Bridge

Image: Scotch College crews in training on the Yarra

 at Walmer Street Bridge, between Kew and Abbotsford.

 

good morning

merri creek bridge

taking the north-east to work

where the medium-rises meet the renos

where the wattles meet their reflections

minds suffused with corded sounds

delineate the rooftop bricolage

blue hills and grey-white clouds

all the senses and scents

where starts and ends meet

skin fresh from the shower

 

good afternoon

walmer street bridge

the vineyard dozing in colour

scotch rowers loud hailered to scull

a madcap cyclist testing the limits

of walkers’ personal space

curving concrete and rattling planks

consecutively past

apartments inscrutable as their residents

and the merry clangs of trams

 

good evening

montague street bridge

scalper of vans

hard halt to the blind

not so fast is your bypass byword

another week another wreck

danger low brow

nemesis of buses

how many warning signs are needed

for an accident waiting to happen

trasher of trucks flashing news

of the latest statistical mishap

idle pastime of innocent bystanders

reading the prang on their phone

with a good-humoured groan

 

good night

princes bridge

concert goers leaving mahler

convert goths nibbling snickers

midweek diners walking off shiraz

midlife donors talking ten the doz

sporting fans left thrilled or glum

sparring friends just out for the fun

buskers hulking drums lead and bass

late night lawyers lost in a case

condo dwellers their constitutional

tied besuiteds looking institutional

pizza scooters skirting the kerb

puzzled punters employing a verb

addled students with intense frown

uber stood-ups wanting out of town

olds hand-in-hand youth hand-in-hand

another tram and another tram

Statistics

 

good morning

biggest tram network

most caffeinated city in the world

your coffee god of a hundred names

dozens of pronunciations

your ‘remember to hold on’

your ‘mind the gap’

never say this after lunch

 

good afternoon

how to say this in a city

with the most languages

some have no word for afternoon

they move forward in an atmosphere

of the four seasons in one day

when did that originate

pink then lime russet then black

converse with emotional content

hold onto your hat

throw an extra coat in the car

and tap the cost on the terminal

use sensibly until dusk

 

good evening

wealthiest once city of empire

your gold-edged boulevards

and bluestone villas

fastest growing city

since the day before federation

and roads turning bitumen

is geelong nervous of merging?

no one is saying

they have nothing to worry about

said sparingly with timing

 

good night

largest again city of australia

the great experiment

no one could dismiss

ever since the dismissal

most liveable and now

the dinner party topic is liveable

where olympic philistinism

is atoned for in multilingual tones

trenchant belief in facadism

we itemise where all the cities

we’ve visited don’t match up

say this last thing at night

 

 

Suburb

 

Glen Huntly at Daybreak

[Suburb]

 

“march suburb haiku”

 

there’s a crack in everything

yarraville

and that’s how the light gets in

 

the compost is perfection

thomastown

the tomatoes turn bright red

 

minutes broadmeadows glenroy

pascoe vale

west brunswick on the freeway

 

pobblebonk frog from log drops

moonee ponds

into the water kerplop

 

the weekend arena of

jolimont

its roar of weekday workers

 

more green leaves than yellow leaves

collingwood

soon more yellow leaves than green

 

oh apartments apartments

south yarra

apartments more apartments!

 

the ubers go too fast through

elsternwick

and the trams go far too slow

 

cream brick fifties make way in

cheltenham

for the chocolate brick twenties

 

heatwave conditions of march

kananook

cool into daylight saving

 

glades caper and shimmer in

rosanna

eltham copper butterflies

 

patients in emergency

heidelberg

doctors talk in corridors

 

dry side toasts with rainwater

camberwell

wet side floats on gold bubbly

 

same same, same but different

glen iris

ashburton glen iris, same

 

eucalypt mural barks of

mooroolbark

and morale barks of park dogs

 

there’s vietnamese spanish

dandenong

peruvian sudanese greek

 

more carparks stores trolleys as

pakenham

grows miles in all directions

Carrot

 

