THE BEACH REPORT, February 4th, '17

High temperature returns and the little beach becomes the most popular strip on the Bay --well, not the most, that being St Kilda & all along the watch-tower, Port Melbourne, South Melbourne, Albert Park, Middle Park & further, oh yes, further --Brighton, Sandringham, Black Rock --one end's big by dint of punter volume, the other by head of wealth, --but Elwood resembles these bigger brothers on such a day as this. Find a space to drop sandals, bag, towel, then straight into the clear sea, shallow for yards tho' discover raised shelf suddenly runs out & midriff's depth leaps to armpits. Hot sun, cool water & clearest sea yet yours truly's blind to a submerged slab of rock, --like the ditched trunk of one fallen on the proverbial hard times, everything he could hock done so including --if this were my story, say Melbourne in Winter,'66 --the wristwatch given me by my Aunt, the charcoal-grey John Collier suit, souvenir of my work voyage on the Fairstar, good now I thought for white-collar job-interviews in Oz, & the best black shoes to match --inevitably tripped & stumbled in avoidance of the barnacled rock and concerned not to fall, trying to maintain balance, smashed my heels into the end of it --heftier bash to left heel than right. Hauled grazes & bruises up the sand --hardly an accident compared to the cut feet & knees swimming "off the rocks" years ago, the beginning times, remembered but borne by hardly changing shoreline --is that true?-- the land-fill further submerged below the hardly new Marina, through which one'd walk, --strange landscape, spongy, compost-warm, broken down waste, broken up building materials. If nothing else the walking-path & the Marina have reconfigured the landscape, but the context, the sight & sound of it, the feel of it, is eternal --each intersection, each trajectory, eternal too. 

I sound like Kerouac or how Kerouac might sound to the uninitiated, as tho' Little Golden Book religiosity or --only talking about it on the bus this day, Loretta's Aunty Laurie, on our wedding day for Heaven's sake, April '68, describing new book she'd been reading, The Dharma Bums! --much she could endorse, she said, funny word? reveals quite another attitude, but said she was disappointed by the characters' apoliticism --well of course, Loretta says (--is Laurie short for Loretta? & Loretta named after her aunt? --hasnt this come up before? --growing up within the figure of the aunt & not the mother? --not on account of the name but the apparent personality or character, --as i wondered then although a stranger to the family, but encouraged too by the girlfriend's declarations about her relatives --phew!) --politics, the correct politics, the Party's line, "politics" was everything! --in the understanding of which, i interpolate, everything else is missed! Whatever K said later or in contradistinction to Gary Snyder/Japhy Ryder's "ruck-sack revolution", the prophecy of thousands, millions, of said 'revolutionaries', the young --young men in Kerouac's mind --but of course young women, understood though not yet written (--Of the Beautiful Young, poem i'm writing in 1971, "neither Men nor Women", "who cannot tell yachts from tears", "my beautiful young cannot sail or cry / they are magnificent in their captivity / they drown tearlessly almost i think fearlessly / whilst we walk dry bottom / full of the knowing / of yachts & tears / the years of the beautiful young") --within the enormous suggestivity of the conflation, and i guess ambiguity could retrospectively be claimed, that is author distinguishing between self & character even though the genre being conjured overrides the conventional literary theorem, -- Kerouac's being acclaimed by my time's envoy, Ed Sanders, on telly, on Mr Buckley's show, on behalf of our Hippy generation, "we come to praise you Mr K…", which Jack brushes off peremptorily, no time for hippies since even the shine of his beats had long dissolved, --but hey! the damage was done! --i mean, the history a done deal, all around & everywhere to be seen, --but fancy Aunty Laurie reading The Dharma Bums, evidently containing sufficient pieces of her own life's jig-saw, not least the encounter with nature, ancient Taoist/Buddhist accented appreciation of trails & peaks, eternal corollary ancient or modern, --Laurie at the helm, as she believed, of the modern, Communism's fail-safe schema, to which every particle of existing & potential being was subservient… I wrote about this in 1968, still going on about it! --but the times repeat, similar dynamic excite similar psychologies, and who remembers anything anyway (Santayana)?

