A Moonah Landscape

In Moonah the cars have no manners

my mother lived here when it was apple orchards
Grandad was a market gardener
they midnight moved to Claremont
the train was a fast ride
boys would walk Mum home
miles of dirt road and trees night-shadowing lanes
most of the boys died in the war
Mum remembers all their names
unchosen rights of passage

Mum worked at the chocolate factory
Dad wooed Mum with chocolate and cinema
the Victorian filllms
I could have told them then
that they should never have got married.

After the war Moonah was full of cheap weatherboards,
the banks looking after the returned vets
Dad was a refugee
rescued from painting hubcaps in Melbourne
by his sister's first born's death
Tassie wanted policemen, commercial art ran in families.

Moonah was the golden mile when I was a child
it even had a library
now its got an arts centre for drowning moral
give the losers a choice to the drugs they can't afford
and teach the kids how to make puppets and play

Moonah's history is top soil deep
cadmium, lead, DDT...
when my parents moved to Moonah
the neighbours said
don't let your kids go to school there
and don't eat the fish
on their way back through our yard
from picking our apricots

then they found out Dad was a screw
so they stopped talking to us
and stopped walking through our yard
for a short cut

I hadn't been born yet
I had to be dragged out with forceps
Ken kept trying to walk 'home'
to the old police station

when he was older he said he'd
never come back to Tassie
'til Rich was out of jail
then we all got partners
and some of us had kids
and the ultimate bonfire
would be to burn our
Moonah house down

none of us had enough manners
to stay in Moonah
even IXL's moved on
no scum on the jam here anymore
just an art school.

© Liz Winfield