By Kavita Nandan.
It was not love at first sight.
She was a full head taller than him,
her English was perfect while he talked funny,
said stuff like, ‘sluts’ instead of ‘slats’, ‘bitches’ not ‘beaches’.
Findon Creek and Warsaw,
the country and the city: worlds apart.
They agreed to live in Sydney.
He made and sold furniture, she studied law.
If she sighed for her home,
he stood his ground, yelled at her defiantly:
‘Go find another boyfriend. I’m a city boy.”
When her father died, the farm became hers.
The city unravelled soon after –
that terrible hum of traffic; the shriek of sirens;
that insane measuring of time
grated on their consciences;
they wanted “real childhoods” for their future children.
He lost his bravado quickly,
the wide open spaces and silence terrified him.
There were things that he couldn’t stomach:
a wedge-tailed eagle grabbing a chicken,
the dog going mad from a tick bite,
a python swallowing the pet guinea pig whole,
the pump breaking down,
the tractor needing fixing,
the moon too luminescent through the window
so he couldn’t sleep,
at first.
Then one morning, he woke up
with her he was able to identify
the apple gums around their house, the tallowwood above,
the Casuarina and forest red gums below.
His ear became attuned to
the tink of the bell miner, the plop of the whipbird,
the love songs of currawongs and magpies.
The city had consumed him.
This place too, was swallowing him whole,
making him part of everything:
bug wallaby eagle egret green tree snake moth death adder cane toad.
When the bushfires came up the mountain
he refused to leave, much
like the python behind the fridge
he’d become unexpectedly territorial.
A Polish migrant in the country’s heartland,
he laughed out loud into a full space
despite all the sorrows that travelled with him –
a mother’s suicide, a brother’s schizophrenia, an alcoholic past –
in the lost heart of a tinman.
Dirt swirled in his finger prints,
dew clung to the mountains and valleys of his body,
at dawn, he lit a match.
Who would have thought
that in caring for the land,
cool burning, the Aboriginal way,
he would fall so deeply in love with this place.