*

Back on the sand, towel around shoulders looking like a Bedouin, surveying the beach & the tribe thereon, sunbathers & tanners of the cliche one thought surpassed, --casually return to the water's edge, the shells there glinting like coins, ingots, treasures from the deep, & the seaweed, the green & brown, the stars & urchins, -- not a prospector now but Doc Ricketts found to have migrated from Canary Row & Sweet Thursday to his own book, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, --brother Bernard's book, recall his Steinbeck collection of paperbacks, read or not i don't know --I'd handled & sampled & taken away with me in my imagination to Australia in '66 --recognised on every beach in every rock-pool thereafter…

*

OF STEINBECK'S DOC

It begins with Ed Ricketts' death --Steinbeck's straightforward prose protects the event from sentimentality; it owns no greater tragedy than its matter-of-course, its dailiness. The writer celebrates his friend, brings him back to the world, --the world in memorium for every lived, loved & gone day; each lived, loved & gone person & place. For sure, the Doc doesn't die every day, but every day any one of us might. And not going out into the world is the kind of death one's loathe to contemplate. Such is the adventure of  each day set against the everyday's incremental dulling. The Doc's surely not a dull man but a daily one, given over to the day's exigencies, as defined by these as by his eccentricities & prejudices which his friend details without the judgements informing them. Steinbeck's Doc is an unruffled man about a small town, except when he isn't. And he & his is the form i now adopt looking into a rock pool, hat on pate, looking & seeing despite, whatismore, his own understanding of the world, especially in its immediacy, as much further & deeper than the 'particular segment' in view --thus ecology, myth, genetics, poetry & philosophy, Ancient & Modern of East & West. Now he is bending to his work, poking through the water, lifting shell or seaweed. He is poking & peering as in the painting of him on the cover of the Corgi paperback, collecting bucket in hand, backpack of implements over his shoulder. First sun or last, sun up or sun down, unambiguously there, as we are here, eternal antidote to the drear & the fear. Clear.

[4-8/2/17]

  

THE BEACH REPORT, 12/14-1-17

At this level of reality (or do i mean perception?) --Malcolm Lowry's, mine, even Dad's (his rhetorical question regarding the overwhelmingly attractive thought that a journey might continue infinitely, --to keep walking to wherever & as long as the path or landscape, the amplified energies, led one on), & if Dad's then, with all due respect, anyone's, everyone's --the journey isn't particular though abounding in particularities. No, it's the ultimate generality whose idea suffuses one from even before the outset, aggregating every step, minute, mile, --filling, fulfilling, fuelling expectation --the promise inherent in Journey…

*

Freighters in the Bay, near horizon. The first one with green flanks carrying red containers; the second, smaller, rust-brown painted. Clear blue sky. White-caps on the shoreline, & gulls sitting in the sand, nestled, nesting. Even from a distance see a large man in long grey shirt, brown trousers, sock & shoeless, curled beside the gulls, his head supported with right hand, left hand on upjutting left hip. Canary Row i'm thinking : fellow stumbles out of alley, first light of day, shuffles to the beach, follows gulls' example, snuggles into nest of sand. Falls into sudden deep sleep, Rock Candy Mountain sheer relief. Awoken by sea's soughing & feels the spears of sun warming one or other side of face. On the street dosser can be moved-on but not i suspect on the beach. Darkness benevolent in that respect, daylight a dobber. In 2016 this is how it is in a novel because, apparently, city by-laws no longer apply to pavement sitting or sleeping --corollary of which, no contemporary bum distinguished by epithets of nobility including freedom, or rather, no erstwhile bum today would associate with the misfits on the city's streets since, motivated by self-respect (unless also banned by Health & Safety cum Human Rights regimen?), sufficient to cobble together minimum dollars for a room or accept the Salvo's dormitory rather than lay-about in sorry stupor or sometimes belligerent bravado beneath the necessarily purposeful feet of the citizenry.

Now, where's his shoes? But rolls over, then's sitting facing the sea and i realise she's no more derelict than i am, has a mobile-phone as well in which she's more interested than the tidal oscillation a hop & a jump ahead of her. It's a gardener's hat pulled down her face, the beach must be bottom of the old suburban block, this her daily constitutional. Stands up, collects sandals & is on her way. Trudge.


*

Couple of years ago wholesale change of staff at the kiosque. --the mix of English & Spanish replaced next season by the current local boy & girl. Even so recognition's still champion. Third season's hello ("How's the family?" "All well, the kids are at home driving tier mother mad!") bestows consummate belongingness. Come to think of it, never see the old parents now. Passed on? But old cant be older than me!


*                                         

Seagull gives me the stare. Surely toasted sandwich crumbs not as good for you as plankton? Go on! Get out of here…


[12-14/01/2017]

THE BEACH REPORT, 6/8-1-2017

6th, 7th, 8th January, '17


The funeral guests follow the coffin out of the chapel into blazing sunlight. We're listening to the adult purr of Charles Trenet's La Mer. Our friend is there mingling on the pavement with her own & suddenly gone mother's family & friends. We waved from our hearts, i explain. We had Charles Trenet's permission to return to the sea --mother of all elements, elemental mother... Our friend's given names --Franceska Jurate Kristina, like the sea a complex manifold. Lithuania, Russia, Germany, Europe, Australia. Imbroglio that is legacy, discordantly chorused as history, life-long striving for singularity sounded through fracture.


