, to be barren and inhospitable, has arisen

out of selective quotation from his account. The bleakest part of the descriptionis, in Vancouvers own words, that which depicts a part of the coast which had

recently undergone the action of fire. His description of his view from Point

Possession of Oyster Harbour - and of Green Island in the centre of it - is much

more favourable.

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Postscript (Sydney, August 2011)Cockatoos at a Drinking FountainWhen they imported the classical gods, and cast

A nubile Diana in bronze, that men might watch

And not be turned to stags, they should have known

A cockatoo would drink there, clawing

The apex of her fountain, and tweezeringThe bright skin of water with his bill,

His blunt tongue probing, while all the bats

In Sydney stirred in sleep, the skyscrapers

Nimbus fringed by sun. And on a branch

Beside a gaunt Euphorbia, would perch

A second, his own tongue dry and grey

As a gum-nut, waiting his turn. You laugh

To see a bill - that can rip through tin as sure

As pliers - testing the water so delicately, and say

Hes bright enough to tweak it so the spray

Will drench us here below, and as though

He hears you, he obliges, dousing my camera

With a spurt, directed with a skillSo exquisite, your laugh turns like a maenads in a wood.

The art-nouveau statue of Diana is part of the Lewis Wolfe Levy

drinking fountain in the Botanical Gardens, Sydney, erected in 1889.

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