Coalcliff Days

 205 Main Drive, Coalcliff .

Between 1982 and 1992 I inhabited a weatherboard and corrugated iron structure known as 205 Main Drive, Coalcliff. The property was resumed by Wollongong City Council in the mid 70’s for the purpose of a creating a drainage easement under the railway line opposite. 

Ken Bolton and Sal Brereton had found the property abandoned and squatted in it for a number of years before a council officer showed up and announced ownership. Luckily for Ken and Sal he was sympathetic to poetry and writing and after inspecting Ken’s gerstner machine which he was used to produce limited edition poetry mags like Magic Sam, he agreed to rent them the property for the grand weekly sum of $25 a week, indexed to inflation. By the time I arrived  the rent was $32 a week and I was grateful for somewhere to write. 

Breeze

I stayed up reading late. My light was the last one to go out

on the whole block. I checked.

And every now and then I leave this book in which i have been looking 

for the last few hours, at poems etc… mostly not reading them 

and go outside and piss over the verandah into the front garden.

Feel the cold creepy feel of August wind creeping up my bare legs and 

looking up to the sky, which is unarguably full of stars and bright almost 

full waning moon giving everything that moves a definite shape 

that sways in what now is an energetic breeze

The house stood as though it had been washed there by an enormous tide. 

Lodged above the tree line, between it and the escarpment 

that rose directly behind it.

It stood weathered like a wooden raft. Still in one piece

but leaning gently in one corner.

The house had been weathered like the bare wood

growing out of the side of the cliff. Everything set at weird angles, 

like the undersea frozen in a strong current.

Even the garden had something of a sunken quality to it.

as though, in order to find the existing form you might have to dig down 

one foot- discover the original bones of plants

gleaned white by the moon.

+

Trains are shunting up and down the track. It’s early morning

and the hill cliffs beyond the road are hit by the first bits of sunlight.

A movement so slight, like the buzzing of a butterfly coming

closer to the ear.

+

Some construction sheds are erected across the road.

Little white ones that look like toys in comparison to the hill

that rises behind them. 

I imagine what they must look like from the very top – more toy-like 

probably. These sheds that have been constructed to house the thirty 

or so men employed to build the new railway.

+

I spend too much time in front of the radio.

I hear the floorboards and I know you’re out there somewhere

drawing me into your place. Curling in the space between two large rocks 

behind the sand dunes.

On the other side of the house, ocean-blue Pacific O.

Windows that open out suddenly to the extended relief of coastline. 

There has been a significant change in the size and placement of the horizon.

The trees upon the hill are reflecting the sun as though they are made of 

some resilient galvanized iron – they are reflecting the light everywhere in 

strips of green.

Alan and Zonda (Coalcliff kitchen)

The Crocodile who Wanted to be Famous (media…)

 

Reviews of  “The Crocodile who Wanted to be Famous” written by Alan Jefferies, illustrated by Mariko Jesse (Sixth Finger, 2004)

“Local writer Alan Jefferies has borrowed from the real-life adventures of Hong Kong’s own Yuen Long Croc, Pui Pui to create a story which is both humorous and thought provoking. 

It is a story which is sure to resonate with readers of all ages, touching on the hot topics of pollution, parental authority, and the effects of too much bad TV.

The illustrations, by unsung local talent Mariko Jesse (who also illustrated the girl-power book Sarsparilla’s New Shoes by Hong Kong-based writing twins Ming and Wah Chen) are sweet and whimsical and ideally suited to the text.

The bilingual book is also written in Chinese, and would make a lovely Christmas gift for any Hong Kong child between the ages of 4 and 14.”

Karmel Schreyer

from “The Asia Review of Books”

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“The illustrations by Mariko Jesse are fun and it has an easy going pace and a touch of humour that would work well in the classroom.”

Hazel Perry

from “The South China Morning Post”

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“Overall it’s a simple story that children will relish, especially if they are familiar with the saga of our real-life croc. Parents will also get a kick out of it because not only will the book resonate with children, but it will make them ask questions about animals, human nature and the state of the environment. 

“This is one croc who may never be as famous as this heroes, Jackie Chan and Yao Ming, but in his own way he’s likely to be just as inspiring…”

-SM

from “Hong Kong Magazine”

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“The tale is spiced with local flavour, including a folk song sung by an old boat woman who longs for her long-lost daughter.