*

Swish motorboat anchored on water's edge. Black-gleaming outboard motor like a gun-mounting. 30-something dad on board relaxing, all the time in the world, waiting for young teen son who's  picking way across the sand with ice-cream cones & large bag of potato-chips from the kiosque. Helps him aboard. The two laze on the deck, eating, taking in the view including yours truly swimming, keeping clear of their mooring rope. Now father & son bob in the water, pull boat away from the shallows. Father & son could do anything & everything together. Son's The Man in lieu of dad's work-mates or brothers. Son is forever the long awaited one, manifestation of own childhood regained, happenstance twin signifying far deeper than reflection, so atavism pronounces its own relations. Now another dad & boy stride off the beach & into the water with rubber-ring to skid & bounce off the surface, footy leap & catch, dive, matching throw for throw, cry Oh & Aah, crow claim to Elwood Beach champions.


*

Dried, dressed, sitting on foreshore bench, wondering how safe is the blow-up plastic dingy & the tiny children within it which their mother --perhaps their sister? hardly larger than the kids --attempts repeatedly to launch on a wave. Couldn't it so easily propel into deep water? Concurrent image then of those children on the wild beach at Mount Lavinia, gleefully jumping the waves which suddenly became enveloping, overwhelming monstrous maelstrom --and the men on the beach, slow to react, but then brothers & fathers & uncles to a man, frantically, furiously swimming out to the tragedy occurring before them --everyone on the beach, then, shouting, calling, crying, then cheering, laughing, congratulating the rescue, embracing their almost drowned children --and i mean theirs, this Ceylonese community, fishermen & hotel workers & the village infrastructure around the foreign tourists, their avoidance of tragedy, their communal deliverance --i was 19yearold sailor boy, secretly courting the Scottish hairdressers --where was the Fairstar? --how far from the port this storm-ridden resort? --could have been witnessing stomach-turning disaster as if nightmare story expelled from out of one's own sick feelings --journey's excitement & education but simultaneously perilous, on  one's sailorboy tod, no one but no one to save my soul, no body that is, but some books surely and the pen & paper by which one confessed, call it journal or novel or poem of the boiling blue sea, the dark blue day, the blue dark night, as many hours of the day that were free of roster & crew's assumed obligation to the Company & one another… And when a man in familiar lifesaver yellow & red gear walked by, yelling into megaphone, i thought he was reacting to the potential danger of the little family in the plastic float, but then heard him say we had to clear the beach, the beach was being temporarily closed because SHARK had been sighted in St Kilda, a hop & a skip down the road… SHARKS! now that's a first for Elwood, friendly as a back-yard pool… SHARKS!

THE BEACH REPORT, 5-1-17

Serving "who's the coffee? tea?" to the table --would have thought i'd know by now, lad laughs --but i didn't know or remember he wasn't English backpacker for in this moment i'm sure he's Greek, especially if over-familiar man under further canopy of kiosque forecourt, adjacent to concrete esplanade & the beach, is the dad? Ah, couldn't be! --mebee related to the little Greek family business, --partner? --a regular customer, little business's esteemed 'regular', every day of the  season like old-timers in pub hoping for a pot on the house, picking up the dead glasses & carafes, this guy gathers tea & coffee cups like kiosque's best girl or boy, otherwise sits at a table, grey & white fluffy dog at his feet, -- he reads the paper, drinks his coffee, pecks doughnut or chip, converses with whomever's closest, the weather, the government…

Only the third attendance of the summer yet seems the British & Europeans aren't here, working or playing. Index of world economy --less travel-money, change of visa requirements, reduced energy, curiosity. Instead, different leagues of local --arrived such & such a year, live in that street, suburb, or came after, but long enough to establish cactus in rockery, privet bush above subterranean car-port --or always wuz 'ere, almost original, like Arthur, Peg Cregan's husband  --his all-seasons' browned legs --like Peg herself --that is, Arthur like Peg, her standard, sockless, sandals --his Diet Ale, her claret --dressed up when he had to be --Australian Railways Union business --but at home, whoever was around, in his garden shorts, colourful shirt flapping --easy in his own skin --seen & heard it all yet attentive, curious, for duration of any conversation --Peg's poets, painters, musicians, --eccentrics --his trade unionists --all of 'em their comrades… "Look at this house Mr Brezhnev" i had him saying in The Poem of the Clear Eye (1972/3), "a worker's house comrade a bloody mansion!" --as too the prettiest terrace on Victoria Parade, "(with blistered feet i come to savour your cool / ness Princess at the offices of Amalgamated / Engineers (our Movement / the beer & mighty bulls refined by / a frieze of realistic art & discourse / Watan & Counihan the mild Jack Hutson the dreaded / Carmichael the gallant O'Neill the last Paraguayans / mate & mate mopping up blood of comrades in Jakarta every / where" --and why have i been thinking of him recently? --figures of age, of ageing, of the older into which one's moved unintentionally…

