Coral Hull

The smooth pale hand of lightning shuddered through the clouds. Was it trying to give me some signal from itself or merely pleading; I am lightning, god I am the shuddering trembling sheets of lightning? 'It's okay to be what you are,' I said. The electrical current came jolting through the brain of the sky, the sheet white light darkening the green open hand of sand palm, lighting its blackness up like a giddy spider. Such lightning all the way from the Equatorial hot belt of the planet couldn't help but be itself. Throughout the day it had backed-up sweltering above the mangroves, stickying the atmosphere from here to the Annaburroo Billabong, where the pale lotus lilies rolled around their droplets. The sky shuddered the way my heart did, when I saw you looking at me. At first my eyes were seriously with hard acting, but too quickly fell into romantic love's sugary depth. This would never happen out along a beach in a landscape. I was here to relearn love's first lesson. You asked, that look you just gave me, do you really mean it? I guess I did in spite of myself, although you didn't deserve it, but what the heck. I'm making no apologies for my ability at tenderness, or even the absence of it, or even the disappointing lack of rain, or the fact that lust joins hands with death and including but not ending with, the dreadful almost maddening weakness of the shuddering lightning. All night it tries to tuck us in but perpetually withdraws the sheet. I turned to him, 'you can love me if you want to, it's really up to you.' My thoughts turned rocky like the beach. I was heading out of the Darwin harbour, a lapwing intent upon its dreaming. In the end he didn't love anything, and I flew away to be with the crowd of flying foxes, common little ferals just back from Jabiluka, gripping to palms with clean moist claws and stinking up the place with their swabbing brown eyes and bandy brown winged legs. A lone fox flew amongst the palms. 'Go and find the others,' I said. 'If this night wont wrap its arms around you, find safety in numbers, regenerate, be fruitful.' Chistmas beetles shudder and flee the branches. Mosquites roaring upon the night, singing blood before the sun has set. The lightning chains are connecting the hands of the big clouds. It's jagged string around their flat white palms and billowing knuckles. All the sleazy month I've been out in my car, cruising for the viscous chains but it turns out to be another false alarm. Instead flat white sheets with the flicker of an orgasm. The old beach casuarinas and pandanus standing in begin to shake and sway on the edge of the dunes, go on, go on, go on. The black cockatoos long cries into the building thunderheads south of the equator, tell of a strange land. The clouds spend all afternoon building themselves up into opaline structures. I'm flapping my arms under their breeze, the cockatoos cries have given me wing. The sheets are lifting, parting the clouds like flickering hands. Go on, go on, bring you energy to the waiting land, that is still now in anticipation of the big wet rain. The monsoon is solid curtains of water, blanketing the rapid creek. Crocodiles moving into the tide to feed are still and relaxed, a sea snake spirals to great depths. The whole town is torrential. Before rain the land has gone as far into the earth as it can get, into its flat dry hope, more receptive up north in the month of October. It is so needy that it aches with its lips parched dry. It has no shame in its need to be fulfilled. Movement occurs in the big leaves with the first few drops. The spiders slip through and enter houses for the night. The mangroves oily heads open and begin to seed along the beach where the tide comes in, thunder washes up its back. The ocean further out is jamming with light and sound. Tonight I walk my dogs in the big storm. Frogs are shouting the wet wet, the wet wet, the wet wet. It's opaline.

 

 

