Craig Smith

Quote from Les Murray: It has taken me this long to get some idea of what the other people are thinking. I used to refer to them as the humans, you know - 'what are the humans thinking about' - seeing myself as a bit of a stranger to the human race and trying to work it out.

I arrived home in Newcastle late last night and when I woke (late) this morning my family had already gone off in their own directions for the day. My work travels from the week owed me time in lieu, so I take my leave now (today), wipe sleep from my eyes and walk to the ferry on the harbour.

The little olive and khaki-toned tub chugs across the Hunter River, blending in its wake the sparkle of blue sky mirror into a milky froth as if a centrifuge were harvesting foam from shimmer to later be collected and pressed against the horizon in a smudge of faded mountain or pending cloud arrangement.

A memory from the past, driving through Hunter Street past a war memorial. My daughter, thirteen, asked if the statue was wearing khaki and then my son, three, said car key, the soldier has a car key, and he thought it was a terrific joke.

Reading through some e-mails before butting up against the Stockton shoreline, I see one from a chap who runs an on-again off-again pirate radio station across Newcastle, 89.3 FM. The other week I sent him two recent tracks I'd finished and he put them on rotation. It turns out, from this e-mail, that one of the tracks has been receiving a lot of positive feedback from an online community of 89.3 enthusiasts and he's cueing it up every other hour.

Twenty-something years on from when the astronaut placed his and the angel's baby in one of his space suits just before a white flash rendered finale we meet a woman living in a heat haze desertscape. She is looking against the horizon for her partner, who wandered off days ago from their dwindling community of tent folk to look for water.

Stockton seems a little closer to the sun than Newcastle, which is foolish as the area is visibly lower but it is the abundance of sand and the way the peninsula interpolates beach into city with increasing resonance until only endless ivory dunes remain, beyond name or map designation, that makes it feel particularly solar.

This runs counter to the many occasions I have considered that moon and beach are analogies for one another. The sun is not a beach although of course its body creates sand. At one stage the moon would have been a droplet of ice floating towards the sun until an atomic greeting furnaced it into a big ball of chalky sand.

My hair has grown too long in the wrong direction so I walk down the main street of Stockton to find a barber. On the way I see a charity clothing store that has a display in its window of white plates with Sweet Peas painted on, a teapot nestled within a royal blue crotched cosy and, what sends me inside, a small plastic portable radio. The elderly man serving shows me how it turns on and generously pops a couple of new batteries in it.

I figure the radio on the street and tune it between bands of static to pick up ghost monologues and AM strings. This is the first time in how many years I have held music in my hand without the potential of a phone call coming in, but of course like a well-timed punchline I then hear the tut-tut-tut signal interference through the speaker as my phone receives a text message.

From 'Portrait Of The Autist As A New World Driver' where Les Murray describes how A car is also a high speed hermitage, questioning who would put in a telephone, that merciless foot-in-the-door of realities.

And, Under the overcoming undimishing sky you are barely supervised: you can let out language to exercise.

Exercise is one thing, but the perfection of it is something else. That's what I keep returning to, why this form of literary writing for those within this spectrum of emotional and sensory sensitivity. It is not coincidence that the two Australian authors of the present generation deemed most likely to win a Nobel Prize have both been aligned with autism.

Riddle: consider what made John Maxwell Coetzee say that Murray is 'not a poet of the inner life', that he 'instead relies on an acute sensitivity to sensory impressions and an extraordinary capacity to articulate them', and the relationship between this comment and the manner in which both Coetzee (now a longterm resident of Australia), Murray and Murnane have all been referred to as, quote, a little bit autistic (never the full diagnosis, always on the border districts).

Looking for her partner, the woman applies her dust filtration apparatus and walks into the desert where, after a half-day trek, she comes across a small grove of flowers. They are paper brittle natives, nothing out of the ordinary, but the grove structure is unique, a walled hemisphere of stepped foliage, feathered salt that masks a drop in temperature sourced from behind.

Eager for some food I push through the plastic blinds of a fish and chip shop and order some battered whiting. Sitting and waiting outside I try to tune the radio in to 89.3 but I'm unsure whether I've got a clear signal and I'm listening to a piece of experimental post-rock art noise or whether it's just detuned hiss. Either way it sounds like my sort of thing so I set the volume to a considerately low public level and enjoy.

After lunch (soft white fillet reuleaux triangles folding and separating) I walk down a pebblecrete arcade and spot a barber shop beside a tobacconists. I head in and get shown straight to a seat where a young man just out of high school asks me what I'd like (I put my hands out in a pleading fashion, whatever it takes to make me look my age in a non-ridiculous manner, but where should the clippers take their lead from the scissors, just do your best).

Asked what I do for work I mention autism and my barber nods, I know a bit about that, he says. My girlfriend and I, we took an online test the other week and if you scored eighty you probably had autism. I scored around sixty, my girlfriend got over one hundred.

He said that he personally has an ADHD diagnosis with perhaps a few autistic traits. What sort of traits - well I talk a lot, he says. And I kind of daydream I guess.

My girlfriend though, he says, she's an accountant. He says I remember when we first went to meet my family at someone's house for lunch, my girlfriend cried on the way there, she was so nervous. And she doesn't like watching movies because she thinks they're all cruel, the characters, it doesn't matter if it's a comedy or action.

