by JUDE AQUILINA
Like an old movie played backwards
the building stones have flown back up,
walls regrown, verandah posts standing tall again;
timber floored rooms restocked with furniture.
History’s ebbing tide has brought the dead back to shore,
old names and stories fossicked from a ghost town’s past.
From the muscle of funding arms and volunteer might,
Milparinka sings again, of bush weddings, gold panning,
and rattly tales of jail cells. For a fiver the weary traveller
can step over a century, marvel at old sheds chock-a-block
with giant rusty tools, homemade rakes and shovels,
blades, combs, kero tins and sticks made into seats.
Milparinka’s skin is leather dry, lizard-tough,
its heart an oasis with watery veins that sometimes collapse
under summer stress. An 1800s island, far from hospitals,
where heat-weathered men turned the rocks, disease and thirst
dogging them. Gold for some, but lodes of hardship for most.
Now, a stream of air-conditioned RVs trickles in:
with fat dogs and generators that drown out crows.
Phones in hands instead of shovels, they mine history,
sift through stories of poverty and death, then, eager to leave,
they flare their rooster tails of dust, scoot back to electric coops.
Sometimes, there’s a ghost sitting beside them, an ancestor,
breathing on their conscience instilling appreciation and respect
till they whisper: How tough were you? Glad it wasn’t me.
– Outback New South Wales