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The Tenant Creek Anthology:
"A Desert Song"
Copyright (c) 1988 by Paul A. L. Hall, all rights reserved.
A collection of poems by me, Paul Hall, written in Tenant
Creek, Australia in April of 1986.
The bus came through Tenant Creek earlier that week. I checked into the the youth
hostel and walked about five or ten miles out of town.
It didn't take long for the landscape to change from city to desert. I found a spot where I could spend a day working on poetry. My office for a day on the edge
between the out-back, as it's called in Australia, and the semi-urban environment of the town.
If you want to just walk straight out into the desert and not come back, you really have to be an indigenous native Australian, an Aboriginal. It takes about fifteen to twenty years to learn the skills to survive in the outback with nothing at all, not needing civilization.
The Aboriginal Australian is also adapted to the extreme environment. Not only the extreme heat of the day but the cold of the night.
In the past, and some places even now, a young male Aboriginal attains manhood by wandering alone a great distance in the desert unaided. If the young man returned at the end of one year, he was only then considered an adult and treated as such.
I suppose in those terms, the rest of us just never grew up. That's not a bad idea, though. To know that you're not completely mature until you can live at least a year completely on your own.
In the poem, I quip that I'm still quite equipped with industrial amenities: a cotton shirt from
Malaysia, a Bic ball point pen from New Zealand, white gloves to keep my hands from sun burn, blue jeans and so on.
So I don't get to stay. I couldn't do the one-year walkabout because it's not my
country, and if you don't know what you're doing, you can die in the out-back in
three hours.
It's a privilege just to visit. Maybe thousands of years from now the global citizens of a united Earth will be able to walk anywhere. Such a world would not have any other transportation. Otherwise they'd never really grow up.
Walking is a form of your own circadian rhythm. Walking is
a form of mental hygiene and is essential for health. It helps to realign
the vertebrae in your back and helps the kidneys flush negative emotion from
your bloodstream. Walking is so good for you it might be thought of as the
walk of Gibraltar.
About the Land
(click to see poem)
Changes Oft Come Slow
(click to see poem)
Beyond Man's Mental Hatred
(click to see poem)
Contribute Thus
(click to see poem)
A Swagman of the Stars
(click to see poem)
To Roam in Thought
Sequestered (click to see poem)
For Travelers to Feel
Relief (click to see poem)
Afforded Thus to Me
(click to see poem)
Desert Land Without the Sun
(click to see poem)
Tenant Creek After Midnight
(click to see poem)
When
You Least Expected (click to see poem)
--Fine art,
digital art,
music,
several voice
introductions by me about my work, articles about
my artwork
and other topics such as
sociology,
the cosmos,
economics,
education,
medicine,
mathematics,
poetry,
humor,
something I call premonitions,
and a series about covered bridges,
all by
yours truly, the webmaster, Paul A.L. Hall. There are
feedback,
a website search engine, and exhaustive
contents pages. Plus
my weblogs are
on site, an
art
school and
classes.
The Tenant Creek, Australia anthology of poems by Paul Hall
Copyright
(C) 1987 by Paul A. L. Hall. All rights reserved.
Australia, a desert song.
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