Log Book
Log Entry 05/03/2009 - 13:40:08
Many years ago I went on a trip with Dave 'Dust Poet' Delaney from Townsville to Mt Isa. He was a removalist then, and he had come up from Brisbane and collected me on the way. It was a long hot dusty trip, straight as an arrow from the coast inland to the west. Every 100 ks we came across a town - Charters Towers, Hughenden, Richmond, Julia Creek, Cloncurry - such well-known names. Dave was in his element, he loved the open road and disappearing off chasing the horizon. He never caught it but had a lot of fun trying. He also loved John Williamson and the 12th Man cds, which we listened to all the way there and all the way back. I have to admit I nodded off at times, but fortunately Dave never did, just kept giggling away to the Tony Grieg/Bill Lawry impersonations or the names of the Pakistani cricket team. After the 12 hour journey we arrived at the destination, and Dave opened the back of the truck to reveal........ the fibreglass frame of a racing car. That was all. We'd come all this way to deliver a broken car frame. Turns out the owner was on a government transfer so all his removal expenses were paid for by his department, so he sent everything up. We picked up the frame, put it in the car port, climbed back in the cab, and headed off back to Townsville! Oh the trucking life.........
Nick Flittner (contributor to Log Book Anthology for "Dust Poems")
Log Entry 03/03/2009 - 14:33:16
Window seat to Perth and home. My knees and neck freezing both ways with air-conditioner on Arctic and 'Virgin' blanket borrow fees of ten dollars - forget it, a grass blade would be warmer. The morsels of food were exorbitantly priced and, eyeing the woman's sandwich next to mine, would taste like cotton. Dreams of lovely fish Mick's wife, Kim cooked Bonny and I those few weeks ago! Enough moaning, Johanna. I've returned alive from The Perth Writers' Festival and still laughing from the Boab Trees wonderful bottle bodies. Few trucks in the areas I hopped through - hopped as my toe is without nail and fractured. I am also feeling sore in the head and gut after getting my hotel room bill for close to three hundred dollars due to the calls I made. Admittedly, calls overseas and interstate but I had no idea that each call cost a week of earnings. Today, returning to the Depot this morning, I spied our invitations which are ready to be posted to you all and as the telephones are bring-bring-bringing with enquiries about our March 21st event it seems the best sleep I'll get for a while was already slept, on the airplane, last night. Bonny is making tea to make the amount of work we have before us a little less daunting.
Log Entry 19/02/2009 - 11:13:48
For everyone who has suffered at the hands of this horrific event.
Black weekend 2009
Up the side of mountains it glows
Deathly flames growing higher and higher
Along the plains and through valleys it blows
Unchallenged this killer lucent fire.
Red hot embers raining from above
No chance of outrunning its advance
Knows nothing of compassion or love
Teasing with its orange flamed dance.
Leaving behind a landscape so charred
Indiscriminate on how many lives it took
Survivors forever will be mentally scarred
Some lived hiding in a water soaked nook.
Homes and memories razed to the ground
Begins the sifting through the ashes
Ghostly eeriness and desolation abound
The terror through a child’s mind still flashes.
We have all been touched by that horrific weekend
When it seemed like Satan returned with hell
A black time that’s so hard to comprehend
For loved ones, you bid a teary farewell.
Emerging from this blackened barren land
Native animals subdued by injury
A koala drinking from a firies hand
Needing human help through this catastrophe.
To the firies showing valour and tenacity
Continuing the fight, though dead on your feet
Your efforts will be recorded with total veracity
As you never looked into the eyes of defeat.
They’ll build again, standing proud and tall
Strength and determination will be applied
How we fight when our backs are against the wall
One thing that can’t be killed is famous Aussie pride.
David J Delaney
16/02/2009 ©
Log Entry 15/02/2009 - 18:23:32
Hello all, A great big thankyou to all for your wonderful kind wishes and offers of help. We have lost everything but we have each other and we are surrounded by the most incredible people imaginable. Thanks especially to Jo and David for passing on of information and Jo, you are surely sent from heaven. We will most definately be in Sydney for the opening and nothing will stop us from being part of such a wonderful project. Looking forward to meeting you all and having a great time. The Aussie spirit will not be crushed, I have never been so proud to be Australian. Mick and Kim
Log Entry 09/02/2009 - 16:24:25
T. S. Eliot's 1922 poem The Waste Land :
I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Time is in flakes since hearing the deathly news that Mick O'Brien, one of our Dust Poets, has lost his home and property to the vicious flames and swift and scorching embers of the Victorian bush fires. Only two days before the fires licked their horrific path towards Mick's home, Bonny and I had trucked down to Melbourne with Mick and spent the night with his lovely family. Now, their son's school is soot, the gum trunks are powder and dust powders all the flowers and every stone on Whiskey Ridge. All our thoughts are with Mick, his family and all the other individuals and communities affected by the bush fires. May the earth and the people regenerate quickly and until then, much love and many hugs to them all.
Log Entry 07/02/2009 - 18:08:27
New states have been discovered: states of the sub conscious, the imagination, the physical. States felt since trucking with Ms Bonny Cassidy and Mick O'Brien from Sydney to Melbourne in Mick's truck, last week.
(a) The musculature change: inside the ears, a result of sitting in a house on wheels for hours with sounds of the deep, rumbling engine that sweats and sighs and exclaims on each corner, turn and change of gear. The audio of a truck penetrates the insides of a body. Once the truck doors lock ear drums respond only to road song. So, the first sleep out of the truck, without constant movement has the ears listening, hearing into the pillow feathers and when there is no engine throb, confused that all which can be heard is silence.
(b)The change of heart. This change made possible because of (my) new understanding of loneliness and abandonment; sensations felt on the tip of that second before Mick left his home in Melbourne's bush to return to Sydney. Mick left whilst Bonny, myself his family and the metal green-grey Gums waved him farewell. The hug with the driver before he (or if it was Kim, Mick's wife) returns to the highway is tinged with finality. It is this powerful sense of the last, the being left behind that is a new mood for me who is newly initiated to truck land.
Over time, are the goodbyes normalised with routine? Do the anxiety of goodbyes disappear? Or, is the leaving always fraught with concern?
Saying goodbye to Mick and I felt that with each shut of the home door and opening of the truck door there is an enormous horizontal and vertical space that is unavoidable in life on the road. Does the sense of being left or leaving only resolve when inside things? Inside the truck or within the womb of home? Is it better to remain on the road because each moment back in the still, at the home is always coloured by the knowledge any minute the lights will go green and with it the acceptance that the journey never stops?
Jo, at the Depot.
Our partners © 2010 The Red Room Company Highway photo by Bram Souffreau