RAINBOW CLOWN NEWS

Cross up from the bookshop of clown fish and over the hill three hills away there is the cream bridge clanging out of midnights of ivy and cocoa flower. Walk with your books and your bird cage and your box of music grinding and swinging along and once you have made it up those hills and the bridge hunches over you you get to see the first light of the university of towers and old locked doors on the edge of the dangling river turn. Three generation reach of university share houses growing older and wealthier door frame the bend as it hinges left to Toowong, and desending through the ruff of river valley, stilt house towns crouching upon the maiden hair hillsides, all your memories of late afternoon twilight games of brandy flicker like short films before you.

How you get to the river from here is harder to talk about. Cars parked by the lane sides just heirlooms you won’t inherit. It gets darker and the university further away. The river blackens to a heavy road too thick to cross. You make your way by the headlights craning down Mount Coot-tha lookout west. The river valleys are high Canadian mountains everyone has forgotten about. All the chimneys smoke and it looks colder than you think it is. It reminds you of the mountains in winter when it rained and school was finished. The house next door you would never visit. You keep walking uphill and the hills get smaller as you climb up the taller paths, the bitumen smelling like clothes.

‘Here they bally come the knockers!’

Eugune Swanbriggs, 48,  clutching his steering hoop like a swan of cribs, sitting stupidly in the car seat of leathers, red and yoghurt, freshly thrown from his Studs Bearcat after colliding with a Scot, had more than a sack cloth of wasps on his mind that day. He had grazed his knees in the whole cart wheeling automobile action, and was not interested in talking to anybody about turnpikes. Not this afternoon.

And what an afternoon. The umbrellas were out on shopping expeditions, and the cake shops were stocking their mounds of sponge with shovel heaps of wealthy black smelling grape clumps, all of them singing like mouthfuls of porridge, all of them crumbling with sugars and wines and apple smelling wasps of tea. The moths were trawling the rivers and the boats of gowns were spangling up stream , running through universities of granite like windows of lonely people. But Swanbriggs was not enjoying any of it. He spent seven minutes collecting up different kinds of all the wits that had fallen out of his blazer, and began to think carefully about what to do with the left overs of his car, scattered around the grey fridge of road he had misjudged so diligently.

Minutes before the knockers came hurling over the tops of the road smoking like cheeses, the idea of top hats leapt like mahogany into the nether valves of Swanbriggs’ flailing brain. Despite everything that was to come, the parliament, the theatres, the vegetable chairs, it was this idea that went damp the fastest. As he limped about the broken flak of motor car handling crimpled fender wings and bracelets of tar smacked hub irons, the idea grew soggy in the crab pot of his mind, and three days later, still itchy after a five hour skirmish against the parade of knocking characters, all of them old and sting covered by bees, he had the finest top hat in the district fitted over his incredible head, sure and warm and black like tongues.

The plague began there, at that accident site, like all plagues do. It would go on to dominate the cultural history of the Swanbriggs family for the next seventy years, tall wooden poles with antlers like gourds sprouting in all directions, following every descendant down every laneway without failure or delay.  Swanbriggs doesn’t get the blame for it of course. He is much too busy corking wine.

Outside his misty windows the hat racks pile up and peer in longingly. They grow woodier every month.

Here is our interview earlier this month with Ernie Sigley.

RCN: Hello Ernie, how are you going?

Ernie Sigley: Ah piss off. I haven’t got the time.

RCN: Do you like to entertain?

Ernie Sigley: Piss off mate.

That was that.

Songs were written on that boat before novels were. The captain refused to accept any other construction in those years. He would sleep in the day and then climb to the deck with the moon and smoke his tobacco, watching the ice bergs scud and shrink over the horizon, watch the smoke rise over the mast and stain the stars with flowery nicotine. Anytime one of the crew had an idea for a novel they would be given a seven hour lecture on scurvy and the problems the ocean would have with anything as moudly and orange as a novel. No, he would say, lighting his fourteenth cigarette of the night. Only songs were to be played on his ship. Only songs were to be conjured from the deep.

His crew would listen to anything he said, they would follow anything he led them toward. They would crew the ship forging west through snowcapped oceans and mountains of salt frothing like sugar under black lizard skies. Later when they were all old in mountain cabins far away from the oceans, as far from the sea as their horses and careers and families could take them, they would still talk about him like stone. Like a hutch of old books they would refer to him and praise him. They were all holy men in those days and nights, after their finest moments. By then novels ruled the straits, the trade routes. By then the songs were already old and frosted. Nobody remembered but them.

