Zigzag
and speckle and prism are the new scrapers’ windows, passing by the ‘quiet
carriage’ windows out of Southern Cross, one by one catch the sun. Miles of
bluestone chips hem the rails they embank and support, perfectly poured by
sleeper-fitters through clunk hours of work crush; same bedrock bluestone the
ancient memory engendering Melbourne Black. Peppercorn and pampas spears and yellow
fennel meet grandiose amongst other random flora on rail islands no gardener
can reach; bristle as our windows rush past. White flour mills and set-square warehouses
and glintiest apartments rise overseen by the Goddess of Footscray high and
happy and calm as multiculturalism amidst her billabong of curly pavilions. Underpasses
and freeway barriers and buckled old-wave fences spread transformed by the
night prowlers’ calligraphic spray cans; brighten the morning with colours of
many hands. Thousands of thistles full-grown full extent seed any crevice on
offer, their land grab impregnable as barb-wire railyards. Cars in driveways of
houses with their clotheslines and satellite dishes and sheds stay squared by
palings from here to eternity; new suburbs adjacent still but a name on a
noticeboard in a field. The way the tin barn is patchwork of old brown rained-through
corrugated sheets overlapping grey sheets and two or three bright new silver
sheets, weed-lined, the same way every time. New classy glassy rail station
inside the concrete-sprayed trench takes everyone alighted by sensible lift and
diagonal ramp up, up to the grassland view again. You Yangs mirror the low soft-sloping
roofs of slate-grey tile across the paddock estates, treed overseeing the
treeless, with many a free-floating cloud for good measure. Tower in a fence in
a field transmits who knows what cornucopia of civilization through high-up boxes
on windless days, silently. Next season’s greetings Christmas trees jet up
green diamond rows behind gnarled windbreaks, furry green not yet ready for
sale, quiet earners all. Someone’s couch finally finds its way to the side of a
farm road, a $2 shop for bird’s nests, sniffing stop for foxes, sight to see as
we hurtle towards Lara; sun and rain and wind will end its days. Palaces of stacked
pallets line the forecourts of mighty warehouses, the forbidding cities of
reinforced steel, storing the future with grains and machinery and ‘units’; such
overnight sensations as add yet more concentric rings to outer Geelong.
