At the brink of dawn

22 April 2020

At the brink of dawn, the blazing white sun has ground to a halt. And paradise teeters on life support. It was only yesterday, I heard the sun spluttering, weep out in a whisper — a bridge will take us back, back to paradise. I couldn’t think of anything worse.

At the brink of dawn, a rupture. Many lives on pause, many others may end. Strange shit’s happening. Billions, billions, and more billions to breathe life back into the sun. It was only yesterday our pleas went unheard.

At the brink of dawn, a tiny opening. In the space of the unknown.

At the brink of dawn, I also heard, rising in the distance, a flurry of birdsong, which I always carry deep inside my chest to protect me from the sentimentality that can stifle a post-colonial setting. Surveilled day in, day out, by a withering white sun.

At the brink of dawn swelling with the cries of the pinkest of pink galahs, the sweltering Tennant Creek, thirsty with soul, stranded in the heart of the heart of the country.

At the brink of dawn, it is another one of those days. The sky a hazy kind of blue. Children go to school, office types to offices, and painters paint. Lovers meet, try and laugh away fear. Trapped in the heat, a lonesome cowboy sits and stares at the drips and drabs of passing traffic. A line sprawls outside Centrelink. Life goes on in the desert.

'At the brink of dawn, I try and imagine there is a place of deep rest — not in the resting but after, when the body has forgotten the weight of betrayal.'

And the colour line dances. The nurses, the doctors, the health workers holed up in the hospital, the clinic, braced for the pandemic, they cannot stop to bear witness; flowers of trauma scattering in the wind like the caws of cocky cockatoos; an old couple’s brave smile, lips cracked with sorrow; an old poverty festering, gnawed away at by cheeky camp dogs; an old silence deafening, turning in circles between suicide and madness.

And in this soulful town, a tick after midnight, the stars livelier than a swarm of flies at midday, the Tennant Creek police doing laps and laps in ever pointless circles. Night in, night out. Word on the street is that the federal police are in town too. Doing laps and laps in unmarked vehicles.

ARTS AND CULTURE

At the brink of dawn

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