Sarah Holland-Batt

Is unwritten, though it has lived in violence. First the factory stood, quiet as an asylum. Then the annihilating mallee with its red fists of blossoms and the mountain ash creeping over it like a stain. I have no proof, but I tell you there were leadlight windows here once, barred. They cast a little striped light on the women. Now in scrub and yellow broom I stand on a history braided and unbraided by stiff Irish wrists. The rope and span and carded wool are unpicked as are their faces and names. Londonderry, Cork, Galway, Kildare— as I say the words they are sucked away to a hemisphere in darkness. I will not presume to say what suffering is or how it was meted out in this place. At what point it breaks a body I cannot tell. But this morning I saw a young rabbit hunched in brush and shadow. I saw its lesioned face, its legs too thin to scramble, the blood-berry red and pink scab of its eye. It had caught the disease we brought here for it and wanted a quiet place to die. And it was lucky, or as lucky as it would get— there was time and light, the hawks and dogs had not been written yet, and were still out of sight.

I have known these estuaries — the channels and canals, the backwaters that flush and eddy to the Pacific, I have skimmed that muddied slurry, felt the nip in the throat where the salt in the air is the salt of the coast, I have tacked where the tide is incomplete: no rollers and breakers, only an ebb that rocks the wayfarers — a rush of silver, the gavel-smack of mullet in the night, mud crabs elbowing denwards under concrete slabs of boat ramps — I have stalked where herons stilt and spear baitfish in green afternoons, cast crab pots in loose analemmas to watch the black sonar spread, tracked prawn trawlers on the broadwater crawling back in the lavender dawn then sat at the jetty’s edge and shucked those tiger shells, cast sucked heads back into the dark, crushed mussel shell underfoot for the burn of sharpened chitin, stepped where stingrays wallow and idle, shuffling their barbs, waiting to strike. I have spent half my life in low tide — nights where I have not known if I am contracting or dragging out again, where the movement of the water is the movement of my mind — unending comings and goings of sounds and narrows, those entry points to my two continents — and my history is the history of currents: a canal small enough to catch a childhood in its net, water vast enough to divide a life.

I find it in a field of feathers, pink-crested, a knuckle of bone picked clean by the wind, a pale mohawk mounted on stone. I bend down. Zeroed out of its head are two sockets, two airy planets full with sun, and taking asylum in one a millipede is coiled, a slick black hypnotist. Polished, it spirals in on itself like one of Saint Hilda’s fossil snakes we studied in the school chapel’s stained glass. As if the eye could dig itself into the earth then extend a curled feeler out, like a fern. I turn the skull round in my palm like a pebble— it will not settle. Otherwise, all is still: the grasses claw in, the world does not tilt. Even the blue stand of scrub grows over; it has nothing on its mind. But the skull will outlast the summer, a thought cut short, and I will pass it every day as I walk and stop just here, where the air hones its teeth on bone, where the mind remembers itself only as a shell, and I will mourn what was once a world: one eye rolled to the daylight moon, the other pressed down into the earth.