Sitting, my back to the Ten Acre Lane.
There is a waterwheel from a far goldrush,
fetched to this kiln to rotate the drying floor,
but tottery now, winningly romantic.
Honey selling from a roadside stall, unstaffed.
A gracious homestead with oak seedlings,
two dollars each, a snap.
Poplars emboldening to lose their skirts
on the seasonal buttery drift, edging the roads.
What merry hay would scholars make of this?
This is an imposed landscape –
it configures the shape of dispossession.
I am called to condemn, but I cannot, not with a fierce heart –
I see, instead, grace and beauty dying here
in its own turn; its brief historical turn.
Hops make their last stand
in the valley’s confident heart,
the hoplands shrunken back to this.
I consider the poles and strings,
see sets to confound invasion by parachute –
but the image says more of me,
my preoccupations and mental colouration,
than it does of this vivid, this dying scape.
This was the domain of powerful men.
Adolarious Humphrey. W.C. Blyth.
The Shoobridges, come here from Kent with skills
and cheap labour, government-stamped.
The island gifted its soil.
The men of power flourished.
Clearing, fencing. The tracks of the people
ploughed under, denied them,
nor even to be found in the story that prevailed.
Now, for a time, I am fierce-hearted.
I sit here in the gold of the sun,
in the grace and wonder of time, swift-wheeling.
Oasthouses moulder, succumb to careless fire,
become twee cafes serving Devonshire tea.
It is the ruin of the time of the thriving of the hops…
Early White Grape. Canterbury Golding…
The irony is,
I could murder a beer.
Pete Hay grew up on the north-west Coast of Tasmania, and has worked as schoolteacher, storeman, truckie’s offsider, youth worker and political adviser at both state and federal tiers of government. But it was as an academic in Victoria and Tasmania that he has spent most of his waged life. He retired as Reader in Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Tasmania at the end of 2008, and turned his focus to creative writing. He has published multiple volumes of poetry and personal essays, and has twice been shortlisted for the Tasmanian Book of the Year. His book of essays, Forgotten Corners: Essays in Search of an Island’s Soul, was named the Small Press Network 2020 Book of the Year.