I met carrot man this morning at St Vincent’s Plaza in Victoria Parade. He was busy minding his own business, watching the peak hour traffic hurtle past the Eye and Ear Hospital. It’s the first time I’ve seen him close up. The only other time I’ve seen him is from a distance last summer walking past the Royal Derby Hotel in Brunswick Street towards the Fitzroy Swimming Pool. Sightings of carrot man are an important connection, part of Melbourne existence. You tend to remember. The first thing you notice is the carrot, which sticks out a mile, even when leaning nonchalantly against the plate glass of the tram stop. It is a very vibrant orange with bright green tufts. It’s solid pâpier-maché. Then you notice him, smiling bemusedly at the commuters changing trams, and patients slowly alighting heading towards their doctor’s appointments. As it happens, he was also having a doctor’s appointment today, which is what he said when I asked how he was going. I assured him that colonoscopies were perfectly okay and you don’t know what’s happening at the time. I’ve had one myself, I said, pointing towards St Vincent’s. After being asked, he said his name is Nathan.  Nathan and I agreed that anaesthetics are one of the wonders of modern life, a blessing. He talked about cameras that have been sent in to look at his heart, so obviously he’s looking after himself. I mentioned that he was well-known. Nathan replied, natural as you like, that he’s been viral in China. Not everyone can say they’ve been viral in China. Perhaps this is why he was comfortable about me asking him to have his photograph taken. He gets asked all the time, he said, with a sheepish grin. In all the excitement I overlooked to give Nathan my name, something that probably happens frequently when you’re carrot man. I took his picture. Had he been sitting here long?, I asked, as though this was the most normal thing to ask a total stranger with a huge carrot on a tram stop. Nathan said that he’d been here a while, it was nice and sunny now for an icy morning, but that when he felt like going somewhere else then he’d go there. The 109 to Box Hill was turning the corner into our stop. No mention had been made of the carrot. “Eh, what’s up Doc?” was never going to be a clever conversational gambit. Still smiling, I told him to stay warm, which he seemed to be doing very well already, and I stepped onto the tram. Googling for carrot man articles on my way down Victoria Parade I read that people keep carrot man Instagram accounts, maintaining regular updates of Nathan’s present location, condition, words of wisdom. I suppose it’s time to add my own words to the public record.

Bookshop

 

Image: The crowd gathered outside the Hill of Content bookshop for Thursday’s auction. Photo: Eddie Jim. Words: Nicole Lindsay, in The Melbourne Age.

My first bookshop account was with Margareta Webber’s circa 1973, when she was still upstairs in Little Collins Street. Trying to remember, I must have opened my account at the Hill of Content Bookshop in the early eighties when I developed spending power. Knowing most of the staff was an added incentive. Reading this weekend’s headline puts one in an Ecclesiastes frame of mind: “Hill of discontent as famous Melbourne bookshop fails to find a buyer.” Journalist Nicole Lindsay’s report prompts practical and wistful thoughts. “Melbourne’s first CBD auction of the year got off to a rocky start on Thursday,” Nicole writes, “when the well-known bookshop was passed in on a vendor bid of $5.7 million.” Not the shop, of course, the land and property. The bookshop could go elsewhere, maybe, but where? I think of the sizable part of my own library purchased from Janet Campbell, Pauline Osborne, Andrew Robertson at the counter, plopped into HoC bags and hauled home, wherever home was at the time. “The bookshop, a city institution, is on a month-to-month lease in the building.” One thinks of Thomas’ Records up the street, closed in 2018, or Gaslight Records directly across the street, left wondering if that end of town has changed character in ways that are not sustainable, or if rents, or online have reduced literary possibilities to zero. “Three bidders made a play for the three-storey freehold shop, which had been owned by the family behind the Collins Booksellers business for 73 years.” Well, Collins collapsed, while HoC was rescued, but for how long? “About 200 people crowded the footpath next door to Grossi Florentino restaurant for the auction, which took about 40 minutes and drew just eight bids, two of them vendor bids made by auctioneer Paul Tzamalis.” A good poem, in a book one could only buy at this shop, may take 40 minutes just to size up. “The slow bidding meant Tzamalis went inside to negotiate with the vendors four times. The first party to put up his hand outside the shop was a local investor bidding for his family. His main competitor was a student from Adelaide, in a swank new Louis Vuitton suit, from a Chinese family which owns a restaurant chain.” Et cetera, as if restaurants will be the only future for the area. Indeed, Nicole observes, “High-end restaurants, including Florentino, Bottega and the Lucas Group’s Batard dominate the top end of Bourke Street. There was a strong likelihood of any new owner ending the Hill of Content’s lease…” a sentence ending with the flickering, or rather guttering, last sign of light: “… but the shop has survived to sell more books.” Sure. What are we not being told? For everything there is a season. Yet Wisdom keeps you safe, this is the advantage of knowledge. What has happened before will happen again. Generations come and go, but the world stays just the same. Ecclesiastes keeps going round in my mind, and is that useless? Is it all, as Eugene Peterson translates ‘vanity’, smoke?