And the floppy beach hat i retrieve from the water after my dip --thought it was a jelly fish --like one of Arthur's --no tickets, that's what it is, talking about the Australian character, --any kind of hat, anything'll do, anything if it does the job, --sounding like Lawrence now narrating Kangaroo --British but without the pettier class reflexes, imposed & reversed snobbery --Jack as good as his master --shock of the colonial new --one can be lighter there, my Lawrence says, --refreshed, renewed, and transformed --transformation in the fullest brightest light, not a smidgin of the ambivalent dark, dark sun & et cetera --imagine him, his surrogate, intuiting, sounding off like that. It's a child's hat. Yours? i indicate to sporty man striding towards me along the water line. No! he laughs, not mine! Slim girl in bikini actually rises from her sunbathing beside us & suggests the owner's to be found among the group of little kids & adults previously playing in our vicinity --screaming, in & out the water after dad has rafted three lucky ones to deeper water & back. She's right. Not that the mother immediately claimed it --but one of the five children did, raising hand as though in yesteryear's classroom --it's mine, she said… And that was that...

THE BEACH REPORT, 4-1-17

January 4th, 2017

Head full of Greece out of early morning emails with Jenni K --reciting the influence of the Durrells, Miller, Clift & Johnson, Leonard Cohen (--i appear to be the only one of the generation who never went to India or Greece or Paris for that matter --friend Cathy's 70's overland adventure its epitome --though naturally always in my head, --and Paris on the map in 1964 but something happened to prevent Christopher Owen, with whom i shared a passion for Oscar Wilde & whose idea it was to drop out of the Tech College in Southampton & go to Paris with me, --my actor friend with the parley vous & the aristo manners & a double crown, --suddenly we werent going -- his pater he said, or his mater, no money forthcoming --ah well, i went to South Wales instead ℅ of a few quid from Aunty Lydia who shared my disappointment at the abandonment of the Parisian reconnoitre -- yet Amsterdam was ever mine, & Ostend & Aachen & some of the German towns, especially Koln, Soest, Dortmund --and India, Greece…? --hmm… "next life" i mutter…) --once more at the kiosque --heard you were still here, Happy New Year--

--but the Point Ormond end of Elwood Beach's sou-westerly bluster's more like the Skegness of another life's forbearance --that is, desire's English inventory of never-visited seaside towns, fed by schoolfriends' holiday reports. However, there was always the Isle of Wight, a jewel compared to the smaller, shalier, stonier, scrubbier Hampshire resorts. Bournemouth we never ever got to, --posher, cosmopolitan, sandy, everything the Aunty in her sophistication would insist as almost acceptable in eternal competition with the Alexandria of her childhood & youth.

*


When encountered, Summer's here-again-ness could never not have been! One minute of summer day's sand, sea & sky causes instant forgetfulness of Winter --the cliche of the constantly warm-weathered Australia absolutely restored…

*

Two little boys squabbling over ball, bucket, ice-cream; third little feller inured from the fight by innocent infancy. Mediterranean mother sprawled in the recliner on the sand shrieks instructions for the three to enact the perfect family photograph, otherwise ignores their mayhem. Kayakers return to the water's edge, survey the chop, then quickly into their craft & paddle out. Three swimmers who pulled past in deep water far beyond where our kind of splashers on a brighter, stiller day would abound, reverse now on seemingly effortless point-to-point. From rocks & sea-wall a hundred, two hundred yards away near the old yacht club, the children's playground, toilet block, food vans, presently closed restaurant, back to Point Ormond…

*

Port Philip Bay's EPA warnings taken to heart --spit out face full of salty, sea-weedy water. One immersion's enough. Throw strange ball back to player with bandy bat. What's that? i'm asking. Thank you, he says clubbing the ball fifty yards across the grass. Hurling, he says --it's an Irish game!  Ah --I was thinking lacrosse or a form of bush tennis. Now dried off & dressed, notebook in hand,  i've commandeered the best bench. Only now, Loretta observes, are others entering the water. The sun's hotter. Your reporter's on his way...

