Back Roads, Local Roads

canola’s chemical yellow rises above the fence line Black Poles laze around a dam, ibis and egrets gliding overhead wattle, casuarina, eucalypt, cypress, radiata where the bitumen gives way to gravel taking you deeper into shadows, ditches tinder undergrowth of a bush block a passing glance to a dry weather only track – a mystery, like the roads memories rise from conversations you have to have with the road the school bus went on, where three footballers were killed on motorbikes how one road can define an attitude to land, scandals dividing neighbours local roads becoming stages where jealousies, differences are played out – to wave or not to wave look aways after church, fence lines cut and repaired around a kitchen table, dust catching in the throat the windows wound up stories seeping through – the schools you went to women defined by maiden names, back roads connecting cousins, that family who lets their chooks in the house light through a plantation’s façade the suspension rising and falling with each random thought the speedo steady as fear of a family death abandoned stockyards, shearing sheds, a colonial farmhouse real estate on the rise leaving a flock of pelicans behind where driving 20ks for a can of paint becomes a mission a diversion from the tail-gating highway stare, those times after shopping in Warrnambool my brothers and sisters spilling out of the car at the Factory Mum’s sighing gaze as Dad stirs the mechanics – You Labor shits! a bag of oats weighing us down on the slow drive back through dairy country weatherboards and poplar driveways, red flags for the calf buyers on strips of bitumen snaking down to Brucknell Creek, a canopy of gums overhead, bark peeling in sluggish heat remnants of bush stranded in a paddock of turnips a Hereford’s fur caught on a barbed wire fence amongst roadside ferns: fallen branches, beer cans, chip packets, bull ants and places where somebody had a leak chasing the myth of the back road short cut farmers see more than they bargain for teenagers leave signature burn outs and shooters nurse a ‘traveller’ to give each other a hard time knowing that the road that leads to Laang is a prick of a road in winter ¨¨¨ through dry stone dairy country, houses set off the road houses where the Rosary was intoned and The Missions brought families into a kitchen; embarrassed, polite, reverting to the familiar – kneeling on lino to pray, whose sons worked in quarries, fought on Friday nights daughters either married early or left in a hurry like the Warramyea Road dropping down into a gully or the brief onset of cool from a pine plantation around Tank Hill – a reservoir I shied away from, squashed against the back seat window I retreated into myself, the memory of playing kick to kick in a paddock with a bull sniffing at my calves, my cousins breaking up the road becomes an avenue of associations circling like a sparrow-hawk zeroing in to a patch of grass the drives dad took us on – the tip, the farms he worked until geography becomes a matter of memory Saturday mornings with the smell of polished footy boots on the patched road to Worndoo, gravel edges unreliable as the images I cling to back roads enclosing us like growth rings on a tree ¨¨¨ it is where the grass grows up to the bitumen that determines your longing as if being closer to roadside weeds will allow your desires release to dream between saplings, run your fingers along the curves of the week’s conversations wondering did they truly describe you: a smile, a raised eyebrow, what you accepted the absence of desire unsettling like the bump the road makes over a level crossing the sky released from barriers holds you to the road hooking around a creek bed, a sudden kiss of gravel beneath the tyres a single lane bridge and two horses either side of the road pining loneliness is what’s killing Australia but I am driving to stay alive pulling over into soft edges to let a milk tanker pass I remember the dream of this section of road where bulls were charging people who had stopped to rest beside a row of pine trees in failing light now they’ve severed the trees exposing the dream I’ve heard that horses will avoid places where the light shivers dream places with high magnetic readings like crucifixes tied to white posts or piles of rock stacked in paddocks – ramshackle cairns pulling you in, interrupting the sweeping stare the road suddenly widens as if direction is simply a matter of revelation ¨¨¨ why travel the highway when you can take back roads through paddocks and towns where the General Store and churches closed long ago and the remnants of butter factories and walk-through dairies crumble beside the road like conversations let go, lives memorialised by signs – Wild Dogs Keep Out local knowledge, local wars, dips and ridges reflecting a landscape of bitten attitudes towards difference – a woman speaks out farmers return to their beers, cow shit on the bitumen, rye grass covering the fence line, the familiarity of trips to the milk bar, nursery, out-paddock, gravel roads owning your thoughts of speeding between she-oaks, their weeping shelter brushing your vision as you drive out of memory, out of necessity, local roads that get you there

Brendan Ryan

From the New Issue

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Bright Objects by Ruby Todd

Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog, translated by Michael Hofmann

‘Summer Winter’, a new poem by Anna Couani

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