Stationary

 

The surprise closure this year of the Apollo Bay Newsagency left pretty vacant the shop floor of its aisles of magazines, postcard racks, Scandinavian noir, and biros. Gamblers must seek elsewhere for their latest credit dock. A solitary sign on the windows of the empty premises requests, ‘Do not lean bicycles against the glass.’ Glass that reflects the ocean across the way. Enterprisingly, the clothes shop down the main street, specialising in Akubra hats ® and Ugg Boots ® has converted into that classic mainstay of old-fashioned country towns, the General Store. Daily newspapers now compete for space with racks of Great Ocean Road tee-shirts and surfie baggies. Necessity is the mother of reinvention. Some of the new stock, however, is noticeably slow-moving. Item: Ranks of next year’s diary rest against last year’s diary, waiting for events that time has forgot. They await the efflorescence of the well-coifed ancient hippie resident in her beatified beach bungalow, the catch-of-the-day records of the tanned angler and particularly his catch-of-the-night straight from the Strait, the personal planner procession of the frazzled councillor and minute secretary, decisions, revisions, divisions. Perhaps everyone uses laptops these days, though who’s to know? If true, it’s one simple delete that time alas will forget. Item: Blocks of A4 will not budge that could all too readily convert into the new Apollonian novel, there to augment Isobelle Carmody and Gregory Day and Bruce Pascoe. The fiery reflection of a burning warship in a window, for example, opens the sole witness account of the 1941 invasion of the Otways, under suppression by the Australian government though not the author’s imagination. Or there’s the John Clarke-like history of the region told in laconic one-liners by a grey power surfer in dialogue with a Gadubanud elder, some of it chronological. Then there’s the new wave story from the echidna’s point of view, the chapters are called waves, living cheap under the millionaire’s sea view acquisition, watching the Antarctic come to the doorstep in instalments. Item: Boxes of map pins await their purpose on quiet ledges. Item: Derwents remain encased, that in future could redraw the crags of the Cumberland, wind patterns of sand middens, and the blue of the wren. Item: Unmoved compasses that once imagined the world’s corners yearn for a turning circle. Perhaps the whole world has come to a standstill watched from screens at the edge of the fingertips’ halfmoons. Or maybe it’s just a slow day in the middle of the week in December, again.  Just me and my dog.