It gets saltier around here season by season. The water-places have dried out entirely and the white of salt has become whiter. It gleams. It is haunting.
If an isohaline is a line that carries us between points of comparable salinity in an ocean, then the pipes that carry freshwater through the wheatbelt, crossing salt wastes on small trestles and pylons, are interior or land-bound isohalines. I am often distracted by the nature of the “line”. What two points it connects might be in the first place, and the necessary curvature as we plot from one point on the earth to another, no matter how short.
Connected at various points to these pipelines are standpipes: the lifelines of the wheatbelt (and elsewhere). I remember when I was a kid going out with my uncle in the truck, with large square metal tanks on the back, to the nearest standpipe (maybe ten miles or so away) to collect water for carting back to the farm to refill the rainwater tanks in dry times. It was for drinking, washing, showering. The toilet was watered from a farm dam, but a month or two into summer would see the house-water supplies run dry. For my cousins, these labours were no doubt of minor interest, having to see to them summer after summer, but I always enjoyed accompanying my uncle. I didn’t do much. I held the rubber pipe in place as my uncle turned the tap/wheel, and the water gushed out. I placed the cover on tentatively before my uncle sealed it shut. Back at the farmhouse, the water would then have to be pumped into elevated tanks, high up on their stands; the largest stand was fenced in by one of my cousins to house his canaries.
Later, as a young bloke doing itinerant work in the country, I didn’t find carting water such an interesting thing. Just hard, necessary work.
Last week I was driving a back road along the Avon River with Tracy and Tim, and as I sometimes do, I stopped the car beneath a standpipe. Tim loves it. He is obsessed with standpipes, these rural life-sustainers... he fills pages with drawings of them. Ironically, they look something like images of oil-wells filling Texas: well after well after well. These don’t quite carry that horror, though. Not in intent, anyway. But the images are terrifying. The cumulative impact of the “mundane”: the total occupation of space. A lexicography. A perspective. A flattening or ironing out of depth of field. Even the “white” between the standpipe images is traumatised by their exponential presence. Colonisation is sequencing. They become close points which are joined by intense, variegated lines. They challenge perspective and functionality: seeing is belonging and belonging is rarely if ever linear.
Anyway, as we sat in the car, Tracy remarked on the letterbox next to the standpipe. Strangely, even after years, we’d never discussed how a standpipe functions. She rightly adduced that it was for recording the water taken: the accounts are kept by shires and it’s an honesty system. You note how much you’ve taken (by reading the meter), and pay for it later. Tim loved the idea. These signifiers on the roadside have letterboxes where the narrative, the story of their watering is told — and by different voices.
Wherever we drive, Tim counts standpipes — we look out for them. We can map large areas of the wheatbelt by standpipes, and where the pipelines go, where the freshwater flows over the salty wastes. Yesterday, as we drove home from Northam, he asked if we could pull over at the Spencer’s Brook standpipe. We did, and I took a few photos.
The position of the sun dictated the angle/s. I took one face-on with the line of the pipe aligning with the verticals on the crosshairs of the view. Lines hiding lines. And note the background — all rotates around the fulcrum, the axis of the pipe. Lines of road, fence, instructions, letterbox, trees, are taken into its simple, spatially minute starting point. Trigger of a lexicography.Mind you, you could just as easily drive past and not notice it at all, but gain an impression of the road, the fence, the trees... But once you know it is there, and once its “offerings” become life-sustaining, essential, or at least necessary or desirable, it is the centrepiece. It becomes bigger than a big place. Out in salt places, a standpipe ironises and overwhelms the salt, the vista of dead trees or the absence of trees. It is encapsulated, contained... channelled fresh water. And it is flow. Controlled flow. I will take a photo of standpipe out in a salt waste when I get the chance. Ghost/phantom limb... not. Haunting... likely. It’s startling once you appreciate its import. It’s such a contradiction that it makes reference to symbolism redundant. It transcends symbolism.
Oh, as an aside, a standpipe is called a “colonne d’alimentation” in French. Here, among the salt angst of the wheatbelt, there are no sonnets of correspondences. When one tries to write them, the correspondences come unstuck. One attempts to write between the languages of imperialism, or one stays trapped in them. The glints out of the salt are fox eyes and/or broken glass. The standpipes are “pitiless”. We can’t begin with Baudelaire:
La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles:”
[The living pillars of Nature’s temple
Occasionally unleash muddled remarks.]
(from "Correspondances" http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1075/)
I have gone for “remarks” rather than “words” or “speech” as the land is re–marked by each standpipe, and yet they remain so hidden in their openness. People drive by time and time again and don’t notice them, if they are not part of their lives. At least this is what I have found with so many of those who have travelled with me.
Tim never misses one. He is sensitised to their presence. He relies on them. The benevolence of availability, the “posting” of what is owing (recording what taken, signing off on the deal in the absence of an official), ultimately the “rights of property” held by the state that the landowner might partake to build his/her own profit, that it might feed back to the state and increase its strength.
Last winter I watched a shire truck with a huge spray-tank on the back, using the standpipe going out of town towards Quairading to embody the poisonous swill — to mix the herbicide with the necessary quantity of water. The standpipe’s rubber hose was deep inside the spray tank. The next user unwittingly dips the same hose into their tank for fresh household drinking water. Not that many would see it as a problem. It’s a spray-crazy shire. Standpipes are also flagpoles. From the taps flowing with scheme water made potable for us all... no matter how isolated, we are “assimilated”. That’s terror.
Yesterday was Invasion Day in Australia. I lamented. How many flags can people stick on their cars and why do their drives look so aggressive? And why is it not uncommon to find “If you don’t love Australia, leave it” stickers on their back windows? Last night I watched Ten Canoes. (On Ten Canoes: http://www.tencanoes.com.au/tencanoes/ . I hope some of the Australian flag wavers did as well. Likely, they were watching the fireworks down in the city — polluting the Swan River with fallout, and putting the bushland of King’s Park at risk of incineration. The price of leisure. “Leisure” will consume the planet to its last drop. Computers, light bulbs, television. Unacceptable. Complicit. It torments me. And poets will play their fiddles as the world burns, convincing us necessary music is being made.
Now, as it’s approaching midnight, I will return to reading James King’s William Cowper: A Biography (Duke University Press, 1986, Durham). On Cowper: http://www.bartleby.com/221/0401.html
John Kinsella
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