A New Norcia Subset

The Benedictine community at New Norcia inflicted sexual abuse on school students on an almost unprecedented scale in Australia during the twentieth century. Further, given New Norcia’s control, displacement and exploitation of Aboriginal children and people, everything we write about the place has to be viewed in this context. The poem itself cannot exist alone, cannot exist outside this context. This is no longer the grubby secret of the Catholic Church, but public knowledge. No poem can be a celebration.

1. False Starts

Where the great flooded-gum fell or was felled

close to the East Moore River a count of growth-rings

shows almost four-hundred years with guesswork

filling the hollow with logic. And those false starts

where the chainsaw bit and didn’t talk, rejected

by a harder layer of time where firebark annealed

against the sawteeth, the vicious chatter, and retreated

then went deeper again to find another rebarbative

layer of history decades ago where something surfaced

in its locale in its heartland, the very essence of its

tree-being its witness of prayers circumferencing

as exoskeleton the language of country reaching

out of its skin to resist and say, We are still omnipresent!

these bites just up from the full cut the absolute

severing from its massive fallen body in segments

alongside a deadend road. This is where we start

and finish, near the blossom-zone of curving grey

honeyeater beaks spiking late-winter nectar making

the seasons name in their system every time they

spark and then chase each other toward progeny,

their sanctifications, their decisive moves

towards a start that will have no end.

2. Cactus Islands in Moore River

Beyond the forbidden sign (heavy machinery)

where the bridge overs a rapid of a bloated Moore River,

an island either side of the melaleuca-sucking flow—

scum and froth and purity all at once, the grassed

channels conduits for herbicide-orange and malfeasance

of riparian agriculture clotting at the islands’ sharp

points and the giant cactuses metastasising the arterial,

the fleshy land. Can we support this image of damage

without it collapsing into metaphor of xenophobia

or can we go back to the dispossessed and claim

on their behalf or are both pictures in a dialogue

through which we might make some sense? Or words

fail when the river flows and when it dries and pools

fester with lunulae of algae and choked microfauna?

I would wonder this and write it differently,

but the mess of thought is pinned to the picture

of where I was, what I take away with me,

what I will return to again: terrorzone to rearrange

in this daguerreotype brain of mine. I am saying

that the spread of cactus is a risk to native flora and that we

might extrapolate to make images and analogies

but it doesn’t work in this overburdened tableaux

of land and machinery, of newcomers and the less recently

arrived and the people with the oldest claims. They are

all people and as such are celebrated in my ethics,

but I know the science and I know analogies fail

and the literary cannot always be extricated from science

and vice versa and sometimes people wherever

they walk from walk outside the constructs of language,

the semiotics of waking and sleeping and being intact

where you are. The eucalypts are in blossom

and form a fragrant pomander in the box of my head,

extracted by my nostrils. A messy and unpleasant

image, no doubt, but explaining much that adjoins

without annexing my river moment, split between

two Cactus Islands, but cactus islands of glorious

melaleucas and towering, imposing cactuses,

disturbing the balance in a disturbed realm.

3. Reading in St Gertrude’s Chapel

In the bivalve half, inner cup

of sound of our own voices where

we are watched over by painted visions.

Outside, visitors search for relationship

to anomaly and for contemplative answers.

This decommissioned girls’ school embraces

the terror of secrets, of communion

with cool but sometimes deadly stone—

bricks and mortar, the tendrils of creed

reaching through from the other side of the earth,

passing through the core and igniting futures

outside the enclave. And now, a dozen monks

walk the grounds reciting Dante for next

weekend’s performance of the Inferno,

from which they’d hope to be safe,

but never gloating as the piano

will play tunes of Gershwin

in variation. But that’s a few hours

in the future and due to take place in another room,

at right angles to this room of prayer, with more

external light and a raised stage

where notes might parse without a cross,

without our Lady reading the score

over a shoulder. Listen, between words,

hear her troubled breathing.

John Kinsella