THE BEACH REPORT : Facts of Life

I'm crouching in the sea, ready to catch, more a slipper than a wicky though it changes from ball to ball, but I'm waiting for it, left or right, head-high or wide --m'girl says you're like a dog, ready for a game, make something out of nothing. That's life, I say, sage in the waves, less of a chop than last swim (--as I write this down the old Greek gent, elegant in shades, black cap, white T, black shorts, all-over tan, flicks at the flies with lavender, rosemary?! --maybe twig-stem of gum-leaves? --his swatch -- m'girl says frankincense so immediately imagine black robed priest, the blessing-swish of his censer --golden church of sand & sea), but 'before' or 'last' wonderfully lost in the continuum, banished --continuum imposed by the elements --petty time crushed (--it's saltbush! --someone else strolls past with same soft grey article --all along the coast, every coast in the sunbathed world) --deep hush of the universe around & about the mush of the world notwithstanding distinguishing graces & blasphemies, thought of which makes one blush! --did i say that? do that? think that?

Prelude to leaving kiosque-table, the old guy says in English to his woman friend, it's impossible to read the newspaper in this wind! She's managed the gusts  throughout with her magazine. Suddenly realise he isn't Greek! --urgent need to correct first impression. I think he's speaking Hebrew interspersed with English. 'Talking' not accurate either --now & then he addresses his partner with slow, sure phrases. Audible but mostly indecipherable. A deep, low voice. Russian? Israeli? He's in his own space, not talking, sipping his coffee, occasionally flicking salt-bush fan at the summer flies. Then I see, nose in my notebook, the pair have gone. Others spot the empty table, take it over. Like anyone, anything, only temporarily there but the impression of this old guy pervades. (Description of the actual is demeaned in the Avant-garde as the so-what of commonplace. Contextualised by big blues of sea & sky, we enquire relation of cliche to archetype.) 

Old guy, younger wife or older daughter. All the news he needs is knowledge now. Visceral, corpuscular. The rest is around him, the basking seal, absorbing what observer calls the facts of life.


[Elwood, 3/6-1-16]

THE BEACH REPORT

Silver-gulls & terns, some standing, some pecking, in & amongst the mat of seaweed strung along shoreline ebb & flow. I'm old man today, sat on bench absorbing late morning sun & warmth, collar up against breeze, picking in & amongst the map that living's made, this life's final lap. Almost fifty years ago I'm hereabouts too, writing in exercise book my Song of the Sea. For all they called me prolific I confess not much of it published. No regrets, certainly since publishing's yen dissolved. Compelled, though, to write, en plain air. Dinghies out to sea. Three kids in black swim-suits splashing in the warmest part, incubator pool of seaweed & old jetty, like the Russians I think whose great-grandchildren these could be, the old St Kilda Russians of fifty years ago, and all through the recent decades, bending the compass to accommodate the Caspian in this Port Phillip Bay. Room too for Hemingway, that is me as Hemingway, looking out at the sea from the beach, bathed in sun & warmth, dreaming up his old man story. I'd like him to have been in Miami but fact is he's on that beach in the Bahamas : Miami'd have been David's sling-shot to the Cuba of his good times and where his last great tale is set.   

After swimming, one stands on the sand, age dripping off like the water. Conventionally, youthfulness the only reference, present moment's bare skin defeating history. The weight of years evaporates in the sun. But today, I havent swum. I'm snug on the bench, and age is the sea-shell I'm curled inside. Sea-shell my house, without even the weight a tortoise naturally bears. The tortoise metaphor's been mine for yonks : history inextricably ours, carried wherever we go.  Perhaps the tortoise's shell was a deflection of the definitive burden accompanying my saint's name awarded by Aunt Lydia, dislodged when I exchanged nomme de plume for given name, age 16.

"Ageing gracefully" manifestly not the point : age is the grace. Instead of frustration, anxiety, unrequited ambition there's --almost embarrassed to say it, as though pompous & vain --contentment.

Like Hemingway's old fisherman, who knew how not to be angry… He no longer let anger get to him, get the better of him. He was over it, had out-gunned it, oh a long time before. Gift, like peaceful sea is, watcher's sea... dreaming the fishing only ever once experienced (this is me now, Kris Hemensley!)  three days on the water around Port Arlington, 1966, two nights dropping the dredge, sorting the coagulated catch… The overcoming deep in him & upon him, on the bench, in the sun, facing the sea…

[29-11/4-12-15]

THE BEACH REPORT, 2015

[16-20, January, '15]


Last Friday night at Kerford Road Pier (how long refurbished?) admired first large swell of the season --the facts probably contradict me but 'season' is the present's accumulation of summer sights & sensations comprising anybody's personal calendar --the first swell, of course tidal but suggests the oceanic, that potentially unbounded heave… Fishermen camped there, solo, pairs, families, like they're parts of the pier or shadows of parts, leaning over the railing, winding up long throw of line, or wandering a few steps to the left then back, in a little circle, leaving the rods to their own devices, bait in buckets, hands in pockets, some Greek, some Vietnamese, some Lebanese, one old Australian family, catching supper, grown old in their routine, three generations, old ways the best but approving of the new planks replacing the worst of the pier, that is I am, remembering it was broken, possibly bound for dismantling…

