RESEARCH CREATION SHOWCASE 2020

bushfire in Hawaiian print | Jazz Money

the end of the world was marked with beautiful light
        we should have known
as mega fires surrounded the city
and our leaders lounged
off shore on beach with shandy hawaiian print

we marvelled
the orange air more brilliant and terrifying
than an instagram filter
our skin glowed and glowed as the horizon
and we were together to watch it burn

the age of the idealised self
didn’t touch our fingertips
the sun hung heavy angry near in a thick sky
we choked
our photographs were perfect

we looked beautiful at the end of the world
        and the content was fire
the lighting was golden the lighting was lit
how predictable that the end of the world
would be captured in a selfie

Terra Australis | πO

May She Know | Viniana Rokobili

I am heard, with my father’s voice
I fight with hands from my Bu
The same tilted middle finger
I am seen, with my mother’s detailing
I walk this life with the legs of her Ratu,
I am the shape of the land of Suvavou
I am the name of the Nakelo people
I am part of the life of the Lomai Viti Province

I am able to create
The way of life
So that she is able to hear the voice of my Nau
So she is able to see her Bu in the mirror
So she can see the lines that cried for her
She will be the flower from heaven sent to stop the tears
She will blossom,
Noqu luvequ will carry on the love
She will run through this life
If I do not reach there she will

May she know where her voice came from
May she know her name, the land of her Yaca
May she turn through the life of the unturned, truth of her ancestors
May she have her own voice to carry, and there is where her Tai will be
May she look through the reflection of her Bu flowing down her cheek

I am, She will, May She

This is the Crow with the Broken Caw | Chris Andrews

This is the crane that little cranes built
until it could start to build itself.
At seven sharp, the slewing unit
swivels the jib, and a crow flaps off.
The shadow of a chain sweeps over
bungalows labelled in flaking gilt:
Sunny Corner and Corfu Palace
with its giant shining burrawang
and a fruit offering by the door.

Yawning and joshing, the hi-vis bros
buckle on their toolbelts and converge
to fill out the artist’s impression
where people are empty white spaces
treading the ruins of futures past.
Where’s Matiu? At the training centre
doing the course he was teased about
last week: Dogging, Theory and Practice.
By five, he’s smiling, ticket in hand.

From the bus he spies the resting crane.
Homeward, over the Tasman, creamy
jumping castles of vapour inflate.
The Ides of March are come, and autumn.
It’s the empire of development
but currawongs alight on the slabs
of the counterweight and sling the shots
of their cadastral song to steeple
to stinkpole to Norfolk Island pine.

Body Worlds | Louise Carter

A travelling show of ‘plastinated’ human bodies
is passing through Sydney. The posters show a skinless man
arched like a dancer, with nerves and tendons fanned out
where there should be hands. His eyeballs seem to stare
right at you no matter where you stand; his expression
seems slightly sad, but maybe that’s just my impression.
I saw one of these exhibits about twelve years ago:
on a date. It’s hard to be flirtatious around flayed corpses
but I was infatuated, and the very strangeness of that day
has prevented the memory from fading. There was sadness
then too – even amid the romance – and the contorted
displays of human remains were flaking slightly
at their edges: the plastic was scuffed in places.
That’s what my mind captured: gauzy filaments
at the end of what were once a person’s fingers,
flickering in the air conditioning. I picture this image
now as I pass a billboard for the new exhibition
on my way to work. It’s autumn again and the air
is perfumed with decomposition. It smells of change –
a mulchy bouquet that induces the urge to burrow.
Walking to work, a gust floods my senses with realness:
my body’s alive in a living world. The feeling links
to my childhood. There was sadness then too.

Intimacy | Christine Lai

Intimacy
/ˈɪntɪməsi/

noun

1. feeling at home in the oversized sweater you lent me. it’s been five months and you still haven’t said a thing, even though it’s hanging in plain sight on my bedside table, daring you to ask for it back. you never do. I think you like the idea of me wearing your things. a constant reminder. an unwavering fact that I am yours alone.


