Quilting the Armour

Sun everywhere, and shadow. Swamplight, aquarium light

turning the far-off fields almost Kelly green, bullion-fringed.

Stitch of tracer gold. Crystallised moments you see, hear things clear:

the end, and past too. Shack, hill, horses, watertank, windmill —

A garden paradise floating in a basement furniture store.

Larrikin heels on wood varnish, your home a museum, helmet

an archive box holding seventy years — of yarn, furphy, flashness,

spree & lore banging about in black steel — everything but the skull.

That’s all you can do: bed a boy’s hard head, that’s not even there.

Cushion it: in blue borage, starfish-shaped, its leaves taste of cucumber;

in sky, woadmyth, in sea and past — ultramarine (see how Morgan’s

Lookout’s a mullock heap now, that armour a lapis mine shaft) —

No ground’s safe. Send him in sea, which he only ever saw in chains,

for water knows: soon as you’re set it shifts; the rules change, are ransomed new,

the body folds down to flat product & the picture plane tilts, heaving

horizons up close — there’s flame robin on the fencepost! — stunning

What you’ve already sensed: He’s gone, and he will go. And so will you.

Dan’s roasted dead, Ned in a new box near mum, fixed up & fed — for hanging.

They’ll shave his head of every precious hair, drown it in plaster — for

science & giggles. The loss no less for not having happened yet.

So back, back — past them sledgehammering metal into myth,

brave boys, over the green messmate log, making the black guard strong;

it’s not their strength — prison-hulked, rock-breaking — holds your eyes but

one ear’s cartilage, the sun made somehow holy through it, cherry red,

& you were Bill’s — on Bill’s selection — & that is Tom’s — & wrong.

Hold to it now: in Masonite, ganged wood fibres fired tight. White sheets

at day, white-footed in cold night. In Ripolin, to show it clean,

as it is. Bullock Creek: him granite in red loam, bad whiskey &

Less gold, clanging & banging all that ship’s ballast pig-iron

into a door — and we went through it, me & Tom. Made a go of it.

Ned, though. He wanted to see the thing out. He was the thing,

is the thing, in the bush and of it, come out of all the traps of time —

Sun, still, always — love, hate, horror in buck set — hand suspended

over inquests of axe, blade, needle, share — and he did, my Ned, my drowned

brother, he saw himself out — of Old Melbourne Gaol, Glenrowan, Greta,

Wombat & Woolshed — to Heide, to Nhill — and ended, & restarted there.

No, back again, to a farther start — past miled creeks to the swollen Hughes

where, at ten, he fished out the Shelton boy, & fame. That day, I swear,

him skinny, shivering with light, & seen, & loved — named — he deserved it all.

Go back, brother, if you dare: meet me at Avenel.

Commissioned in partnership with National Gallery of Australia in response to a work of art in the national collection, Nam Le selected Sidney Nolan’s painting, Quilting the armour (1947).