Slipperly
I scrawled a little note to myself in the margins of some papers: “A slippery double.”
Days later I realised I had written “a slipperly double” and went to sleep imagining grey-haired doppelgänger shuffling about in dressing-gowns and slippers.
It was true that local characters and scenes slotted effortlessly into a global script. Muscled teenagers in big shorts crowded the nation’s shopping malls. On neat estates where every house replicated its neighbour, young women pushed strollers containing babies of such plush perfection it was difficult to believe they would grow up to eat McDonald’s and pay to have their flesh tanned orange. There was comfort to be derived from this sense that the nation was keeping up with the great elsewhere. What claim does a new world have on our imagination if it falls out of date?
But a stand of eucalypts in a park or the graffiti on an overpass might call up a vision of what malls and rotary mowers had displaced. Australia was LA, it was London; and then it was not. Here there was the sense that everything modern might be provisional: that teenagers, news crews, French fries might vanish overnight like a soap opera with poor ratings. The country shimmered with this unsettling magic, which raised and erased it in a single motion.
The past was not always past enough here. It was like living in a house acquired for its clean angles and gleaming appliances; and discovering a bricked-up door at which, faint but insistent, the sound of knocking could be heard.
— From The Lost Dog, by Michelle de KretserWhat is so strange it feels like home? — From Susan Mitchell, “Bird, a Memoir,” in Erotikon: Poems
![Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe [Hands with Finger on Throat], c. 1919
(via frithnotes)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lihsbzypg91qzqf48o1_500.jpg)
Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe [Hands with Finger on Throat], c. 1919
(via frithnotes)
Anita Groener, After ‘Le Chasseur Dans La Foret’ Caspar David Friedrich, 350 x 350 cm wall drawing, from Gilgamesh, 2009
Anita Groener, Forest (4), tempera on paper, from Gilgamesh, 2009
M. C. Escher, Reptiles, lithograph, 1943
Yvonne Todd, January, 2006
From the Queensland Art Gallery collection (currently on show at the NGV):
“Yvonne Todd’s fascination with the dark side of beauty emerges from her investigation of photography. Using her technical expertise, Todd shows us that there is always something more to what we see in a photograph, even if it is more artifice.
In January 2006, we are presented with Todd’s version of ‘January Wayne’, the tragic young heiress of Jacqueline Susann’s 1973 bestseller Once is Not Enough – a carefully made-up and Photoshopped muse with an anxious expression and bloodshot eyes. Todd’s January, about to consume a sugarcube laced with hallucinogens that would result in her disappearance – as it did the character in Susann’s book – presents an obscure mix of pathos and glamour, sexuality and creepiness.”
Australia, by Bernard O’Dowd
Last sea-thing dredged by sailor Time from Space,
Are you a drift Sargasso, where the West
In halcyon calm rebuilds her fatal nest?
Or Delos of a coming Sun-God’s race?
Are you for Light, and trimmed, with oil in place,
Or but a Will o’ Wisp on marshy quest?
A new demesne for Mammon to infest?
Or lurks millennial Eden ’neath your face?
The cenotaphs of species dead elsewhere
That in your limits leap and swim and fly,
Or trail uncanny harp-strings from your trees,
Mix omens with the auguries that dare
To plant the Cross upon your forehead sky,
A virgin helpmate Ocean at your knees.
(Source: poemhunter.com)
House guest
The morning after she leaves, I am rinsing out the teapot when I realise she had filled it almost to the brim with loose tea: as though to prepare mess-hall servings, or to stimulate an appetite for its strong black flavour. I am taken back to the previous day when she sung out, “Don’t mind me, I’ll just make a cup of tea and then I’ll be out of your way,” and then squeakily tiptoed around the living room, humming to herself.