Mid-afternoon the next day at Elwood there's a surf, line upon line of frothing & crashing white water presaged in last night's churning dark green. On the Sunday I'm the only one in the sea --larger swell but warmer than before. Impossible not to go in. It's in my blood now, in my head. Two beached jellyfish hardly portend harm. But there are rocks now, uncovered or shoved there by the violent water. The force of the waves prevents swimming, but crouching then standing up as the large waves hit, or falling down before them, or floating in the furrows interspersing successive onslaught is exhilarating. A quiet bay-beach's version of staring down the sea…




------------------------------------------------------------------------



[21-25, January, '15]


It was never a 'milk pond' was it? --notwithstanding the Queen of Sheba in an encyclopaedia at nine or ten, or Krishna bathing in the pool with the Gopis, story discovered during Indian reread in the '80s, voyage through seas of etymology en route intimations of the larger meaning. Yet the water's flat-white of cloud & lambent light rehabilitates misnomer invested in the remembered lines of dairy cows moving indomitably across farm yard, leaving behind the inviting, therefore warm, surface of shit & piss & mud & milk. And before it's lost or I squeamishly censor, include in this sensation of gentle ooze or curdle, imagery of the lactations & ministrations of the multitude of breast-feeding mothers one's naturally known as oldest son to young mum, or lover & chum of the women of my own generations… '50s Nursing Home --floral, sunlit, balmy --or parental bedroom's built-up pillows, starched sheets, redecorated by dad for the event… For sure, another temperament in the New Age & Feminist '70s, but same mother & child contiguity of major & minor face, throat, arms, breast, mouth-- and amidst the sometime struggle, remember long moments of their imperturbability, as the sea is, which is what this is all about, forever & ever-ness…

But  mill-pond it is, in particular Elwood's on the 20th January, a ten out of ten --warm water, sweetly welling waves, regatta flotilla out to sea whose racing dinghies equip first glance's dhows from out of Egyptian infancy, divine shape I constantly reproduced back home in first English school '52, '53, --Australian high summer's cliche sumptuously achieved. Another day I rate it the impossible Eleven because the sunbathing crowd's suddenly here as well. Beach comes into its own. Pods of swimmers but mostly well-oiled, sitting or lying on the sand, with or without umbrellas, young families, children & teens, young male & female singles, tats (sleeves, calligraphies, figures) abundant as the traditionally, now Brazilianly, bare.

But the suburb's elders, especially the matted & thatched, the double & treble tyred, where are they? Probably back in St Kilda, blackening all day, up against walls or rocks, pier rampart, dug-in --dug into Odessa's lingering dream, the older scales of St Kilda's dream, Post-War, pre-development, the old St Kilda which is my own St Kilda even from the '60s, enough of all-that's-left to attach historically --amalgamation of histories intersecting one's own to which one adds the emigrant's. Native's the one whose particulars are inherently the time & place, sung as sprung, conversely subject of emigrant's eternal wondering…



------------------------------------------------------------------



[early a.m., 7th February, '15]



Yesterday's long dash (yes, that's a contradiction but good intentions (leaving Shop at 5 for immediate train from City to the 'Garth, then change into trunks & up the road with Loretta for the 6-15 or so 246 to Elwood, but crikey! gone 7 by the time we crossed the main road & onto the beach

Long time between dips (o summer where art thou? (("Hey-la-day-la my summer's back" (a kind of Death in Venice white light of sand & smooth sea suspension, whole beach of all-day-&-night bathers ahead of us

And into the water (colder than the air temp suggested or account of L. & cousin's morning stroll there anticipated (and everything's returned, everything the ten day hiatus rescinded (other world, summer world, water world

Can't help thinking every time I'm sitting at the kiosque (this time beneath umbrella (cuppa & etc, notebook, luxuriating in the balmy air (how Dad would have relished this and did in fact when he sat back after exertion of swimming & beach games (ah, Isle of Wight memories, Whitecliff Bay etc (suddenly & poignantly in sync with the world

Young proprietor (shorter hair than last year, black crew-cut rising out of sheer scalp style (serves beverages (Ah, I say, the real English Breakfast Tea, and he says And the real French doughnut made by a real Frenchman, no kidding (ring doughnut, sugared (hugely satisfied with his lot Dad would breathe in & out audibly, comment This is the life

And it is (transformative (weight of working day lifted, dissolved (I'm still finding the words for the equation recalled from Spengler of forest & cathedral, a little piece I'm scribbling about train-carriage view of the country from Bendigo to the City but harnessed to description of the great Sacred Heart church, the art within it, the art of itself, stone & wood (in my battered green-covered notebook



----------------------------------------------------------------



[8th February,'15]


Morning to afternoon the weather turns around. Nothing else for it to do or for its word to exist, otherwise non-differentiation's literatureless world. Try saying that with the sun in your eyes or a gobfull of wave. Said by whom, to whom? Rummage old shelves for the answer. Brighton Rock for sandy, salty, mouldering hotel airs; Malcolm Lowry for solitary, strung-out soliloquy.  Racier, Wide Sargasso Sea? Rowdier, La Bateau Ivre?