This is from the tropics. Yesterday I was approached by a man on the Jumping Crocodile Cruise along the Adelaide River. He kept staring at me as though he had suddenly seen a whole lot of himself positioned like crows hanging out along an electric wire. He approached. Finally, I said, can I help you? and he said he couldn't help it. We couldn't help but be here and this was true, but our reasons were different. It was the 'original' cruise like Streets Cornetto and Smith Crisps (both on sale) and with a tacky ornamental 1800's American piano rolling out the tune in the cruise coffee lounge. He stared me down as the crocodiles came through the water towards the boat, to receive pieces of pigs head and kangaroo spine blooded-up and dangled on chains. The first 'jumper' was Hannibal the Cannibal, over one hundred years old and the biggest god damn crocodile you'll ever see, lovely sexy lady! Huh, who said that? What is this crap! He came towards me in his T-shirt and thongs, as I tried to shield my face against the Darwin sunlight. Later on there was a smaller croc the size of a ruler, jumping for a t-spoon of mince on a thin thread. They were training them, making a circus out of a river. To think he had brought his family here to watch this spectacle, no matter how attractive he thought he was to me. I said, it takes more than a pretty smile to shake my boat. Then a tremendous splash like an uproar, down below the sky parade of the whistling kites here for the wet. A crocodile swallowed a beer can that someone had thrown, and tragically belly dived back into the river perhaps after realising her big mistake, the fresh aluminum aching in her gut. The skipper of the ship spoke into the loud microphone and said, some very stupid person has thrown a beer can and now that crocodile will die! Thank you, that very stupid person! Next week it would be a video camera, akubra hat, an esky. It was a strange atmosphere on and off the boat, where I feared the ground would open up and slash like teeth. Yet the Adelaide River ran brown wide and warm, allowing the breeze to sweep up my neck like a broad-rimmed hat, designed for cooling and condensation. I wondered what we look like to a landscape? On the way off the boat I saw my reflection in some shallow water down by the mangroves and Pandanus palms. I tried to see myself like he had seen me, but got distracted. On the way here, I had stopped to take a few photos of this big mother Pandanus. She marched across the open tropical woodland past the eucalyptus, spiking up the termite mounds. She was a bossy lady. I liked her spunk. She was okay for a plant, her hair awash with monsoon humidity, rough spikes. Soon the stripy Archer fish swam across my cheeks beyond the shade of the mangroves, golden brown. I'd like to have a perfect face like the moon when the sun lights it up in February. I would like to look back at earth with a similar kind of brightness and intensity. Instead what I saw was the bottom of a river, murky and undercurrent. There was this beat-up look around the mouth as if someone had bashed it in, or stubbed out a cigarette. My eyes looked mean somewhere, then sad, then lost, then they looked like nothing, simply reflection bloated with river fish. My mouth was a sound receiving the silence of the world. In the shade they were merciless event horizons, like green glass that is a little bit smashed. This place has a yellow water presence, reptiles moving along underneath the currents like big cats. Savagely, my face turned away from itself and tried to adopt the expression of a cloud. Where should I place myself in a landscape? Where do you position yourself in order to be part of it?

I walked down my driveway and was dive bombed by a big caramel grasshopper the size of my forearm. My hand reached down to grab the wrought iron gate. There was a bearded dragon lying across it. The bearded dragon lizard looked at me. I looked at the bearded dragon. It looked at me. Excuse me, I'd like to shut the gate now. Tasks take longer to complete in the tropics. More neighbours than down south to contend with. I was just about to slip on my shoe when a speckled gecko chased a fly out of it. Then a big six legged huntsman hopped like crazy through the louvers in the loungeroom. It almost fell in my soup. Fucken hell, look out! I dropped the phone. The huntsman was obviously in a hurry, having lost one leg per day for the past two days to the ghecko community on the front verandah. It must be hard being a spider with eight legs, let alone six. The geckos were merciless hunters. The rain is slashing through the leaves, chopping them to shreds. Those big leafy plants think that they can just grow all over the place in the humid air and sun and shade, proliferate like crazy, held together by their shallow roots, orchids, epiphytes and vines and fungi and remain here. The season has their thoughts on this. So you think you can stay in Darwin and get away with it. The equator speaks its instability and awesome energy from the waistline of the planet. Then when that big monsoon storm comes the trees get dressed up in their fragile gowns of leaves. They toss their shoulders around, their slender hands and dance like crazy all over the goddam garden, more wind than plant. I say make up your mind you crazy forest. Are you going or staying? I'm afraid if they go then I might as well go too. The table was blown away leaving a trembling rodent beneath before the eyes of the cat. That's the most unstable sky I've seen all season, purple clouds in misty ribbons spinning like firecrackers. When the first drop hit my arm I brushed it away like an insect. The sky is rushing along above the land and when it stops big buckets of straight down rain. Rain like wet hair furiously combed out and the head of a thick old mop dipped in dishwater just pounding the earth. The temperature has dropped by half. The ground sings, fuck you this is all for me. The plants hold onto their roots, their leafy braids. Dance like princes and princesses at a groovy nightspot. The green ants who bite potential intruders all day arses up and vicious are very quiet in their boxed leaves. They could drown in a tenth of a droplet. A black cockatoo talks to thunder. When the thunder replied its shuts up its little hard beak. It appears that rain like this is a very exciting thing. A frog that seems to remain in exactly the same position in my garden since I arrived here four weeks ago starts to scream out. Are you alright?, I ask. Darwin is clinging to the coast like a saturated fruitbat. Yeah, I guess so. A town so friendly that it replies. The big wind positions my voice then slams it into the driveway once, and finally throws it out to sea. The mighty cyclones are conspiring there.