The Lord of Barns jiggled his bejewelled rack of black smelling keys locked like birds in his great tailored pockets of salt and old comets and, panting like an onion of parrots, took up the nearest telephone in that great old hallway and began to beat several large helpings of conversation out of it. There were a number of especially prickly conversations he was dragging from the device. The one about blood clots made his head blossom into eight great blisters of crumbling pie crust, and an especially vibrating one had his eyebrows smoking peculiar secret codes nobody outside of one lonely French outcast in a cabin in the North Pole could decipher. When he did decipher it he made the decision to draw maps of imaginary cliffs for the next several years in dark rooms with faltering lamps, and the whole thing became extremely unsettling.

Driving from Melbourne to Adelaide, the Lord of Barns lights the radio dial with a sweet pile of odd cigarette glow which flickered against the numbers decalling the perspex radio screen.  There was still a long series of corners and hills to negotiate with his Stingray vehicle, and he had not even really approached Mount Gambier yet. Outside the moon hung like an arbour of wheatgerm over the bleak road he was forging along. Fish hissed in the far off oceans behind numerous outcrops of petrified pine. The night wore on.

‘Rubbish!’

The frozen Mayor had a point. Clara and Isabelle preferred not to consider it though. There were buffalo to be netting and the tennis raquets in their spangly bags were not to be dealt with in contrary type ways.

The crumbling paddocks, all smoke stack bean blue green and black hearted, stretched up towards a windbreak of heavy set hoop pine and birch wood. Hurricanes of moss parcelled in creeks of insect twitchings smelled of giant engines grinding like forests of cobwebs deep inside the gigantic evening. The frozen Mayor watched the girls walk away from him. The great forestry wad of his lamb choked left hand dug five foot into his striped blazer coat pocket and clutching about for fruit mince pies of matchstick and fire, he grunted German obscenities, and admired the choir stalls of black robed crows cloaked in ponds of dark and evening. The cold was strolling in with its parcels of straw and timber soldiers, and it was not at all interested in what the Mayor had to say about antiques.

Somewhere up in the sky Roberta drove her bi-plane through the cloud rambling late afternoon. She was already thinking about the Pacific Islands, and the three days it would take to fly all of her books from Bathurst to the far off watery compound.

The night was a long way away.

(To be continued around July sometime)

There are the tramp hills of Brisbane. The ones you walk up in the early evenings wearing canvas, suede, smoking handfuls of heavy cigarettes with vegetables sprouting out of them. The tramp hills you climb like they’re not worth your time, climbing under the rose of middle evening yachtclub moonlight smoking down. Those tramp hills are crazy, you can walk them for miles, you can keep going following their line for miles and never reach the top because they keep on going, and everybody who walks up them turns tramp before eleven. It always happens. When you turn tramp you know it right away. Everything looks different. You see everyone in mesh petticoats and joke pinstripe blazers. It becomes easy to believe there are boat races just around the corner. Or that you are in London near the Regent Canal, and there are houseboat artists with potplants smelling of cheese.

Next up: Where to find these tramp hills.

The problem with Brisbane rooftops is you don’t feel as though many of them were built with astronomy in mind. Walking from Newstead to the Grange under a snakes and ladders game of strange stars, once in a while I would notice that people weren’t perched on their rooves drinking stout or cider, reading hotrod magazines, or even painting portraits of the Prime Minister while taking the time to have a look at the Pleiades, which are certainly having a good look back down on them, or big bearded Orion and his problem with scorpions back in the thirties or thereabouts.

Walking along Breakfast creek the occasional late night fisherman on concrete banks under car yards fish away their evenings with their eskies full of melted ice and enough bait to last them til five in the morning, when the race horses are led from Hendra round the Ascot hill and into the early morning water. Industrial outlets hem the creek line and must think about the day they’ll go under again. The next flood somewhere up ahead in the mountains. Nobody on any of those small business rooftops. Nobody looking out for the comets.

The TAB at Albion on the hill across from the train station and between the Breakfast Creek at the bottom of the hill and Sandgate Road’s avenue of restaurants and bottle shops craning up into the wealthy green hills is the last and best lighthouses Albion has ever had. No ships are going to run aground anywhere near Albion train station with the TAB building beaming green and yellow by night. The windows of that building are not lit by faces monitorng the night for killer astroids. They have all gone home. The horses and the dogs are sleeping all over Australia as I walk past. There are no telescopes watching the stars.

