The Strange and Shining.

Rottnest Island, quokkas, and poetry from Cath Drake.

Jet lag woke me at four, and the sun, and the loud unfamiliar birds. Browsing the internet through those early hours, I saw that the poet Cath Drake was reading that afternoon in Perth. My big sister walked me to the train station and I crossed the Swan River and scuttled from shadow to shadow through the intense heat to the cool interior of the The Moon Café.

My sister and I are remarkably alike, given that we’re polar opposites. Debs has four cupboards full of make-up; when I was in big boots and mohawk, she was in high heels and perm. She’s relentlessly chatty, loves clothes shopping and parties, is only still when she sleeps. But we finish each other’s sentences and match each other in our uncontrollable excitement at the things we love - and her next-door says that the house is full of laughter since I arrived.

Debs says that Perth is coming to the party for me. I’ve seen black swans on the Swan River; pelicans, galahs, lorikeets and white cockatoos; cormorants, curlews, and oystercatchers – bigger and brighter than their European version – I’ve seen quokkas, snake necked turtles, kangaroos. Today I’ll see koalas, and I hope to have the privilege of seeing a snake – the Waugal, according to the Noongar people, is the giver of life.

And people are coming to that party too, crowds of them - warm, loud and profoundly friendly – Ilsa and Sonya and Mel, Craig and Bobby and Dazzer, Cath and Kathy, Amy and Lisa and more, every person in every passing encounter - shop, dentist, bus, library, park or pavement, paused by the road.

And I am a person who likes to walk alone. Once, in Spain, I saw a two pet meerkats on a lilo floating down a bright river, chattering loudly with what might have been excitement, or perhaps more likely, fear. Sometimes, in the bright, sociable suburbs of Perth, I feel like a meerkat on a lilo.

But when I walked into The Moon Café, with its long bar crowded with bottles, its stage and its rainbow flags, I found my footing again. And to open the reading, a Welcome to Country which made me feel, for a moment, like we all belonged to this one moment in millennia of human history, to all the ages of this dizzingly ancient land.

More of that another time. Because now, I want to talk about quokkas.

And Cath Drake. Since the Moon Café, I’ve been reading her collection “The Shaking City” published with Seren in 2020. It’s unusually thick and accomplished for a first collection – and I read it slowly in these baking hot days of wild distractions. By the time I reach the second section – a sequence of fantastical and quotidian character portraits, each equally magical - I return to the first section, and find new narratives in each of the rich, dense yet accessible poems. It’s a collection which deserves to be more widely acclaimed – but it’s the third section – “Far From Home” – which comes alive for me in 30 degree heat, facebook full of pictures of the snow falling back home, Australian ravens wailing like babies or peacocks, or mating cats.

The day after the Cath Drake’s reading, I was due to visit Rottnest Island - or Wadjemup, the Noongar name of the island. It’s referred as ‘the place across the water where the spirits are’ - the resting place of the spirits, as well as the bodies of the Aboriginal men and boys who died in the island’s prison and forced labour camps between 1838 and 1931.

In her reading, Cath described how significant the island is for anybody raised in Perth – how quickly and drastically it has changed; how she loves it regardless. I was only on the island for five hours, and my engagement was brief, shallow, and wildly enthusiastic. I loved the speed and breeze of cycling down its tracks and deceptive hills. I loved the snorkelling; the fish like silver flames, the shy and sandy flounder. I loved the white beaches, the rough vegetation, the peeling gum trees and the old buildings; the gulls and oystercatchers. But most of all, I love the quokkas, sleeping in the shade near the shops, climbing into unattended bags, begging under benches, stealing ketchup from our table.

(I know they are ostensibly wild animals, and that mugging tourists and fearlessly stealing ketchup is not advisable. I know that whilst I followed all ethical guidelines when taking my quokka selfie, it isn’t enough to protect this over-visited island and its animals).

Here’s Cath’s poem – from “The Shaking City - about the less-developed island of her childhood - and of course, in the glass-bottomed bucket, and the eye it opens into an unseen, underwater world, we have a perfect metaphor for poetry; how it shows us that “there’s more than one world you can belong to/ and how easy to slip between them, unmoor your mind/ and live among the strange and shining”. I hope Cath’s poem alerts you to the strange and shining in your lives. I hope you enjoy the first, the cold blue skies, the snow.

Rubber dinghy with Glass-Bottom Bucket, Rottnest

by Cath Drake.

for bob

Take your home-made glass bottom bucket,

a certain uselessness, a disinterest in direction,

find a bay with patchwork reefs, far from people

and their things, wade into the cooling shallows,

lie across the rubber dinghy, lock the oars away

and let the current drift you slowly out of your depth.

Hold the bucket steady in the water, let it draw you in –

before long you won’t take your eyes off this porthole

into amniotic blue-green with its impossible detail.

The ruber is sun-warmed and fluid like water,

like the body as it softens into the tugging seabed:

the dinghy is a shadow on water, a cloud passing over.

All carries on underneath: wrasse jerk,

changing direction, a brush of whiting disperse,

then hovercraft stingray! Ah seaweed sways

in slow motion, crab claws rise with a change of current,

a pale stone on the sandy bottom is a flounder gliding.

Look up from the book it and it will only drag you back:

the sea’s surface is too opaque to bear,

its blur of dark and light is the rim of a sky

you want to be under. After you’re blown

into a cove, bumping on the sandy shallows,

minnows imagining they’re sharks in deep water,

grains of sand running with the tide, a tumbling shell,

long after you’re beached, as you stare

at the unfamiliar dry world, a transparent curtain

of currents, eying creatures, sea ribbons, reef,

coral will fall across your lids when you blink,

limbs streamlined, body held in tingling disbelief

that there’s more than one world you can belong to

and how easy to slip between them, unmoor your mind

and live among the strange and shining.