Alongside the English, there is a Chinese translation by Lian Yue, and humorous illustrations by Mariko Jesse. The bilingual format can assist readers learning English or Chinese, and lends authenticity to a story based in this part of the world”

Joyce Ng

from “The Student Standard”

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 

“Hong Kong writer Alan Jefferies has also captured the crocodile very well in his imaginative reconstruction of the story for children and adults, entitled The crocodile  who wanted to be famous. In Jefferies’ version of the tale, which is enlivened by Mariko Jesse’ wonderful line drawings of both crocodiles and the city, the fictional crocodile

named Crafty sees imagages of Hong kong on television, and makes up his mind to go there.”

“Hong Kong: a cultural and literary history”

by Michael Ingham (Signal, 2008)

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Poems published in "Akhbar Aladab" (Cairo, Egypt) (Arabic translations by Sayed Gouda)

Poetry memes ...

"Ignorant new puritans out to purge our poetry" (Spectator article) (11 April 2021)

Response to Guardian article  "The whole canon is being reappraised: how the #MeToo movement upended Australian poetry"

 It was the by-line that caught my eye 'The whole canon is being erased' or at least that's 

how i first read it. It actually read 'The whole canon is being reappraised: how the #MeToo movement upended Australian poetry"

It's not often poetry gets into the press and when it does it's normally for something terrible, like slander, or someone's run off with someone's work or worse. So it was with some trepidation that I pushed off from the shore of the first paragraph, compass firmly adjusted to Guardian reality.

The article is based around input from two poetry politicians, Jacinta Le Plastrier (poet, editor, publisher and CEO of Australian Poetry, the peak body meant to represent poets and poetry nationally) and  first nation poet Evelyn Araluen.

The opening is fairly standard fare, Le Plastier says: 

            “There’s a huge rise in First Nations writers and women, 

            queer and non-binary poets who are writing about the body but also colonial assault, 

            rapaciousness and trauma.”

O-Kay…
However it's not long before my reading journey comes to a shuttering holt:

              Both Le Plastrier and Araluen directly link this shift in Australian poetics to the

               spaces created by the #MeToo movement, and specifically to the 2018 

             publication of Kate Lilley’s autobiographical collection, Tilt (Vagabond). Just as 

             significant were the allegations of abuse and sexual exploitation, made by Lilley 

            and her sister Rozanna, about their mother, poet Dorothy Hewett, and numerous 

             figures – among them Bob Ellis, Martin Sharp and  David Hamilton – in Australia’s 

             feted bohemian artistic circle of the 60s and 70s, or the “generation of 68”.

Huh! What has Dorothy Hewitt and “her artistic circle” got to do with the generation of 68?

A quick google search brings up: 

                     “The generation of 68, a contested label applied to a loose group of 

                    Australian poets who began writing and publishing in the late 1960s.”

The truth is Dorothy Hewitt was never considered central  to that generation because she started writing much earlier. The other names mentioned; Martin Sharpe, Bob Ellis and David Hamilton weren't poets and weren’t in any way associated with that grouping.

Unfortunately these facts alone may not be enough to prevent these ideological simpletons from dragging  the whole generation to the bonfire.

The movement (towards reappraisal) hasn’t just affected what and how we read. “It’s also going to change what’s being archived, what’s kept on library shelves, what’s digitised. It’s really profound,” says Le Plastrier.

I'm not sure if i should take that as a threat or a promise. Either way this is truly frightening coming from the editor, publisher, and CEO of Australia's peak poetry body. You might expect a more rounded, full 360-degree view of the OZ poetrysphere - as would be worthy of a truly representative national body - instead the message is laced with resentment, exclusion and frankly revenge. 
“That whole canon is being reappraised,” says Le Plastrier “I know a young non-binary poet who just removed all of that generation’s (generation 68’s) work from their shelves!”

So there! All that self righteous censorious rage triggered and fuelled by what? a complete untruth?  And as for the unnamed, aforementioned, 
non-binary poet I’d say you’re an dead-set hero/ heroine (the non-binary equivalent?) - to all book-burning fascists everywhere!

Le Plastrier goes on :

             "Similarly, can you possibly read someone like Ted Hughes without a completely

            changed  lens given the information that’s come out recently about his relationship 

            with Sylvia Plath?”

Recently? I mean Plath died in 1963 and since her death and the posthumous publication of "Ariel" she has become an absolute icon of Feminist literature. You could fill an entire library with the publications which dissect her and Ted Hughes' relationship, and after consuming that you could watch at least one Hollywood movie and numerous documentaries that cover the same territory. My point here is, there's nothing particularly new or startling in any of this.

Before moving on to the rest of the article though,  I want to return briefly to that supposed water-shed moment that both Araluen and Le Plastrier, identify as pivotal in unleashing this urgent book burning, sorry, “cultural reappraisal”.

