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Thylazine: The Australian Journal of Arts, Ethics & Literature                                                                                                                                    #6/thyla6k-dh AUSTRALIAN POETS SERIES 6 The Poetry of D. J. Huppatz Selected by Coral Hull [Above] Photo of D. J. Huppatz by photographer unknown, 2000. I hepburn springs, july 1999 I wurdi youang, you yangs, february 1997 I yeddonba (pine tree) I Cooloola, January 2000 I hepburn springs, july 1999 snagged for the weekend in burgundy-earth potato country where trees are allowed to grow mossy & greygreen pines by the creek decorate what would be christmas somewhere else & after the blackberry scramble down a slippery slope at sundrop, eyes widen to take in more light. how excessive my presence, or, no more so than the tiny bird who makes its home among the blackberries while above the moon feeds fungal poetry that will spring up overnight among spidery birch trees - here even ghosts grow moss & there a shaggy twigclump tucked into a fork in the trunk (last spring's shelter). distant crow songs. so much inaccessible to me, movement resonates along the spine of the valley. mist drifts into solid evening rain, transforming the trail to mud. knotted gumtrees somehow maintain a vertical hold on your shoulder as it dips into the gully. i shelter under stone, trace white streaks of quartz, split soft shale in two, images of slagheaps just out of sight - your punctured veins, your body emptied of gold. wurdi youang, you yangs, february 1997 cloudless upon a folding point of the earth's crust surveying the richness of surfaces a wedgetailed eagle spiralling higher until the black v becomes the dot above an i shrinking out of sight. across the werribee plains below mathew flinders found no water - he didn't know where to look. from ude youang to surveyor's peak in 1801 (later flinders' peak) grassy plains capable of supporting much cattle, though better calculated for sheep. after the invasion of batman's flocks from van dieman's land in 1835 the land folded inwards. nowhere country opened, rearranging eucalypts into huts & fenceposts. fred williams found scrubby smudges clinging to fencelines dry honey stillness & suspension of familiar sounds notably engines. in dissipating paintspots the heat. his trees dense & difficult spots. in sparse clusters birdcalls. landscape a vehicle for formal invention, stripped of trees how square the paddocks. demands of the manchester mills left nowhere to hide but the stone circle of wurdi youang. forced up through the landscape's shell, insignificant everything exposed on granite boulders. dead branches scratching at ankles, details of translation glossed over. not even cloudcover. yeddonba (pine tree) across to Gooramadda through Streeton's eyes: smudges of grey smoke from a farming cottage, hazy Murray River plains in the distance beyond scalped hills. Sir for his vision. May cold on hilltop granite, it's June on Monday. rhythmic insistence of insects resonates in me. yeddonba, black cypress pine, provides resin for holding words together. roots are roasted & beaten into an edible bracken fern paste. red ochre outlines on granite rockface, broken stories: a snake, pouched dog with wolf's head (thylacine)? marked themselves before Linnaeus. guilt makes crows' songs, death groans. listen, they're warning of rain. it comes. descent into the cave: & then went down the sheep, what motions from the upper world? shadows do shows, herds of adjectives swarm around the sun. within this natural amphitheatre, i make shadow puppets for an audience of fairy-wrens. I am a miner, I am Ned Kelly, I am a violent pioneer. I crow, WA-AK WA-AK. sounds project from the cave. no crows reply. the world issues forth words in languages unknown to me. this moss, bracken, yeddonba, quartz - eldorado, land of golden words, a word on every leaf, beneath bark of each tree, embedded in quartz bursting from flaky shale. evasion is writing is lost in patterned grammar of bracken among the pines in the language of forgetting. Cooloola, January 2000 conversation thin & transparent through woodland, without wind words dissipate into slim waves. softprints on sand soon collapse to shallow dents & leaftraps. track tacks left, past a sandy cemetery. how many frogs, ferns, fronds can i hear? a barkcurl drops, its wave penetrates, its rays set fingers to tingle. colours lurk, a plastic half captures something pink. a brief wetting of leaves from the sky sets ants moving. tip leaf endsplash after rainstop. the sky underlines our failure to read it. gum is sticky, drips at treespeed. form follows sound. all these finely tuned transistors, antennae, broadcasters & translators opening a hole in the tree for gum to seep out. i follow the wavering line sent out to this watery sac of sensitivities, conduct a slow crescendo by the cicada choir. but fossilisation inevitably occurs, however brief, deep in grey cabbages or written as signata on apricot bark. some interbreeding may occur & hybridisation is possible. About the Poet D. J. Huppatz D. J. Huppatz has published a wide variety of writing including articles and reviews on contemporary art, catalogue essays, book reviews, poetry and fiction. His catalogue essays have accompanied exhibitions at 200 Gertrude St.(Melbourne), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), 1st Floor (Melbourne) and the Hong Kong Heritage Museum. In 1994 he became a founding member of 1st Floor, an artist-run gallery in Melbourne. 1st Floor is an art space which focuses on contemporary art, particularly collaborations between artists and writers. Out of this experience with 1st Floor he founded TEXTBASE, a collective of writers working in contemporary art spaces and has coordinated many visual art projects involving writers. These projects include work in galleries, visual projects and readings at events such as the St Kilda Writer's Festival and Melbourne Fringe Festival. TEXTBASE, a journal of experimental writing, was founded in 1998 and has recently moved online while continuing as an experimental small press. He currently teaches at Swinburne University of Technology in the Design History and Critical Theory Department and is in the middle of a PhD on contemporary design in Hong Kong.    [Above] Photo of D. J. Huppatz by photographer unknown, 2000. I Next I Back I Exit I Thylazine No.6 (September, 2002)