Robert Hoddle Sets his Easel on the Cusp of Billanook

Entering Billanook
( 'The Billanook' is the hidden (from the West) valley floor of grassed woodland plains and foothills surrounded by the tall blue mountains of the Dividing Range in the Upper Yarra Valley and the Dandenongs in Victoria, to the east of Melbourne. This area is my own home country. This poem is inspired by two or tree watercolour paintings of the area by Robert Hoddle (who designed the road map of Melbourne) one of which is called " Towards Yering".)

[Robert Hoddle Sets his Easel on the Cusp of Billanook]

The memory lags before mountains
the brush has never shaped before
and colours on the palette hardly correspond
to seasoned airs thickening to gas-jet blue

intensifying in cleavages of the land
like tinted veils across fold-in arches
beyond hips, beyond mounds, beyond
a background deepening into mystery.

Shrub and grasslands of this walk-in country
steps up through woodland red-gums
- in their spaces and at their ease -
to scrubbed hills of wild-headed sheoaks

that gossip with winds fluming down
a native firestick-tender of open flanks
cradled by laps of limbered mountain
breathing out leaf-graduated oxygen

which Aborigines’ tilt-verticals of unshipped spears
slice through, the unquivering arms, telling-points
of oral bible, held into the upright as welcome-meaning,
laid-down in humour as people cross wide divides

going into sign’s language, till land embraces
revelation suspended in earth’s maker-culture
fuelled by transfiguration as eucalyptus exudes
before refining fires for dis(or is it)un-covery?

as mankind’s meet-match of sensed possibility
over the horizon, behind the hill, under the range,
as gum-blossom breaks cover, uncapping the nut,
taking eye-steps few whitemen have placed before,

into risen tufts, to caressed bolts of chocolate lilies
to splayed orchid fingers; tresses of mistress lands
outspread to pulse sheer pause, as palpable matter
goes up to wild grainfields of thigh-deep kangaroo-grass.

Horse fetlocks shimmer in bush-tresses going down
as yoked bullocks plod across Tarrawarra lagoons
prized in this promise-land of parley-ilk and laughter
embedded beneath the cicatrice of faces painted

for theatre backdropped by uprising great divides
where the set of Donnabuang meets Toolebewong
above staged flats and knolls of Yering, a yearning
beckoned in playful otherness that calls: ‘come in’.

2001-2002 © Wayne David Knoll , Coburg, Victoria