34-37 Degrees South: Easy reading version

Far South
Elanna Herbert
driving the tourist road to Narooma, life gets feral
outside Moruya. things relax, not me, just the locals.
the lady with the multicoloured hair, four loud colours
on the over 65s feels like one decibel too many. then
the girl in the organic veg shop waves me through, stays
on her phone, smiles as I tap and go. I expect nothing less
from a town where highway house gardens hold lambs close.
crossing Coila Creek, landscape folds like dry calico
no matter the time of year. at Tuross, I fail to arrive, boxes
kept firmly shut are flung open as Pandora’s glorious
sea breeze, rolling up the hill, hits me with my mid 70s
summer—two teenagers on the beach. before you were killed.
before your seventeen should have arrived (despair never
lets me turn off to the lake). at Bodalla, much younger with
Mum and Grandma, my childish horror at finding a one
legged seagull on the cheese factory roof, Mum’s joke about
where its leg went. summer of ’69 bringing seagull not raven
as the harbinger of Grandma’s own amputation, mise en scène
on the far south coast always collides with emotion, things stay
raw. too many ghosts lie in wait, or maybe childhood instinct, still
keen as a feral cat, reclaims, over and over my early coast trips
brazen simplicity. it’s no wonder then, my lack of surprise
when I saw through a haze of smoke so thick that even
television couldn’t disguise it’s taste, the goat woman from
Cobargo, wearing her black and blackened Led Zepp T-shirt
shouting at ScoMo, concisely shrinking him down hard, after
his ill-timed holiday to Hawaii, and her fire fight that day
against a nightmare. impossible to comprehend.
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