The Forever Lands: Australia's Northern Territory in Word and Images.(Review)

The Forever Lands: Australia's Northern Territory in Word and Images, by Mark O'Connor and John Kirk; Beyond Images (Camberwell East, Vic), 2000, $49.95.

OUR PHYSICAL experience of being Australian isn't complete until we have gone beyond mountains and bush to the remotest regions of the country--the deserts, red centre and tropical north. In his foreword to this latest book of Mark O'Connor's poems, Les Murray describes this vast region as the "three-quarters of our continent which nature has set aside for mystical poetry". Each poem is accompanied by atmospheric photographs taken by John Kirk which relate to the subject matter and enhance it. With its high-class design the whole forms a handsome package.

I read these poems after being in Alice Springs, Broome and Darwin and their environs for the first time. The poem "Flying over the Top End" crystallises the image in your mind as you fly in:

 
   Dawn is a curve of primal light 
   so distant it seems straight, 
   ruled by a continent-sized protractor. 
   The black land, saucer of chaos, 
   waits for creating light, for the fire-glow 
   lit by a screaming torch of parrots. 

The poems in this book are based on two distinct parts of the Northern Territory. One region is the red centre--Alice Springs, the Macdonnell Ranges, the Todd and Finke Rivers, Uluru, and the Olgas. This is dry country: "The Finke waits, a river in dry storage, / each ripple and shoalbank preserved / with its foam-chewing boulders". The other area is the Top End around Darwin and Kakadu which, in contrast, is lush wet tropical country. But O'Connor undercuts our expectations of this neat division between wet and dry:

 
   Australia shams dry, 
   turning outward its reptile surface; 
   blues and greens reflect 
   fluid everywhere under. 
 
   As though the land swirled and flowed 
   from certain sites of Increase; 
   soaks and shapes and shallow holes in rock 
   are the timeless Dreaming spirals 
   from which fresh litters flowed and flow 
   as milk weeps from an echidna's ductless udder 
   richly among the spines. 

The simile of the echidna's udder is able to convey this strange feature of the continent. In general these poems gently dissolve our preconceptions and make us see the world in a different light. They are minimalist, stripped-down-to-the-bone poems, deceptively simple, patiently building up the world anew from rudimentary objects. They work by cataloguing the distinctive features of the terrain in a series of definitive statements, which are connected as much by atmosphere as by grammar.