The beach begins to take form by the roots of mangroves. Hidden complex ropes are muscling through sand, tying knots underground. To hold onto or seek moisture, they utilise salt. Some trees die from salt, the earth withers. But mangroves are salt snakes, taking the salt into their respiratory systems. There is a lot of salt across Australia. It's seeping up through the ground. We have dug for salt and found the country made of salt, and now we have found the marvelous at Lee Point: the amazing salt utilising trees, thank you, I'm pleased to have come out, even though it was hard to leave the house. Like straws sucking up or prodding sticks, after the quiet nagging of equatorial surf, the mangroves exploit salted leaves, stems. And the waves of salt, that have sucked out the body of the beach relentlessly, have left for the day with the great grey tide. The mangroves lift their roots and moan. The voice is salt, the dry crystal, in the eye of the speech. The tree forms the barrier that guards the living coast from cyclone. The heavy lengths of land are the side of a crocodile floating in mud, each step into the mangroves causes them to loom up, a crocodile's back. Sand, the bubbles of spit and grime from the hermit crabs. It is deep, shattered and always in a whisper, Australia. The Golden Oriale or my dry trouser legs rubbing together, the deep hum of time. It is not the individual object but the atmosphere that finally captures me. Indistinguishable, I can see the stretch of the Darwin harbour, like wet green arms hugging itself. I do not describe boats, think surfers, because there are none. Like details overlooked, the long wet haul of the box jelly fish has left the oceans empty of people. Australia is wrapped in coastline, the strings of stingers wrapped it up. We are fending off salt and wind from all angles. We have learnt the squint, the thin-lipped voice of blowflies trying to drink from our lips, the Aussie salute. We love the coast as it eats us, we retreat to the inland coasts of deserts. The sleepy long country basks like a skink on the rock of the earth. The wind hits the curve of my ears like its race and departure from empty shells. Beaches echo in the chamber of gristle and are finally released after seconds. For a moment, I heard everything that the wind had picked up from lengths of country, before the country resumed, and the beach settled into its routine movements. Here in Darwin it may never grow any more crowded. There is room for the heart to think and shriek. The dog dots zig-zag to cover the territory of maximum ground/maximum scent. Although they often do not know what direction to take, so that the bitch digs just like that, nothing else, and I write this. I am overwhelmed by this day. Soon my dog companions and I will be gone, like brilliant skyscapes that are never the same. I weep because it's so beautiful, and we don't know why. That is why I am a dot, a thinking dot who weeps at beaches. Today I'm filled with joy and all the beach is us. Sand suddenly horizontal, a gull shoots through an air current, leaving the facial skin tingling and empty, these transient meetings. And I weep a little for dots with faces like lenses, that only let in so much light. The fruit bat will never see this beach like me, and tonight I won't be here. We're lucky if we can see each other at all, and all thoughts after that are tricks or luxury, as this country explores my small territory. Australian coastline, I love my hair blown sideways and the surf in my other ear. Everything from the ocean is pushing at the coast, is delivering space from the sea, shouting SSsshhhh, sssshhhhhh. Through crystalised mangroves that do not budge, through the skeletons of crabs and lobsters, drowned mangrove roots and seeds of endless origin, the sad and empty shells. We do not know the shape of the life that inhabited them, again we cling to skeletons. The universe of waves is trying to break into my living heart, to take it apart, to salt its meat, until it is smaller than sand. We are so precious, my dry lips on my dogs blue forehead, the brave and frightened trip, the joy of expanse, the fear of an end. The black kite is a gliding dot. The mangroves huddled together buffed, along buffered coastline, the tangle against the universe of surf. The season is cloudless. My arse is dry inside my trousers, and my dogs tails, as joy rudders. There is so much sky you will not see back in Darwin. All this before you every day, that you will not see. Greedily, I want it all at once and always. The dogs and I on the vast beach, the tides ssshhhhhh sssshhhhhhhhh ssshhhhhh. Three happy dots with tongues. I love the crooked lines of surf, a crocodile's crooked teeth eating the coast, sand rippled and manipulated, the crocs back wet and salty. You know I love this land, where you can be a dot. And no matter how loud you shout—it's never much enough. 'Are ya's happy?' Binda's grin. The beach is a galloping dog.

