Georgina Woods is an environmental activist from Newcastle, Australia -- the biggest coal exporting port in the world. She is a founding member of Rising Tide Newcastle, a grassroots climate change action group that fights coal industry expansion in the Valley she calls home. She has an unfashionable interest in protecting and celebrating biodiversity and everything that is alive, and an equally unfashionable fascination with Ezra Pound, about whom she has recently written a PhD thesis. She loves humans in person, but is confused and frightened by them in groups. For links: http://www.risingtide.org.au For events: Camp for Climate Action Australia. 10th-15th July. Newcastle, Australia. http://www.climatecamp.org.au

View from Newcastle, NSW, 2006 (or, a congregation of vapours)
by Georgina Woods
          
A native bee lit
in an urban garden this evening.
Elsewhere,
entomologists wade knee-deep
in frozen monarch butterflies.      

Senator Heffernan stands
in a paddock of roasted mutton lumps,
(20,000 of them dead),
 on the hottest day, of the hottest year
 of the hottest decade. (Graham Parton, Junee farmer)  
It buckled the rail lines,
blacked our blazing suburbs,
and charred thru bush and paddock:

"It was a bugger of a day, mate"      

It isn't wet in Sydney, and six countries with a lot to lose
(Campbell is there, but Heff's still in ruinous Junee)
come together, smiling and cooperative ... and doing nothing.

 "It just came in such a rush," in the Pilbara that same day,
a wall of water. Just such a rush..."

and we went all day without a demonstration of contrition.  

A five-metre whale swims up the Thames,
bleeding into the cold gravy.
If the Easter Islanders had seen that,
 they may have proceeded
 with more care.       

No one under sixty ever felt heat like this
   in Adelaide today.
Electricity consumption surged;
and the heat grew, and
the power surged       
andtheheatgrew
andthepowerandtheheatandpower.

And Dr. Pearlman, AO, has been made redundant for temerity
 - yes Minister, there is more CO2 in the atmosphere
we might need to- 
On Valentine's Eve,
Rio is passing sweets and flattering notes
to Senator Campbell
 - why not save the forests, Minister?  (ha ha)
 - no need to waste     paper
Our copy is your copy.

‘Cross river from the Carrington loader,
the prawners put their boats on the hard
and reminisce over beer.   (sorry ...  no women on a Sunday, love.)
Dead jellyfish sequin the river's edge,
and wiry fishers speculate about the drought.
 - They only come down river with the rains.    
 - You can't live off it these days;
  one or two boxes aren't worth the diesel.

But from Carrington and Kooragang,
Sincere Pisces, Global Triumph and Fortune Lady,
bleeding rust and bilge water, carry on undeterred.

(The prawners knock-off early for a pint at the Boatrower's.)

For want of a cold upwelling, the Gulf Stream slowed.
For want of a gulf stream, Europe froze.
And the old dope won't let go.
Stubborn old crank just keeps on smoking, after all his teeth have fallen out,
and his children vexed to nightmare,
in these narrowing gyres.

That sound keeping pacific kids awake all night,
 is the drip drip drip of the cryosphere.
Their mothers try to soothe them with brackish water,
while fewer and fewer phytoplankton,    
like canaries,
get about in the warmer currents.
     
The Bellinger broke its banks and sprawled through the rainbow country.
It peaked yesterday at seven metres...      
 ... seven metres deeper in a century or so
when Greenland is a reef complex and Nukufetau and Nanumea
are forgotten stories of the Pacific diaspora.

As our houses go under,
Ocean Cosmos and Oriental Fortune glide over us,
and we ferry these follies about with us in rescue craft.

Upstream from Kalbarri, at Murchison House Station,      
water is pouring into buildings through their windows.    
 
From her boat, the Station Mistress ruminates:
- We're just floating, metres and metres,
all the houses have had it,
I mean there's no point...

- it's terrible, never seen anything like it (she said.)     

Larry's eye has passed over Innisfail,
and the banana, papaya and cane stalks couldn't get flatter.
"I'm in the hallway with mattresses on top of me and the kids."

>>just after the worst had passed (posted cairnsgirl)
>>he heard a truck in the driveway.        
>>and there stood a bloke Dad'd never seen innis life.
>>G'day mate. I'm a friend of a friend of amayta yrs
>> What kin i do fer ya?   

  This is the mob that dug the rock.
  This is the rock that loosed the gas, that filled the
   sky, that smothered the house that...

  (the beauty of the world,
  the paragon of animals
  hiding under the mattress from raining dust.)

More Ross River than Coffs has seen
 for a decade         
 the mozzies are that much thicker,
 and staying longer.
   
On this side of the world, Lockhart River is watching Monica        chase Larry across the Cape.

Here, and in other places, the great wet breaks free,
and claims back some of its vicinity.        
And we are coming, we reciprocate.       
This saltier water is heavy above you and your nieces and nephews, 
listening to muted bells and broken crystal.
It creeps higher,
to engulf them      (us)
in angry blue, like the deepest part of a bruise.

Weightless, they will move deeper, uncompelled,
free not to breathe and recollecting all-at-once,
in that light, (abuleia), in that soundlessness,

our fealty,
to each other,
and the places that have carried us.