by Rodney Williams

outside Marvel Stadium
at Docklands in Naarm
on the country of the Kulin nation

All that’s left here now of Batman’s Hill
is a stout square pole, its red paint fading
on a tall fabrication, installed stiff as steel
unmoving in concrete on a concourse
as if the trig-point on a hike from train station
to sports stadium, each rated beyond debate
as second best of its sort in this metropolis:
as crowds pass, no one pays that pole any mind.

Beneath this walkway all you’ll see is railroad
with tracks laid over earth long since flattened
once a seafront marker in First People’s country.
Perched there, settler lookouts scoped for white sails,
until this rise gave a site to a city founder’s house.
Thence shifting dirt, ton by ton, navvies were pressed
to wield shovel & pick — their engineering exertions
anything but civil, they dug that hill down till dead-level.

All too familiar a face at Van Diemens Land brothels,
Batman had felt coins could be clinked in Port Phillip.
Loud in his boasts of chasing brigands back to bush,
he’d lead massacres in the Black War, south in Lutruwita.
Yet such ghosts could not veto a parliamentary seat
getting gazetted in his name up here. Since rescinded too,
he offered a treaty, the one Anglo on these shores to do so,
paying food & tools & blankets for country without price.

With his diary claiming This will be the place for a village
he’s renowned for foresight in a city grown to millions.
Dead while still aged thirty-eight, he’s also remembered
for living out last days hiding his visage in a bandage,
with its nose disappearing thanks to syphilis from Hobart,
his electorate, home & hill likewise vanished up nostrils.