The glistening drop of the cattle dog's eye, has not dropped from his head to quench the thirsty ants. Instead the desert watertank tap has dropped its water adjacent to the dog's dropped eye, as parallel moisture banks. The dog is as calm as shade at the end of the dry season. He's a shady low-down breed, a slink into cool spots beneath homesteads, like the retreat of the inland tiapan. The tap is thirsty ants, the weary dust that coats my lips like flies to drink and visiting birds that are insistent and silvery, such as the peewee. The old well-travelled dust has come from miles around to be moist here, beside this northern watertank. Binda is a name. He has caught my eye with his glistening droplet—Binda, deep pool of water. Meanwhile Kindi-kindling fire, is roughing up the red dust with her hop-back-side-jump, a unique kelpie move, ready for sheep interaction. Her border collie colouring, shocks the dust with black and white. Her hanging tongue is a barometer receptive to long high up summer rainfall, misty blankets stretched out on distant plains off the Stuart Highway. The clouds tip sideways and spill their tongues of vast mist onto the aching parchment. Revitalised land frogs sing beneath its moist breath resurrected behind the rocks. An amphibian is a mouth open to receive moisture. We are all receptive deserts before wetness. The giant cloudy thunderheads water the sweltering sections, selected plants and red hot stones that have baked. Even the tough spikes are moisture laden, vulnerable in their secret places where spikes turn soft and succulent. We can not know them as they plunge more inward. The rained upon land is far from any roadhouse, road or human, only seen by the dying lamb, the waiting crow, the dazed red cow. This watertank is a place where we can all stop to drink, our glad eyes plunge pools. We are all glad, seeking each other from eye to eye. We are moisture receptive beings, protecting ourselves from the limitless thirst of inland. We view the space through pools of moisture. If our eyes dropped out there would be no sight to speak off. Soon a crow's moist vision dips into the resting place, by the cattle dog's glistening blue grey eye, in the shade of the silver tap by the watertank. I place down a bottletop for the birds, each beak agape with its tiny thirst. My hands are blistered from a radiator geezer, placing water down for birds on the blistered dirt. A dog and tap, there was a dog and tap, this tap dripping like a tongue, the tongue dripping like a tap, close together in big space, in our joint loss of moisture, desire for water—dog and tap. The birds came to drink, the peewees and the zebra finches. Soon I will be gone, and the birds will turn on the wing and go back to their inland territories, and I will be gone north to the trembling thundery wet season. Soon I will be gone and the dogs will be gone with the birds, all their hanging tongues, beaks agape and fragile legs like firesticks, as the land burns on and is baked silly beneath the sun, and along the Stuart Highway we are all gone, but for a time the dog, tap and watertank are identified.

The baby water buffalo looked directly into my camera lens, shedding all its miseries, it was miserable in the bright wet hay, the harness and yoke distressing it, and the look of its mother in the next paddock, with the quiet desire to give her milk and her warm brown side, distressing it, the separation causing stress to them both, it is so pointless to harness an animal like the baby water buffalo, to break its tiny spirit, to destroy its infant happiness, which is its own freedom to express what it has come here for, and that is to be a water buffalo, in all its glorious presence, with all its instincts fulfilled, it did not come intentionally to the hell we have created for it, it did not come to say hello to the hell we have created for ourselves, the light in the yellow hay is steaming, the baby water buffaloes misery leaves for the sky as steam, but it can't fulfill the take-off it desires, instead it is left to deteriorate in the living body, ever nerve ending a pinprick of pain, until the walk up the finale ramp into the slaughterhouse, or a bullet to the brain after it has fulfilled its part in eco-tourism, for now its hide grows course and hard like its mothers, as he watches her dragged away by the big ring through her nose, the ring pierced through the nose of this huge beast, it should be against the law to drag them along by their tender noses, to rip the flesh inside the noses of the big herbivores, its a crime and a shame to see it, their rolling eyes and nostrils tenderised to blood, it seems that we can't help our attitude and it seems our fears and evil, as soon as something like a baby water buffalo arrives in the world, we hold it down and label it, in our loneliness and desire to accumulate power, we try to break it down to an object to be held captive, we prod it and stab and package it, to make it profitable and less like a sentient being, just so it will stay with us, but just look at these two, we turn everything we touch to sorrow.

He called me the snake woman. He said, 'I couldn't remember your name.' His mates saw me as the snake woman too. He had been talking about me behind my back, which is what you do with snakes. You might follow them for awhile, but you soon let them clear off over a rock at their own speed. Usually they are just trying to get away. It was the ones that remained behind that were a threat. There were snakes trapped inside woman's bodies who wanted to fuck men. We were walking along Mandourah Beach in Darwin. I had just lost my name. A shadow appeared on the sand where we walked. I slid my hips from side to side and hissed, 'I like that. I am a snake.' For weeks I had been observing reptiles, trying to understand what a crocodile dreams about. A crocodile's eyes shine even on a dull day. It is all part of their ability to perpetually smile. I touched his hand. 'Follow the snake woman then,' I said. I was completely distracted by myself. He hoped I wasn't offended and kissed my neck. It was okay that he thought this way about me. He didn't know me. It was just a label according to my potential threat to him. It was a very powerful and beautiful name, a dark and mysterious name, fitting for a woman like me. My nick name for him was Telly Tubby.

© by Coral Hull (Thylazine)
The photos on this page are also © by Coral Hull,
except for the last photo of Coral, © by Robert Milne.

Photo Captions (in order)

Dog, Tap and Watertank, Stuart Hwy, Northern Territory, AustraliaCrocodile

Crocodylus Farm, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia

Merten's Water Monitor, Litchfield National Park, Northern Territory, Australia

Pandanus Palm, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia

Dingo Fence, Coober Pedy, South Australia, Australia

South Alligator Wetlands, Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory, Australia

Devil's Marbles (Pirmiridi/Karlu Karlu), Northern Territory, Australia

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