WATCHING THE AUTUMN SEEPING IN

Found myself gazing a few hours back from the veranda at red grapes still under net across there by the kangaroo coppice and then spotted those Smart family orchard remnants being inched down the creekline by the natural plasticine clay flow and then I realised how I should acknowledge the dancing eucalypts right up the front, with their limbs falling off from awkward poses from the beginning of last winter to vintage a few weeks back in real scant dirt on slab ironstone. Sorry Darl, just dropped off for vintage. That was very confronting and scary weather. So these tatty babes need all the stouts of winter. Everything's trying to stay alive wherever it can. Some choose a hard spot.

To me they look like a shattered Picasso by Dali, one cruel man chewing out another's cruel art. They have none of the decrepit wartime depression humane honesty than you find, say, in the Moulin Rouge posters of those days. Yurp. Then I look at the Bernard Smart bicycle in the shed and sleep smug in the know that Picasso woulda never painted another bull if he'd spent a few moments bowing at the tyres of this enraged toro. That prick Picasso deserved to be painted by Dali.

Evenings like these I spin round the other way and imagine what it'd be like to skim the trees from here to Mount Bold at about 500' and Mach 0.6 ... need a little Macchi fighter-trainer ... that's Peregrine country over there ... we'd have to go through real slow a day or so earlier and give 'em all a brochure about coming through faster than they can. Talk to the kiddies coming home from Killing Starlings III. Maybe they'll be reluctant to give us the nod. More I think of it, nah. Give them cameras. If we're real polite they might agree to return images we want in exchange for serious Raptor Restaurant access to what those feathered killers on The Up call 'Down Meat.' We are Down Meat. Probly be cool as long we don't put it too close to their school.

all photos©Philip White