2. afternoon naps and sleeping away the morning, our legs tangled together. your hair brushes across my mouth and you turn slightly so that I can breathe you in. it’s soft. you smell like honeydew and peach, mixed with your favourite shampoo. I vow to learn every line of your body. the way your hips move when you call out my name. the way you wake up humming, the sound moving along the shape of your lips, gentle and soft like your voice. and the crevices I’ve yet to discover.


3. moonlight sneaks in through a gap in the curtains and the light creates a soft shadow with the outline of your body. I wonder what you’re dreaming of. you’d never admit it, but you mumble in your sleep. I’d never admit that your voice, scratched with sleep and gibberish, calms me down. I find solace in your even breathing and whisper into the darkness. our hearts beat in sync.

Black Coffin with Milk | Michael Farrell

Take the measure of wooden speech with a wooden tongue
The sound waves crash in, like a handful of grasshoppers
Take the nails and bang them into the weeping painting
The kids are shouting what they’re for: it’s making noise
Making noise and drinking milk with a magnifying glass

The ancestor’s dead from reading books and breathing
From boxing vegetables and reading books and breathing
The cardboard boxes are in his brain in tiny mirroring bits
From the vein in his forehead to the vein in his toe they run
They run like children to the school milk and the myths

Out of the crush they would say of him, mad as a string
The trees would say different phrases when they saw him
Out of grace, they never were, they would mimic Umback
The leaves in his hair were the marks of a bush comedy
A bush comedy so good it could run forever without seats

The little version of the novel, every novel he read at night
That he played out with his bosses, with strangers, his wife
The wife has another ancestor with the same name, related
That the lightning spilled down the hill in hot liquid form
A form that was repeated and parodied in the hill’s plants

Take this string and wrap it round the painting as if alive
As if alive and attempting to survive out there in the bush
Take the clock and time the boy who went to get the milk
As if you can get milk from a large white rabbit that makes
The sound of death, chewing grasshoppers like a machine

Balkan Weave | Helen Koukoutsis

A homely loom laced with wool at the heddles
clacks – bangs, clicks and rattles. My mother
sings Slavic songs as she weaves and pedals

away her girlhood. Shuttle speed trembles –
a dowry of blankets and couch-covers born
of a loom laced with wool at the heddles.

Rich reds and greens on the floor of a stable –
bedside to cows and lamb. My Greek mother
sings drunken songs as she weaves and peddles

away her maidenhood. Her voice travels
north to Roupel – memory and mourning.
A homely loom laced with lamb’s wool – cradles

graves and villages of rock and pebble
in honeycomb – basket – twill. Ghost women
join her in song as she weaves and pedals.

Gaida voices mistaken for that of rebels.
Muzzled – Hellenised – scorned. My Greek mother
sings drunken songs as she weaves and treadles
on a homely loom laced with wool at the heddles.

/təˈdeɪ/ | Duy Quang Mai

/təˈdeɪ/

        i. /ˈaʊəs/:

Heart. I’m here thinking back to the summer hours around you, jewelling with gnats, of the sour apple & pineapple tang. The iPhone I’ve promised myself to throw away & these faceless books, stout – as if they are whole bodies, dismembered & forgotten. Of life’s make-ups, I think back to the potassium, membrane & enzyme in my biology class. Now in the market’s seafood stall, the sublimation of dry ice is bedding those dead fish. How warm how warm you tell me? Our dialogues are crumpled. A sore resembles clichés they say. But it does, still does. The gold on my hands is gone, the self wastefully spent & the ink has whitened these pages, languishing into air. So I went. I went to have my torso bent. Again, I went to exit you, distilling the shower till I sleep, loving you on & off & on & off.

        ii. /ʌɪ/:

Heart. I prefer the years leaving their skeletons, prefer myself still here. Once, I actually believe the sky means enough other than blue. At times, I prefer my hands begging, in a morning undone. I prefer today. I prefer today anyway.

        iii. /ˈkwɛstʃ(ə)n/ /mɑːk/:

Heart. That suppose the comma will do, the full stop is alright. Combining together, they give you a question mark. I think about this now. How you punctuate your life just to restart the process of finding answers. Heart, you tell me, how beautiful? How gorgeous?

