NOTES

General
For aesthetic reasons, botanical names are usually given in the poems in lower case and are not italicized.

Gascoyne: Two Roads
The roads lead to/from the tourist destination of Exmouth in the northern limb of the Gascoyne
region of Western Australia. The two poems read as a set.

Burkett Road: Red
Road W from NW Coastal Hwy to the Minilya-Exmouth road, WA. Some of the country through
which the road passes is red-dune terrain.

The Minilya Road: Night and Moon
Road S from Exmouth to NW Coastal Hwy just north of Minilya Roadhouse, WA.
The ‘I remember’ sequence was prompted by an ‘I remember’ sequence in a song by Scotland’s
Harry Lauder (1870-1950): ‘I remember the year, I remember the day, I remember the hour …’
A slightly shorter version of this poem was published in Indigo Journal volume 2 (March 2008).

The Caravan Park Poems
Caravan parks as interim holding camps, temporary refuges for souls that wander by day,
and sojourn here, sojourn there, as secular pilgrims not joined to ‘country’, unlike
the possum which must have its own country and so makes its country and knows it and
keeps to it as it goes about at night. Caravans and tents as ‘shells’ and ‘bubbles’
that confer a slight, impermanent measure of shelter and security to the wanderers who are
away from home physically and emotionally, and away from ‘home’ spiritually.
People as travellers in search of pleasure, distraction, rest, ‘home’, journeying casually and
helplessly towards their end as they voyage across the land. And as they journey,
they spend their days and lives on a moment-for-moment superficial level, from which they
might be disturbed briefly as they encounter a strangeness or a difference, or sense
their human condition in the face of things. Precious lives stained with waste and loss and
with the ephemeral, and the trivial, the unbeautiful, that the night hides, that sleeping
shuts out. But the day, uncomfortably, reveals all. The poems accordingly invite readers to
consider their own wanderings through life, their own dealings with issues of being
and belonging and making, of purpose and meaning and mortality, of destination and home.

Caravan Park: Geographe Bay: Dawn
Western Ringtail Possum: likes peppermint trees: has black rings around eyes, white-tipped prehensile tail.
Peppermint myrtles tend to have a ‘weeping’ habit.

Caravan Park: Tom Price: Sunset
Aboriginal name for mountain that peers over iron-ore mining town Tom Price means ‘place of rock wallabies’.

Kalbarri: Red Bluff Lookout
Prominent feature 4 km S of Kalbarri. Tracks left some 400 million years ago by 2m long scorpion-like marine
creature visible on plateau (in the area occupied in the past by a caravan park).

Exmouth: Cape Range: Yardie Creek
Deep blue salt water creek in a red-walled gorge: Cape Range National Park.

Exmouth: Cape Range: Tulki Beach: Night and Stars and Wind and Sea
The earliest song: ‘the music of the cosmic microwave background radiation - the relic oscillations of energy
from the big bang that ripple through the universe and can be detected by acoustic instrumentation as a
hissing/humming. André Malraux (1901-1976): French author, intellectual, statesman.

Perth And Fremantle: Biking Rotto
Rottnest Island: small tourist island 19 km off Fremantle coast holding large population of
quokkas (small marsupial).

Perth and Fremantle: The Hills: Burning Off
‘Burning off’ is the expression used in Australia for incinerating vegetation (here, domestic garden waste
in the back yard) – a convenient but polluting practice banned in many districts.

Perth and Fremantle: When The Cockatoos Return To The Marri Trees
The Corymbia calophylla (Marri, also red gum) is native to the SW of Western Australia.
Formerly classified as a eucalypt, it was transferred in 1995 from the Eucalyptus genus
to a new genus Corymbia. It is one of a number of Corymbia species grouped as ‘red bloodwoods’.
The Marri (from the Nyoongar aboriginal word for blood) exudes a dark red-brown gum and
produces nectar-rich blossom and clusters of large gum nuts in abundance. The nuts become woody
and hard, but when young and soft are as favoured by red-tailed black cockatoos as are the blossoms.
The capture/shooting/poisoning of birds and the taking of eggs, and the clearing of habitat which
destroys food sources and nesting sites, cast shadows over dwindling WA populations of these cockatoos,
whose great grey-black forms, feeding behaviours and raucous cries are a marvel to witness.

Wheat Belt: The Salt, The Salt
Gimlets and salmon gums are companions in WA’s wheat belt where large-scale clearing of deep-rooted
native vegetation and its replacement with shallow-rooted crops and pastures has caused saline groundwater
levels to rise, resulting in widespread salt-sterilization of land and destruction of habitat. Wagin and Narrogin
are two of the small towns that service the wheat belt.

Two Explorations: South West Australia: 1. Cape to Cape Hiking Trail: Camp Site
Last camp site of the coastal walking track from Cape Naturaliste to Cape Leeuwin, the latter being but a low
petering-out of land forming the SW extremity of the continent on which a slender lighthouse stands.

Two Explorations: South West Australia: 2. Nornalup Inlet: Deep River And Kayak
Walpole-Nornalup National Park on the south coast of WA. The Nornalup Inlet discharges into the
Southern Ocean. The Deep River is one of the rivers that feed the Inlet: neither deep
nor wide, but eases, dark-watered, quietly and modestly, into shady depths of tall karri forest:
there is flat water for kayaking for a distance of some six kilometres as far as the
suspension footbridge, beyond which logs and rocks and pools and white water are encountered.

The South: Bluff Knoll: Thirsty Work
Highest peak (1073m) in the Stirling Ranges, SW of Western Australia.