Square

 

Image: Collins Street, Melbourne in 1905, lantern slide photograph 

taken by my great-uncle John Henry Harvey. Held at the State Library of Victoria.

When illegal Van Diemen’s Land settlers first sailed up Birrarung, why did they imagine a street grid extending a mile in each direction behind all those mangroves? Their thoughts were on a city, not a village, from the first fatal impact. Until then, not one line in the landscape was straight. The square came from Indian garrison towns, keeping everything wanted inside, everything unwanted outside. Such grid towns were seen in maps of ancient China, square as the imprint of a red ink stamp marking possession. The streets were set out in rapid order, exact measurements, perfect corners. The only anomaly to this army fortress being Parisian boulevards launched into bushland in the general direction of the blue hills, the distant prospects, Sydney somewhere, gold someplace, Antarctica. A city was the idea, but what kind of city? So many squares, no city square. Each generation succeeded in avoiding the overwhelming question, as city blocks were populated with buildings grand as London. It took the demolition of a street of Victorian goodness gracious grandioseness behind the cathedral to come close to a city square. Half a square anyway. Lacklustre, with views onto drab sidewalls and lasting but a season, the square became the scene, most memorably, of a moratorium against an Asian war, a conflict based on the unlikely premise that this city will be invaded anytime soon by an army from Annam. This finest hour of popular resistance to stupidity was the square’s raison d’être, in all cultures the square being the agora where everyone meets to congregate, to celebrate, to market, and to protest. Bereft of mangroves and piebald from the Wrecker, the city made half-hearted efforts at a square. Then a main street was turned into a mall, betraying its true shape in commercial interest: a square is there for the market, once citizens sidestep roving trams. Later came Fed Square, a place for the well-fed rather than the fed-up, an eccentrically irregular dodecagon, not a square. Not one inch of its surface was flat, which is how the planners wanted it. Comically yet, the commercial sector vied, year in year out to be the centre of the city. A complex called Melbourne Central was an outstanding example of this complex, which was only ever central in a businessman’s mind. Half the city blocks laid claim to being the centre at one time or another, but none of them, thus far, have been cleared to make way for a city square. Meanwhile crowds will turn into congregations, celebrations are organised where possible, and protests are so carefully stage-managed that police merge in with the protestors. The citizens take coffee in side alleys then walk the grid maze some more, well knowing their bearings, knowing well they’ll not find the centre, that they could wander rubik-like for days without finding their city square.

M

 

[M]

 

Mal-born, mellow-bairn, male-burn

anyways the mouth pushes softly before

boom or bust, make or break B, do or

die, a staid name politely taking its turn.

Victoria dubs thee meal-bun, mail-bin,

Melba-urn, mall-bored, Marlboro-brown

most golden marvel, Olympic hoop town

to be, or not, a faraway name to lose or win.

