South

 

And then again, and then, again, South Yarra, again. Beep beep beep. Gateway to the South, in a riverside city where every station is a gateway to the south. Where every stop is an exit from, or an entrance to the south, then, and then, again. The South of Birrarung, its way bending deeply in the earth, from the smooth oval-stone cascades of Warrandyte and floodplains of Warringal, past tree-swaying suburbs and ancient rock pulpits, a shuffling then sliding brown-white water, broad past the emptied billabongs of Melbourne High School, the phased-out factories of Cremorne, towards the big Bay, there to translate again into grey-blue blue-grey when Birrarung meets salt. South south of the island continent, this vast epitome of south, as the dead language would have it in an age when Australis was notional, a crowd of clouds cracking cheeks; this disproportionate immensity of south, that the eye still guesses at beyond available horizons; this unclassifiable catalogue of climates, seven seasons in one year, four in one day alone where Birrarung drifts and dawdles its load that fell torrential in freezing catchments above; this tenacious grip born out of firestorms, implacably reaching out again its ways in wordless complexity. South of the Equator, unmindful as the Equator is to cold mists on languid riverbends, or the kind of rain that will turn to ice at the first opportunity. South of the uptop hemisphere, origin of harnessed electricity, train horsepower, and ringing steel roads, its expansive propulsion turned grotesque with Enlightenment setting out curving grids of ironic tracks to compete with latitudes and longitudes on its, uptop’s, latest map. South of the Moon, as it were, again then, always where the Moon is looked up at, as if from a vantage south, round even when half-round or quarter-round, on occasion sparkling even like sunlight on water, though often like sunlight through mist, like sunlight upon a pool, sunlight being all that is seen of the Moon this far south, and so distant that train travel there and back is unimaginable. Then, and again then, South Yarra, that forests of toaster-rack apartments have turned into a wind tunnel, that hungry transport has turned into a warren of underground concrete caves, that time itself has turned into an ideal perpetual jogging track, a self-perpetuating traffic bank-up where satellite idols lose track green amber red red and amber and back to green, an overpriced idyll for Jaded Bayside Commuters (JBC) and idle poolsiders on their way back to Trak. Beep beep thud.