Albion road falls down a grim grey bridge off of Albion into a brief flood plain of seventy year old houses, one takeaway shop, and a corner near a co op where once a man and a woman I passed by were waiting for the Police to come after a stabbing in the next street. You walk quickly along Albion Road as it climbs up to Lutwyche Road. There are no telescopes, no stars. There are only cloud sopped carbon skies of car headlights. From house to house you can smell the different dinners. The different dinners fight it out from door to door. Mint sauce and gravy battle pasta and salad. You walk on and hope Lutwyche Road will make things better…

But you don’t use it. You follow it uphill and left onto Maygar Street, and immediately you realise all the houses are old nineteen thirties houseboats, riverboats, ferries and liners, all of them marooned on the hills of Windsor post the 1974 floods. Grand white wooden louvre windowed yachts run aground and waiting for the rains to come and flood them back down the Brisbane River and out to sea where they belong. The Windsor yacht club is exclusive. There are probably telescopes around but all the blinds are drawn, the curtains are shut, even though you can’t look into those houses. They look down into you. And most of them don’t like what they see.

And instantly you know as you walk along Maygar Road that you are wandering through tram territory. the lines are gone, the stops are lost, but the trams pull you along the widest road in Brisbane as it moves up and down and sways from side to side. The possums have forgotten the squeeking grinding tram sounds in their trees. But the trees and the churches and the pensioners and old reformed hippies know, and you know, even if you were born long after the trams had been shut out and sent back to Bavaria or wherever. The trams haunt their old streets.

There are probably only seven telescopes in Brisbane now. Three of them are watching the skies. Three of them scanning the late night suburbs for trams. There is always one watching the girl undress a suburb away. It is just the way it goes here at one in the morning this time of year. But those telescopes are going to have to start paying more attention to the constellations of Brisbane. They are fading very fast, and the rooftops are ot getting any younger either.

Plankton crumbs are polluting the driveways of seventeen clowns in Liverpool England. Ridge Campbell, popular scouse clown, has thrown a hammer at one of these plankton crumbs. He reports that nothing whatsoever happened at all. He wasn’t overly happy about it.

Brisbane is a train of towns running five minutes late, with three drunks in the third carriage talking about pantries and another in the last carriage reading Angela Carter. The ticket offices are always closed for those wanting to climb aboard Brisbane. It doesn’t always stop at the tumbling down wooden stations. Ticket inspectors rove from car to car with lanterns, smoking herbs, trying to wear their regulation coats with whatever accuracy they can approach. The train of towns, old Brisbane town, old fish and chip shops strung together by big men tall as bears rattles collapsing in great leaps through pockets of coral and mulberry trees steaming hot in late afternoons.

Some days the great train of old churches, new townhouses, leaning facades with 19th century date stamps embossed high above plate glass restuarants specialising in bowls of cheese and chips, of creeper and lemon fruit and frangipani perfumes stops still. At the oldest blindest regional station it stops and it steams and settles into its silent throb of insects arguing with an ancient station master with wooden buttons and plenty of cigarettes closeted all over his coat, his sleeves, pockets and boots. Some days that old train stops long enough for the older people to climb aboard, find a seat between piles of second third and eighth hand street directores dating back to 1974, rhododendrons boiling over old chinese antique lamps, and grandchildren with subscriptions to defunct Bristol teapot societies gone over ripe and stringy after too many wet Saturdays.

Then that train of church towers, renovated high rise apartment lofts, windmills and terrace flats grinds back into life and moves on through the labyrinths of its stranger stops and rows and blocks.

Maps can’t trace Brisbane’s tracks through the jumble sale canyons of overgrown grass any longer. The map makers got lost on their way to work last weekend and have all started families down back alleys in the bigger fibro carriages somewhere near the outer suburbs of the rollicking train, famous for dirt and grit and printing shops. They have all given up going back, finding their old offices, emptying their old desks. They are too busy mapping the next ten years of their lives. Mapping the paths their wives and husbands and children must take through the overgrown towns of sporting ovals and bus stops passing all the pretty stations of satin and musk they can no longer afford to catalogue.

The Mayor of Brisbane’s long train of broken down cars, of vases of vegetable flowers and fruit shops hops from carriage to carriage as it moves around long loops, up and down hills, in long careless loops of iron and glass and louvre windows framing ferns and acres of moss. He leaps carefully, his clothes old, made from shoes and sheets of metal rusted black as outdoor bathtubs.

The Mayor of the town climbs a chimney of the train and sees Brisbane town’s engine in the far distance shrouded in ponds of moss and trunks of custard apples, its end tangled and jangled in lattice and arbours in long forgotten family gardens unheralded, lost and hidden behind real estate for sale signs ten years rotten and faded.

The train of Brisbane’s past and future stumbles on deep into its present of mushrooms and cobwebbed historical societies. The clouds rain on it all, and the sun deals with it in its own sweating skin wet ways.

Somewhere timetables are nailed to hoop pines and left to go green into the last of the late afternoons. They will be examined by antique men in blue black hats one hundred years away, and they will be ignored. There is no keeping time in Brisbane. There is only collecting it and selling it on. The train is running late.