At the outset I want to say that my comments here are in no way meant to excuse or to diminish in any way the harm and trauma that may have resulted from the alleged behavior revealed in Kate Lilley and Rozanna Lilly's books. However i think it’s important to acknowledge here that this really wasn’t a “speaking truth to power" moment in the classic  #metoo sense of that term.  

More accurately it was a “speaking truth to dead persons” moment. The individuals named at the time, and renamed in this article, have all passed away and the one alleged rapist poet that was alluded to  is apparently still living,  and apparently still unnamed and still too powerful to touch. 

I get it.  The costs of legal indemnity are far cheaper via the dead persons route.  Then again, the dead aren’t here to defend themselves or to seek  redemption (another word long deleted from the woke dictionary).

Evelyn Araluen's contribution to the article runs along similar lines; hatred and resentment steeped in toxic generalisations:

 

         "For Araluen, Australian poetry has long been full of writers that “glorified [white] men

           who drank themselves to death and treated women like shit”.

 

There you go, i knew race would have to come into it eventually. White men treat women like shit and only white men drink themselves to death. Got it. And according to Araluen the rest of us dumbfux just idolise them…

            "I’ve been really struck by how many otherwise progressive people don’t see an

              issue with glorifying those figures"

Which figures exactly? It's not clear.

Isn't there just an outside possibility that some readers were able to separate the person from the work, and still found something enlivening in their poetry. Is it just possible that you've generalised a whole generation from the alleged behaviour of one or a few individuals? Endless possibilities unless your mind is a steel rod bolted to the deck of a failed political system.

But despite all that negative drift Stephanie Convery who wrote the piece finishes with hope and dare i say it… future redemption.  Like the ending of some age-old morality play, the heroic, noble and oppressed prevail over the wicked drunken white demons. 

         "It’s in the ruins of those Australian literary mythologies – the tarnished history of

           a previously lauded cultural coterie – that a new chorus of voices, not all of them 

          young,   has found the space to draw breath."

What a lark! What a load of old cobblers! How can i say this any clearer, Dorothy Hewitt's so-called "bohemian artistic circle" WAS NOT and never will be the generation of 68 and the only thing that's being tarnished in this article is your reputation.

So this is what the Australia Council funds these days- book burnings and witch hunts.  This is what the fully-funded CEO of Australia’s National Peak poetry body is applauding: the effective censorship of Australian poets and Australian poetry in 2021. Of course we must remember that for the woke crowd, censorship is holy; especially when it’s necessary to protect readers from unsafe poets and the harm their work causes. 

This is what censorship does, it infantilises the audience and makes them subservient  to the judgement of the supposed more knowledgeable, more educated arbiters of moral purity. I for one do not need Le Plasterer, Araluen, or anyone else to tell me what constitutes good work or what i can read, or what should be archived or for that matter what should go onto the shelves of my local library. 
The meat of the matter here is, who decides? What's in and what's out, what's for the bonfire and what's for the delete all button.

One thing i definitely do not need is to be spoon-fed my cultural sustenance by self-righteous brain-dead cultural Marxists like this poet and this esteemed CEO. 

Instead of presenting a full 360-view of what’s out there in the  OZ poetrysphere, Australian Poetry thru its CEO has made it crystal clear what they are offering; a confected safe space away from a supposedly hostile, racist, white g-pop. A perfect echo chamber dedicated to the glory of their own moral superiority, accessible only to those other truly woke individuals who want to offer abeyance at the throne of their self righteousness and importance. 

In other words, the roughly 10% who vote progressive. A hundred per cent of taxpayers hard-earned going to fund what is essentially an exclusive  club; or as the article puts it "the community".  

Le Plastier couldn't be clearer, if you don't fit their woke, exclusivist, self-righteous agenda then you may-as-well pick up your marbles and stay away. Just count yourself lucky we don't come round to your crib, remove your books from your shelves, delete you from our archives and disappear you in an acid bath of our righteous anger.

When I started to air my views on this article a friend pointed out that canons and artistic/literary generations are always being reappraised, which she thought wonderful. Each new generation bringing a new lens and important conversations continue. Yes it's a good point, but when the new generation is coming at you waving little red books and screaming profanities. It's difficult having a conversation with someone who"s shouting in your face. Harder still while locked out of the guarded citadels of OZ Poetry Inc.

So yes, read this article and weep! Not for the “wistful nostalgia” of a time past or the 

generation that the article speaks of, but for the fact that these self-righteous woke Puritan

 cultural vandals are now @ the helm of our peak cultural bodies and they’re coming for your

bookshelves!