I take the chance, depart autumnal, overcast; arrive summer once more. Most people seem to have been discouraged. Not for the first time I'm by myself in the sea, which is tantamount to owning it. Disowning it is the fully dressed man face down in the sand five metres from similarly hung woman whose afternoon began & ended when her Weekend Magazine threatened to fly away in the breeze.

I glance at them from the good sea. The size & force of the waves increases. I'm unconcerned. Footing's secure, drowning's someone else's fear : aged three, clinging to mother's neck, screaming blue murder.


oOo



[12th February, '15]



One-fifteen I'm the only swimmer but five minutes more and there's another, in his own space to the left of me. Entered the sea Point Ormond side of the kiosque & delightedly found it rock free. This day the water is clear again & the extreme saltiness gone. Whitecapped waves enlarge through the afternoon. It's become a day for sailboarders. How would youngest brother Robin have coped with Australia (imagine him twenty years ago in wet suit on Weymouth Bay, ahead of England's fashion have to say)? An afternoon but never a life. Go for the afternoon & stay for life? Life as though an afternoon? Does or doesn't bear thinking about? Old guys' contemplations --old emigres --old old --osteo-, arthurio-, rheumatico-, heaven help us! But sea & salt & sun surely soaking one with the necessaries. Ah, Lorenzo, escaping English constraint, embracing Idea entwined with whichever of the Elements inspired it…

Walking back from the Beach down Byrne Avenue to the bus-stop in Elwood's bright little bustle, the skipper of old terrace house, sitting on sun-caught pavement wall, legs extended across the tarmac like a shadow, greets us Good evening, adds Sorry for my smoke! But we love it, I say --which I wouldn't offer any regular chimney. Perverse if you like but daily defining individuality, autonomy… It wasn't a Sobrani (Black Russian) or Gauloise or even Camel, perhaps an aromatic roll-your-own, but rare enough this H&S era to momentarily restore an ancien regime of the senses' maximum value --smelling, seeing, tasting, --apertures of life's far-outest education… Joined the old guy's laughter as though schoolboy found-out revolved through wheel of bravado --but quite properly his right, our right --that crucial bug in our humanity increasingly stomped on by the H&S. They want H&S clones, automatons, --docility reformulated as the social norm, sterility as health --all that & more. Excuse my smoke? Excuse us for living!



oOo



[February 19th, '15]



Alternatively driftwood, sea-snake, dog, but suddenly identify the shape as large ocean gull beside me, bottom up, fishing. Two flew over the waves the length of the beach last time I was here --index of nothing of Nature, only would-be beach bum's peregrinations. (Peregrine? Nah, language isn't that helpful! --more helpless in language than the sea, tossed or becalmed, at elements' mercy.) Long skein of seaweed looks like a strayed squid. Severally folded width of white cloth-like jelly-fish. My own left-hand unintentionally brushing hip jumping me out of my skin.

At the bus-stop made to pay for Famous Five unheroics when bird on wing shits on me, wishfully misapprehended at first as leaking air-con from adjacent cafe or even broken pipe from same building's bathroom above the pavement. Bird's shit wakes me up to real world. Evidence of what food that grey brown muck smear on my house-brick coloured cotton shirt? Thank God no flying quadrupeds!



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[28th February/1st March,
Summer into Autumn, 2015]



Sea's stillness last calendar day of Summer instills the timelessness often adduced. 'Time out of time' I say, as though the Beach is a self-contained cylinder, propelled from suburb to sea & back again, or even a tunnel --Wellesian, Vernean? (--image born of industrial age's sky's-the-limit inventiveness, centre of the earth & outer-space alternate playgrounds of scientific dreams --& any such dreamer an engineer on frontier of mind & matter, pith helmet optional, blessed by commerce & empire--

