Smoke Encrypted Whispers (9 page)

It was labelled a ‘meteorological anomaly', a dust cloud red banking the southeast Queensland sky; afternoon a crimson dusk. Inspecting Boundary Street, the air lathered rouge, the view distorted beyond the tunnel's arch of Dornoch Terrace. While in the house, the television showed similar dust storms: American artillery barrages in the hills of Afghanistan. Presented with the cobble stones and rustic mortar around Boundary Street's bridge, I am also drawn elsewhere, my mind inspired by Victorian architecture and Jack the Ripper's dark paved streets shrouded in mist. Through filters of red dust, I imagine his fog-tainted whispers,
‘Catch me if you can?!'
But this is not London, this is far from Afghanistan ... though red dust fills the air that is occupied by Osama Bin Laden's phantom and George Bush Jnr has got everybody by the tongue.

In East Berlin, I lost my fear of the dark, as easily as someone who might lose their passport or a shade of identity that has defined them for so long. I did not hear any whispers here. I met Nick Cave's stick-insect babies fingering the grey palette of the streets; every shade of grey was alive! The kill-zones were left bare, these blocks of dirt where the landmines had been removed like an unfinished pock-marked canvas of Western Desert dot-paintings. Boundary Street, West End, was our Berlin Wall, lavish signs depicting the redundancy of ghosts.

Concrete sentinels stand to attention on both sides of Karl Marx Allee. The old headquarters of
these
secrets and
those
secrets, reminding me of the midden-mounds back home, shell upon shell, where the great chiefs once feasted, discarding the charges of their hunger. In East Berlin, I began to renovate my Dreamtime, stripping the veneer of my engine room and all the skins of my past. A journalist welcomed me home(?)
‘If you have one drop of German blood, you are ALL German!'
And it was as casual and as sure as being black, like I'd never left the placebo of Boundary Street.

From Boundary Street, West End, to the Berlin Wall, East Germany, entropy caught me. Now, the atmosphere of Communist ‘curfews' are lost, especially when you step into an American-franchise 24-hour service station with 30 gas pumps and microwave tacos. I wanted to taste so much more! Walls and boundaries are the blemishes of our history and the flavour is generic. We are all given band-aids to place over the wounds of our ancestors; used band-aids will be the bookmarks of my history. I was looking for something in Berlin, but a colleague told me I should just relax and have another drink before I go. I'm not going to find it.
‘When the Communists left, they took the barb-wire, they took the missiles, they took the tanks. And the ghosts of our loved ones they had killed.'

On Boundary Street, the police painted the outline of a homeless man's body on the pavement where it stayed until it was overpowered by the shadow of a stylish townhouse complex

Fireworks shoot from retired gun-nests in celebration of an infamous bridge and its macabre role during the Cold War

On a dank afternoon, an old tribal woman, shrouded in society's skin, raised a heavy head and shook the silt in Brunswick Street Mall. She peppered a weary audience with a volley of hard moans. Peak-hour traffic was forced into a saunter of whispers. Joe Public don't know how to relate to tribal people, and now there was one weaving a dreaming-throat at them, almost alien in this occupied land. Sitting in a bar with my eyes closed, I pictured a cloud of red earth spiralling from pursed, deep-purple lips. With my eyes closed, I actually noticed the sudden cackle of crows. Dark birds gathering above, whining along in the grey-cloud drizzle, mimics to the haunting chant of an old tribal woman. ‘Smoke?' she asked the audience, ‘You got a smoke for me?' breaking into a howl that fed a low rhythmic pulse. Her eyes swept the domain, and I'm sure, right then, she cursed us all.

My bedroom back at my parents' house is a cemetery for virtual-reality pets. Laptop, palm-top, mini-disc recording equipment, cameras, guitars—all these things that I thought years ago would help me to write ... but no, when you're in the field all you need is a reliable pen, plenty of notepads and a good dictionary. Maybe I'm still rigging those gadgets trying to catch some whispers?

Travelling around the place, experiencing the darkness of different hemispheres, I lost my fear of night. Living on the Brisbane River, I can attest that it has its own sirens, like those in the old Greek classics, and their songs at night helped me write and showed me that night can't sit still on the tide.

Living back in Tigerland, the only whispers I hear in the night are on the breath of my little boy when he mumbles to the spirits that playfully encroach upon his dreamtime.

When we smoke the houses that our loved ones have lived in, and say ‘Yenandi' in the old tongue, we're not evicting them from this plain, but in the smoke, we're ensuring their whispers continue the journey beyond ... beyond this secular world.

From my balcony I can read a strong poem that the moon has pasted on the river. Everything is quiet. Now and then, a wave breaks the message, temporarily changing the font from
bold
to
italics.
The moon in its crescent appearance is the precision blade of a Shaolin warrior. I'm concerned that if I gaze too long, I may carelessly jag my retinas on its razor points, pierced globes adding vitreous humor into this serious stretch of river. A mullet leaps from the water and reconstructs the moon's message; it is now the sound of one silver hand clapping. Above, an anonymous comet breaches the sky a small eternity, but shooting stars don't have the recoil of a poem executed in the lull of moon fire.

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