From 'It Allows a Portrait in Line-Scan at Fifteen' where Murray talks about his son who used to attend the same school I taught at for many years: He has forgotten nothing, and remembers the precise quality of experiences.

What if the woman pushes her dust filtration mask back and wedges her body between shafts of paper leaf and wall-dusted melaleuca to find a hole in the ground. She can hear a shout wet with reverberation - help. It is her partner.

She fashions a rope from twisted wonga wonga and lowers it down a long, long way.

I walk out to the breakwater and look across the channel to the opposite breakwater on Newcastle's peninsula that extends out beyond Nobby's lighthouse. This is the first time I have stood on the Stockton side after having looked out at it for how many years.

There is a shipwreck, the Adolphe, cast against the rocks two-thirds of the way towards the breakwater endpoint. A metal plaque reads that it was built in Dunkirk in 1902, a French ship, and was only two years old when it sailed from Antwerp to Newcastle and, a word I've not read before in this context - foundered - on the oyster bank at the mouth of the harbour.

Looking down at the spinal remnants of the Adolphe, like the skeletal remnants of a gutted length of whiting, I think of Les Murray's major novel in verse 'Fredy Neptune'.

The major plot catalyst occurs ten stanzas in, a tragic violent event observed by the protagonist (a group of women in Turkey, during World War I, being burned to death) which results in the protagonist, huddled in the sick bed of a ship, losing his sense of touch. His body is rendered white and numb and is assumed by those around him to be a form of leprosy.

He is put ashore quickly and left on the coastal flanks of Turkey to beg and survive (A bad place for a Dungog man, waiting for bits to rot off him). But of course he is not leprotic, he is traumatised. Our protagonist has witnessed an event that has caused him to feel it on and in his body so intensely that he is no longer receptive to external stimuli.

His fellow sailors witnessed the same event but were not reported to have suffered in the same way.

What is the internal drive for the emotionally sensitive soul to render the world in beatific language. We know from neuroscience that reading turns the same lights on in the brain that experience does - it simulates, synthesises, the act of living.

And if reading is a surrogate for living, then what is writing but a way to daydream concretely. To remember through representation, marked by lines on a page, in ways not accessible by way of any other medium, forged in isolation, safe from social harm (a good place for a Dungog man).

On the beach near the breakwater now, not the side of the beach that is rapidly slipping into the ocean, the other side where dogs tumble over mounds of coastal spinifex, I sit with the radio and try 89.3 again and get a stronger signal this time, still weak but with more form. There are beats, those are certain.

While the woman is down in the cavern with her partner he shows her a miracle. There is a lake down there, unheard of to see a full body of water in this age. She bathes in the underground waters and feels something change within. A voice speaks between her bones. After many hours they climb back out to the surface.

When Les Murray was invited to give a poetry reading at a bowling club in Taree in early 1988 it was a moment for the local son now national literary hero to enjoy a victory lap on his home return. What he didn't anticipate was a former classmate cheerfully greeting him after the reading by reminding him of one of the cruel nicknames she had given him during their school years.

Within days Murray is barely functional. His physical sensory system is topsy-turvy and his emotional and cognitive world is fractured. Like the protagonist from Fredy Neptune he experiences an overwhelm of pain that is replaced by a dissociated state which, as recorded in his memoir 'Killing the Black Dog', manifests as depression.

From Fredy Neptune, 'No pain, nor pleasure. Only a ghost of that sense that tells you where the parts of you are' and 'It isn't hard to do from memory: curse when burnt, hunch when you see it's cold, don't hammer fingers or let your leg bend to the pop! stage'.

When Coetzee said that Murray is not a poet of the inner life but rather focuses on sensory impressions, I want to respond and note that it is through sensory impressions that the inner life is revealed. Emotional sensitivity is worn on the skin.

Taking the ferry back to Newcastle, little plastic radio in hand, I have a mind to take a swim at the Bogey Hole to round off the afternoon before I head home.

After a time the woman and her partner realise she is pregnant. This is another miracle as natural pregnancies have not been recorded within the fictional structures of this narrative for generations. The woman herself was of course birthed into being some twenty years ago via nature hacking when the witch and the hacker established a way for her parents, the astronaut and the angel, to imagine new life.

Which means, doesn't it, that it isn't a stretch to consider that the weapon the hacker initiated that created that vaporising whiteness from which the woman, the baby in the astronaut suit, was protected from, was also what created that lake of life giving water beneath the desert sands. It gave life to the daughter of the astronaut and the angel and now it has given her too the capacity to generate life.

Was this how the hacker and the witch ethically justified the weapon, to defeat the war effort by erasing everybody as a sacrifice for beginning life again.

Les Murray opens nearly all of his books with the same line - To the glory of God.

And what was it that Jesus said in Matthew 10 - Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.

The Bogey Hole, convict built in the early days of British imperial rule, is a shard of opalescent sky pressed deep into the earth, into the presiding caves, of the coastal shelf. There are around two dozen other bathers playing in the water, but I am only nominally aware they exist as I float at the edges of the pool beside my radio receiving full reception here. And hey, what do you know - they're playing my song.