Part 5 (1/2)

Who Killed Brett Whiteley

Actually, it was Lloyd Rees killed off Brett Whiteley who couldnt live the promise of old age, the calm terror of it. Thats what Rees meant in his letter to Brett: carry the torch forward and something about being a warrior for Art. Brett, in fact, was skittled by a high powered mix of narcissism & clown. Forget what he had to, or couldnt leave behind & anything to do with High Seriousness.

He got caught up in lat.i.tudes of s.e.x where the Olgas loomed round as b.u.t.tocks. Brett became his own myth when he died, and effectively slammed the door on the 60s.

Maybe some other seascape, like Thera, suggestive of broken altars; looking down into the cratered harbour he might have seen beneath the lapis lazuli waters, an ivory scimitar held in the gaze of Portunus, perfectly preserved, snapped in two.

Sugarbag Carpenter

Them days all you needed was a blunt saw & an axe thrown in a

sack. If you could drive a 3” nail through a pound of b.u.t.ter

you got the job and thats a fact ask Bob the Builder

who shook the hand of Banjo Patterson though no-one believes him.

Theres not one finial or mullion round Boomi that hasnt

his name on it; he was there with the ox & swivel chain.

When he couldnt make a deaner he went b.u.mper shooting in the 30s

way back before the Great War the first of the street kids in Ultimo,

and his father (h.e.l.l tell you) saw electricity come to Tamworth in 1888.

From Tilba Tilba to Bondi, the last of the Sugarbag Carpenters.

Aunty Eve

who always kept the Aspidistras flying high up in her Georgian house on the windy Terrace from marble urns

had lipstick bomber pilot red & nails the colour of flame.

It was often elevenses in her lounge with Gordons served on a silver platter and THE GRAND HOTEL, DUNEDIN 1932 engraved

on the rim. Another stim dear?

from the mahogany sideboard repository to dozens of weighty 78 jazz records in brown paper jackets stacked like so many ossified flapjacks.