 

Not so, Naarm. Name buried under breastbone

denied its breath, name in dirt, old hurt

ownership nasal resonant through cranium, chest

resurrected by committee, stayed, all for the best

that repetition rendered home in ever alert

centuries, redolent of mists and mellow tones.

Ashburton (April)

The only house where we ever drank ourselves under the table. David’s, with its squeaky gate and diamond windows. Was it April, August? Nobody noticed. Telephones plugged into walls. Ring for pizza. Fairport Convention and T-Rex 33and1/3rpm. So long, whole hours, since night before became morning after. Adolescent high-nerved senses grew memories of autumnal streets, neater and neater nature strips. Thud of indifferent football. Cool pool leaf floated on aqua. Liquidambars fell in heaps, circles of yellow, Saturday sodden earth smell. The dairy clanked, wineshop clinked. The week ahead was vague insistences: Russian Revolution homework. Yes, literally, under the table.

Alphington (April)

Fog this morning. Old tin warehouses, above grassy drop to Darebin Creek, are shrouded like an engraving. Wind meters keep the weather in check, spinning clicking down today. Cotoneaster dark red amidst dark green. Their long streets of verandahed houses elm-shaded, paid historians and school councillors powerwalk footpaths. Dayworkers in beanies and scarves, their plastic and pearls, wait for the train. Broken crust river gums slide into lowered cloud. April fog dampens rooftops, cartops. The Paper Mill is falling down, falling down. Dan Murphy stands sober as a judge. Golf course is no longer lonely. Heidelberg Road is fairly heavy.  

Melbourne August

seventeen melbourne haiku philip harvey wrote in august 2014

tiny lady near huge sculpture buttons her coat waiting for old friend

outside office entrance smokers share a flared match and compare the frosts

south yarra schoolboys on peak trains flat chat without end algorithms

front seat drivers swap family foibles all along dawn freeway

new york truths fuse their double fantasy who’ve never been to new york

last night’s tax form face stares at bronchial planning sunshine holidays

park bench world’s one daylong parade: cyclists, ipods, walkers with their dogs

laughing in midday café unaware their jokes rode last night’s nightmares

passing smiles between customer and seller get them through the minutes

his eye signs of thrilled awareness notice his wintry look of knowledge

two talk outmoded existentialism on tram stop of mobiles

man and cap on pavement unwashed beg man whether he gives what loose coin

lovers separated on tram have all the time to reach their next stop

unknown refugee stares at well-showered face that will not return her look

1 a.m. god dreamer tends to the loss of a dead man in drug lane

closing time: long lost friends rave their past near the café window, alone

cold outside: after mild tensions, in each other’s arms, they fall asleep

Melbourne May

seventeen melbourne haiku philip harvey wrote in may 2014

less starless darkness for a tightrope possum and first warbling magpie

black as tree root, pink as gumleaf, grey as bark sunrise again’s cold green

thick dew, dependent dogs while above park treelines three hotair balloons

because we breathe and need a roof and work is work peak hour begins

train says, now arriving at hawksburn, as train arrives at moorabbin

he keeps online profiles, likes and dislikes, blogs, deletes, stays in his room

sushi bar: one pair of eyes on the job, one pair on the customers

a crowd at the tramstop talk to their touch screens, the busker to his dog

brown or silver or grey or bronze towers mirror the turbid river

the new streamlined medical centre fills with crook backs, blood clots, stuffed heads

signs of shops and shops of signs and signs of streets and streets of shops and signs

thought he had change for a coffee but sorry only have a fifty

perfume paris, curve shoes london, handbag roma, voice pure brunswick

central locking remote sensing auto shifting slow brooding road rage

on jolimont half are stoic, half satisfied after the night game

basketball courts, game ended or yet to start empty under floodlight

lights out under doonas the mind sees autumn leaves collect as sleep falls