First Glance at a Walking Party, Barrington Tops, c.1895

First Glance at a Walking Party, Barrington Tops, c.1895

First Glance at a Walking Party, Barrington Tops, c.1895

As in a photograph by a small town artist
regional, unknown, whose sepia wandering work
fetches up in libraries as support
against myth-made progeniture, or, as here,
is caught again in April’s stencil work and glints
against the wood panels of a tourist lodge,

so there’s more to its choice than just the eye.
What the eye sees, plate glassed or not, is mostly learnt.
A leaf-rustled, bellbird solitude calls to them,
they whose sense, togged up, was of getting-far,
never the first time quite, yet intending a newness
raw as sawn log ends, timely as a wheel’s sprayed sand.

Held under breath, their words are dark ice-blue
like a pool flooded with late, upland snow —
you see their long-awaiting, intense eyes,
fixed in a spacious, brown-varnished frame. Looking back,
we’re watched, fresh-faced by spivvy, statuesque
men in ribboned boaters, and crushed Panamas, and by plump

middle-aged women, firm-necked in pleated tweeds:
only the youths have that hair-parted look,
modern, steadfast, self-conscious,
soon able to fly planes, or pick up the telephone.
Front left, someone’s tulle-bloused daughter,
fulsomely caught between home life and an idea,

stares out past our future — being perhaps the
same age as my wife’s grandmother, “first female student
at London’s Slade”, whose own Victorian mother transported
thirty portmanteaux through far-flung vicarage worlds,
looping Jamaica, Teneriffe, India, out to here.
This photo, though, tells nothing of unlikely

provenance, back of flower arrangements, deathly memorials,
or last-minute wills bequeathing razored paddocks.
A cloudy stillness, a hand nervously blurring,
deprive them of a lack of origin,
some of them dressed in graziers’ touring duds
but all of them defined in a balletic idiom

of bird and breath, of cream-gauze sun-up
intently glowering on a wire. In their minds’ Sydney,
blue-brick memories, hazy, pinnacled, flow
into a glance, carrying out its introduction —
a thing soon checked by polished boots, starched collars,
heads askance with Ma and Pa. So, they wait.

They wait in order to recall themselves —
glazed, shimmering, like lakeside reeds —
within a glittering transformation, a beatitude,
now about to exit in a photograph,
shining like the bush’s cut-out veins of light.
Dated, they’ll walk away by car and telegram.

Caught in this rainy air, they’re indelibly faded
on a rucked-up backdrop of negroheads,
conjoined warlike among 19th Century
parsonage sounds, about to break ranks and stretch their legs,
till they glimpse our future mood loading up the Commodore —
towels, camp-smoke, Ampol, bursts of shellac-bouncing sun.