Second Place
Flying W. A. - Elanna Herbert
the Indian ocean brings the
abrupt line aquamarine fades
cut with pale calico dark riparian
tendrils snake mangrove green
across my palette red
copper burnt sienna just
now blush pink signifiers
of shade and hue limit my ability
to describe watercolour washed
over country still crowded with
Indigenous knowledge.
You never really understand
until you live it
conceptualising distance is
more corporeal than cerebral.
This is not home. No blue mountain
crevices’ strong valleys plateau edged
by my past only colour
remains familiar against the
disconcerting lack of fence lines
below the QANTAS FIFO shuffle
a dead ocean scoured clean by
geological time sores cross-sectioned
with straight cut lines graded by
company men of and
from the past yesterday’s
exploration transect flails an
enduring scar. Landscape
no longer heals. Either way nothing
changes linear paths turn left
or right become events of west and
east under the aeroplane wing
they disappear
nowhere
reappear scrape an open-cut’s
cyanic lake deep azure copper green
floods the next beside the tailings dam faded
orange bleeds a contrast.
You can’t see corporate wealth
from a FIFO shuffle. Chinese ownership
or family injunctions distil form
residual patterns folding palette pools
into false pigment waiting for the dip
and drip of a fine point brush.
Lost baseline geology of the West.
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