When he’d tire his secretly joyful complaint;

how the ‘bastard’ would rain

all night on him, then burn

the mind from his flaking head,

(staggering ‘round the North

in a jeep that ran on turps).

I thought, with my pointed shoe

chipping an easy rock:

 

I met a traveler from the Goldfields, who said:

rusting wheels, in a crumbled old shed,

where the bush plain’s cracked crust

suckles rotting shafts in dust, speak an end.

The miner’s hands course through silver-skinned trees

the iron trickles back; and by a moth-coated neon,

through cigarette smoke in my export lager eyes,

scrutinise the share price of planning a town.

 

(published in Sandgropers; A Western Australian Anthology. Ed. Dorothy Hewett. University of WA Press)