Auctioning Jane Austen's hair

Modern Ovid In the back of the ute, linked by two thousand year chain see them; half man, half beast leaning round the bends. The car itself is half lion, and the field's wattle gold are the round medals of too much self-regard, mirroring vanity, puffed into tiny tree suns. Cane toads, carelessly squashed into tarmac, are transformed politicians still spreading venom, and that endlessly running tap was a sportsman who urinated on ordinary people in bars. Ovidian justice isn't blind, but apt; appropriate. That unfunny comedian laughs at his own jokes forever; a kookaburra's rehearsed glee at his own pattering routine. The lock '...a lock of Jane Austen's hair has just sold at auction for £5640 (on today's exchange, that's AU$11,640.73)...'

The Australian Writers' Marketplace blog, 24 June 2008. A photo of the hair appears in The Guardian, 2 June.

It has been shaped into the crude representation of a tree. Do they stroke it with avid fingers, this palm tree lock that once grew from the full head of quietest genius? Scalping would be too much, headhunting too tropical but buying the hair of a dead woman you can't know is quite the thing. Your age, Jane, would craft sad crap like this weeping whale-spout from bits of loved ones, so willowy wrists were always kissed by absent lips, dead, or gone to Australia. Perhaps the buyer loves your wit and grace, balanced like a cat walking over a bark of craning dogs; the way your corseted matter could expand beyond tight binding without showing the pumping. Or perhaps your dead snips are stalked by modern zombies of celebrity, shameless and bloody. A bit like Bath, but bigger. Personally, I blame the BBC. Dressing down Their clothes retired before them, long ragged procession of rejects; threadbare corduroy, shiny moons rubbed into being like lamp genii, or pink crescents of flesh, peeping through faded denim skies. Jumpers, unravelling back to wool, sheepish in folds of drawers. These scarecrows of themselves, superannuated coastal ghosts, wake at night and stroll beaches, scaring owls and sandy midnight roos. Neat and immaculate, the shedders of these wretched snake-skins wind their way through work's roundabouts; parallel-parked universe of skirts and ties. The old rags wave like surf, ageing sirens croaking your time will come. Tatty livery of yawning holes and motley patches await the some-day procession of leisurely, sloppy, beanie-crowned, ug-boot kicking, _______________________________Kings.