Log Book
Log Entry 21/04/2009 - 12:15:25
The Sydney Royal Easter Show is known for a magnificent collection of four legged beasts, giant fruit,assorted vegetables, moleskins and jodphurs and other crops that make up the NSW Agricultural industry and country life style. The Show has an abundance of fruit cakes, amateur art, vomitous carnival rides, show-bag riots and fairy floss. This year, the Show had the Dust inspired poetry of truck drivers; our posters were displayed right outside the train station entrance and on the big screens, in film versions of the poems that made a fantastic contrast to the other sponsor driven material on display. There was also a Bush Poetry event at one of the main stages which I missed because I was round and round on the Ferris Wheel. Tomorrow the posters on the Easter Show sites are unclipped and archived, just as I was relaxing, sitting back and admiring the work it's time to end this and start that. And, here's a recent article on the project for the fanatics.
Log Entry 24/03/2009 - 13:04:33
Our Dust Poems log-book anthologies have all sold and Tamryn is having a teenie break away from the sewing machine and shall not be crafting any more until she's had at least seven hours sleep. Bonny and I hooned around Kirabilli today exploring spaces to host poem workshops in and for what remains of Tuesday, I trust Bonny will rest.
On Saturday, words flashed across the brick of the Olympic forecourt, these were the poem-films we created in partnership with Nick and Andrew and they were stunning. As the visitor exited the train station you could hear the lyrics of each poem and delight in the sequences of sentences which at 6PM became our live performance of Dust Poems.
Mr Peter Wilkins, our emcee was robust, friendly and sensitive. With verve he introduced the poets, interviewed them and a Rugby players and invented a game that asked the crowd to submit their own poems. Peter had it tough on Saturday because at the last mad minute before we arrived to set up our depot, the security teams decided to make our performance-audience arena an alcohol-free zone. This meant our planned audience of 20,000 shrunk to the hundreds and those on the other side of the fence had to open their ears wide, sling their guts over the iron fences to hear our poets read. I am, as you may read, still livid and filled with rage about this.
Weather was a joy, th hot-dogs looked pink and pretty meaty and once Peter wrapped up the readings, the poets and crew lingered into star dust, talking about trucks, poems and Australian elegies.
Today, it's a task to feel light fingered and exuberant, instead my legs are jelly and sawdust and if the sun wasn't so scintillating and if days were just a little longer I'd cover my mind in the green sheets upstairs, whilst Dolly, my parent's dog whom I am master of for a few weeks, snored on the floor beside me.
Log Entry 14/03/2009 - 22:48:36
The Overflow stage, Olympic Park screens and their 'tah Bar will host our 'Dust Poems' launch next Saturday from 5.30-7PM. This time next week all six poets, myself, The Red Room fleet and Peter Wilkins will be reading poetry and distributing log books to a crowd of rugby union fans who, rather than just drinking at the bars and thinking of kicking balls will get to know a bit of road poetry. Tonight I watched the rain fall as my neice lay beside me on a trampoline and together she and listened to the trucks run up and down the wet roads and we spotted planes blinking their way through the thunder. The only sign of dust was the most obvious - being told my grandfather has a few days to live and flesh, in no time, will be timeless, formless and dust.
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 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 Red Room Company