White Lines on Pink | Luke Beesley

        after Tony Tuckson

I arrived by the pink bark-stripped eucalyptus tree last Sunday and went straight to bed.
I slept in the pink light of a eucalyptus tree. Sleeping was easy until I dreamed the bark
stripped from my own pillow, owl-embroidered childhood pillow, collected in dream
lichen florescent and waiting on kindling, something I could possibly trace back to a
family tree, to the nomenclature of an arborist’s labour. Apples while the sound of
the river refused any softening. I sat close to its stereo. Woke up in pins and needles.
To acknowledge the fireplace here and the fireplace in the sound of the second home
of my childhood. Smoke flooded the house, the brickwork at poor angles, a shout
ricocheting off the river as I made the bed and prepared breakfast simply and with
turned eggs and the eye of the e.g. always drawing on emotion caused by repetition.

Ash in Sydney | Jake Goetz

        after August Kleinzahler’s ‘Snow in Jersey’

ash is falling on the Lidcombe line
on Carriageworks and Regents Park
it’s falling on plains of closed-up houses
where Greg thinks his summer’s fucked
and it’s blowing in from morning westerlies
and it’s blown back by arvo southerlies
and it’s falling as if skyscrapers were chimneys
and the country their crematory  animals of ash
falling through bodies  the lyrebird’s song
an office worker’s cough as they jog through
the Domain at lunch  and it’s falling on woke
capital city greenies marching at Town Hall
on National MPs whose towns are out of water
and it’s falling on Raquel who sits at Coogee
on a working holiday from Brazil  watching
it wash ashore with the breakers  and it’s falling on
New Zealand glaciers  over Chile and Argentina
circling the earth to return to Australia
and it’s falling on screens and the space they sit between
on the dissociative gleam of our media
and it’s falling like the ASX on Kochie and Samantha
falling like coal-dust from the hands of ScoMo
and his dreams of a surplus  falling on his Hawaiian
holiday and PR stunts  falling into rivers to clog
the country’s veins  falling into stolen land and
white National Parks  ash is falling   falling
as relentless as snow  as if snow could fall
from the ground up

Part 2 from The Midnight Charter | Kate Fagan

I wrote a forest
I wrote a clearing
I wrote a cow eating blood
I wrote the long wait on a cliff as doctors
        came for the writer
I wrote draglines
I wrote suffrage
I wrote fish in canisters
I wrote hills rearranged by dry winds
I wrote a hymn to birth
I wrote documentary
I wrote relatives
I wrote wrens
I wrote a girl climbing
I wrote a scientific charter
I wrote a boy dreaming of wolves
I wrote there is no scenery
I wrote a mantis trap
I wrote ferns
I wrote salty plains
I wrote extinction by proxy
I wrote the bones of a horse circling
        a kurrajong
I wrote ice
I wrote extraction
I wrote temperate cells
I wrote a meeting of five streams
I wrote a flattened hollow still carrying
        skin’s heat
I wrote weeds
I wrote survival
I wrote core samples
I wrote the remains of love
I wrote a plastic beach
I wrote a book of lists
I wrote barricades
I wrote brambles
I wrote pines dropping out of season
I wrote walking into mist
I wrote pollution
I wrote protection
I wrote reading nets
I wrote in the arms of strangers
I wrote to remember the milky scent
        of sleep
I wrote moss
I wrote debris
I wrote without pages
I wrote broken mechanisms
I wrote a nest full of paper and woollen
        threads
I wrote snow
I wrote a sea fret
I wrote a coal cross
I wrote listening to storms
I wrote elemental drift
I wrote settlement
I wrote ash
I wrote absence
I wrote protea spikes
I wrote a cornered earth
I wrote baskets of evidence tucked
        into vaults
I wrote drones
I wrote colony collapse
I wrote a southern horizon’s curve
I wrote a catalogue of dust
I wrote species decline
I wrote drums
I wrote data banks
I wrote staggered rows
I wrote a valley distributing animals
        and people
I wrote descent
I wrote nowhere to land
I wrote steel boulders
I wrote glitches
I wrote edges
I wrote what more has to appear
I wrote in the event of apocalypse press
        here
I wrote determine outcome
I wrote asymptote
I wrote figure