This photo of a teenage Thomas Williams, is by Jon Lewis and is held by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Imagine being held to represent Bondi Beach, the way Thomas is here. Kind of amazing!
The Criterion
The corner seat in the public bar of the Hotel on a Sunday morning.
The corner window.
The seats are sticky and unclean, this is usual.
The air is redolent of stale tobacco and old alcohol stink, the floor and walls are mudded up with some kind of atmospheric grunge and are unwashed for weeks. This is a rude place, a tired hostelry, where every door is a drunkard’s exit.
Here is welcome.
Sunday morning today. 9am. This hotel never closes.
Eleven screens flicker their melancholy list of local Totes and about a dozen NZ Harness Races; NSW country greyhound previews, NSW provincial horse races, cartoons, and interviews with men whose lives are an eternity of distance away from the clean easterly swell that caresses the Sydney coast this morning. They natter away at their damned commentary.
Common items found inside hundreds of thousands of dead albatross chicks include bottle caps, lighters, children's toys, combs and toothbrushes
Often, to amuse themselves, the men of the crew
Catch those great birds of the seas, the albatrosses,
lazy companions of the voyage, who follow
The ship that slips through bitter gulfs.
Hardly have they put them on the deck,
Than these kings of the skies, awkward and ashamed,
Piteously let their great white wings
Draggle like oars beside them.
This winged traveler, how weak he becomes and slack!
He who of late was so beautiful, how comical and ugly!
Someone teases his beak with a branding iron,
Another mimics, limping, the crippled flyer!
The Poet is like the prince of the clouds,
Haunting the tempest and laughing at the archer;
Exiled on earth amongst the shouting people,
His giant’s wings hinder him from walking.
(Translated by Geoffrey Wagner, Selected Poems
of Charles Baudelaire, NY: Grove Press, 1974)
Hard, heavy, slow, dark
Or so I find them, the hands of Te Whaea
Teaching me to die. Some lightness will come later
When the heart has lost its unjust hope
For special treatment. Today I go with a bucket
Over the paddocks of young grass
So delicate like the fronds of maidenhair,
Looking for mushrooms. I find twelve of them,
Most of them little, and some eaten by maggots,
But they’ll do to add to the soup. It’s a long time now
Since the great ikons fell down,
God, Mary, home, sex, poetry,
Whatever one uses as a bridge
To cross the river that only has one beach,
And even one’s name is a way of saying –
‘This gap inside a coat’ – the darkness I call God,
The darkness I call Te Whaea, how can they translate
The blue calm evening sky that a plane tunnels through
Like a wasp, or the bucket in my hand,
Into something else? I go on looking
For mushrooms in the field, and the fist of longing
Punches my heart, until it is too dark to see.
– James K. Baxter, 1971
A wave is the measure of some windy pulse, .. an oceanic punch,.. the thriftless child of some distant tempest … wandering to the shore, lost to violence.
