McAuley (July)

Malcolm Fraser was ambitious, his chances interchangeable as boxes on ballots. A great divide of a face stares beleaguered at futures, a mind keeping tabs on numbers. A stroke of the pencil and he could have everything he asked for. People, you have to look like you believe in them, they hold your chances in their hand. Funny times, elections, December, July... The sophisticated art of convincing people is followed by the labyrinthine art of convincing yourself, back in the purgatory of Parliament. Critics betray, pundits praise, trolls scorn. No one is a politician until they’ve learned how to lose.

 

Amor (July)

David Malouf appears with no metaphors, no Luna Park of references, no subtle acknowledgements of a past. Italy could be just a word, July notional. Day is a clean sheet. My relationship, or your relationship, with David Malouf is a private matter. We play marbles under Queensland verandahs, the clink of glass. Down in the trenches with our sense of belongings, we’ve only our mates to thank: everything could be blown apart. Exile, it’s our choice. We sit by the Black Sea of our chequered existence, with a companion who’ll never fully comprehend how much we’ve changed. Nor we, them.

Whiteley (July)

Patrick White, insomniac, asthmatic. His hands seem not to have done a day’s work. Illusion, July was writing every day. His brain a tree, like other brains. Palm tree, Morton Bay fig, grow into distinctive forms. How stories, left to the elements and time, rise into novels. Lists of loves and hates are petty, prompt petty spats. He told his biographer: include the dirt or they won’t read it. Patrick would know. Everything – house frames, footpaths, humans, their shadows, Whiteley’s blue period – is result and haunt of waters where it began, place of arrival, deep shoals of the Harbour beyond.