Allman Park is laid out geometrically after the flag of some forgotten or yet to be invented nation. The Fire Station just over the road, the Police Station next to that. Victoria Street with its twin lines of massive palms that carry in their name a memory of the Phoenicians. Tintern Road down the other flank, where one rainy day I saw the brick garage of the early childhood centre collapse into rubble with a sigh. On that corner you cannot help but think Abbey and then Wordsworth but after that there’s nowhere to go: Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. Norton Street runs between the two and that’s where I walk on Sunday mornings with my sons, looking for mice that infest the fragrant hedgerow beneath the coned agathis from which we take the dammar gum. It wasn’t until I went there for a tryst one purple dusk last autumn that I saw the park is an outpost of the country called Auracania, a raft detached perhaps aeons ago from Antarctica. The once and future kingdom of Auracania. The one I was there to meet did not come at the appointed time and then I knew she never would. I sat on the bench before the dry fountain for a while longer, not because I still expected her but in order to fix in my mind the passing shapes of that ambiguous hour. Auracania the place of conifers and shaggy beasts, some of whom might have been human. I glimpsed beneath the kauri a shadowy diprodon large as a rhinoceros. A palorchestes with claws and stunted trunk like a deformed elephant snuffled under the arbour for god knows what. A posse of sthenurine kangaroo with shortened flat faces and forward-looking eyes went by. The ghost of zaglossus, that echidna the size of a goat, feeding on armoured blattodea. Mihirung birds striding out, flightless and carnivorous, taller than moa. A goanna six metres long and slavering. I would not have you think these creatures came before my eyes like things of this world; only when I looked away did I seem to see them, only at the crucial moment of forgetting did they remember themselves—vast dim shapes like grey holes in the gathering dusk. Absences deeper than an ache in the heart, more monstrous than grief, further away than pain. Their strange remanence refracted through tears. Their cold extinction and their future bones. I wondered about passing over and joining them in the lacustrine sunshine of their yesteryears but it was not possible. Stupid even to try: as if delusion should replace reality. So I got up and slowly walked on home. Past automobiles and grimy shop windows, sheets of paper blowing in the wind. The bus stop that has been closed. I had not noticed before that you can see the crown of the agathis from my balcony. There on the skyline, just to the right of the steeple, the one glyphed with Sumerian cuneiform. At the blue hour, when I cannot sleep, I go out to sit and smoke and watch it firm against the lightening dark. Sometimes, not often, I hear a snarl and a scream, followed by distant braw bellowing as sarcophilus or thylacoleo takes a warredja returning to its burrow and eviscerates it beneath the gibbous moon. And then I smile because at such moments death means life and life means death and between them there is nothing to choose that has not already been chosen.