remember saying to my brother & father "Everything conceived eventually materialises", watching telly, 1970 or so, visiting home in what had been the village of young family's growing up, --in bed-sit now, in the Docks district across town, --prodigal's return from Oz. As a kid would have it, our eternal & infinite address : "Mon Reve", Shelley Road, Thornhill, Southampton, Hampshire, England, United Kingdom, Great Britain, Europe, The World, The Earth, The Milky Way, The Solar System, The Universe. No where else it could be! Thought but not spoken before : "anything imagined will come about!" Really? Actually? brother exclaims with troubled look. Yes, the mind's like a computer; we put in the questions & out come the answers : whatever can be imagined will eventuate… Dad straightens tighter to himself, maximising attention to the story on TV, leaves speculation to his sons. What was that film? From an elapse of 45 years, brother suggests Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner… I'm thinking of a sci-fi thriller --maybe a better episode of Dr Who, in which a diabolical telepathic & shape-changing battle or duel with cosmic consequences ensues in rural southern England where sharp moustached army officer with detachment of men run around like headless chooks, plainly out of their depth & probably in the wrong film let alone dimension? Or could it have been Doomwatch, or even UFO?)

*

Such stillness, transfixion, I saw in Seurat's painting, Bathers at Asnieres, hanging at the National Gallery in London. In the piece I wrote in 1975 for my ABC BOOK, jumped from French riverscape to Melbourne's seaside, explicating the figures' "pink rotundity" & "torpor : "Even on a bay beach, where only a minor bend of the imagination recalls the Ocean & states of being not contained within a pretty border, the men & women occupy the sands & changing currents as solidly as they did the green bank. It is most of all a domestic scene, the installation of soft cubes. The seven-eighths naked men & women blob the sand. The gulls blob the first height of air. It is on the cards the tableau melts at nightfall. Each succeeding day has the sand a trifle whiter, requires a fuller foot to tread it, a wider posterior to settle upon it. Summer's seven years pass slowly."


*


Different friends ask if I'd ever consider moving to Elwood, but perhaps as L says our cottage at the other end of the bus line already is that house by the sea. But, seed sown, where in Elwood would it be? Byrne Avenue, old & new dwellings, renovated homes & apartments, old fences, new walls, old & young happy families, hippies, professionals, laid-back first timers, old timers, dogs, cats… Normandy Street, larger detached houses, mansions, grand in the white-glossed way, nobody & nothing along the street except luxury cars…


*


Big seas, surf, winds, inaugurate first day of Autumn. Couldn't be larger contrast with yesterday. The contradiction includes another : grey brown green water beneath black hills of cloud on the Point Ormond / Port Melbourne side, and clear blue sky scudded with cirrus on the Elwood Lifesaving Club side. Remarkably warm water following previous night's wind & thunderstorm, though dirty with storm detritus. As life is…


[28th February/1st March, 2015]

3 QUICKIES : in lieu of The Beach Report (numero uno, Melbourne summer 2014-15)

1
(21-12-14)

Everyone & everything connected yet one's been unaware that James Koller actually died on the 10th December, three weeks ago, on the heel must have been of Bob Arnold's first posting of Koller junior's news of his father's stroke. The notes I've been making over the period are all, therefore, after the fact. Man alive : celebratory; passed : memorial.


2
(26-12-14)

Shouldn't have been a surprise but off sparse Clifton Hill platform onto packed City train, any observation to accurately contain the word 'abuzz'! Carriage full of cricketers, all Australian & male supporters, day-after-Xmas casual style, except for two younger Indian men, orange T, floral shirt, sunglasses… And here we are, Jolimont-MCG where the carriage almost totally clears --platform bulges, the Test begins… Naturally I'd like to be amongst them despite colosseum style cricketing not my style even when i was a regular in the '70s relishing the density & atmosphere… If carriage's buzz is notable then the Melbourne Cricket Ground's is incredible; and once bitten, the bug is forever!


3
(Elwood Beach kiosque, 28-12-14)

Loretta says all the beach cliches are here like a Jacques Tati film! Large woman squeezed into tiny bikini with little dog on lead; vain old health-fanatic joggers; fast-walking middle-aged keep-fit duos etc… I wonder where we might fit in that scenario? L. in blouse, shoulder shawl, earrings, bead necklaces, bangles, straw hat, shades,  rather like my mother when she was younger --but 'sempl',  my mother's French pronunciation, with 'chic' never too far away! And moi : beach bum, stained old cap, pen & notebook, seamless alternation between the words & the world --thinking & watching… On the bus ride thinking of the local poets of the sea(side) --inevitably, then, Tsaloumas, not too far a stretch to add 'with whom we swam'. Second degree familiarity with Bob Morrow & Brook Emery as per their reports of ocean swimming & surfing. A bay dip or two shared with Claire Gaskin, Susan Fealy… --How far back does one want to go? History is a companion whenever & wherever one travels --perhaps I live here after all, sea soused & sun bathed senses warming the mutually excluding Northern imagination, softening the heart to acceptance of nearly fifty years of the Great Southern's actual life…