'Fibrous Materials' and Chalice Mining

Interview: a poem

 

The local newspaper addresses

a series of questions to Chalice

about NOA (naturally occurring

asbestos) in ‘their’ Gonneville

Deposit (the roots of Julimar

Forest and environs). Answers

fire back without definition,

talking of ‘fibrous materials’

and management per ‘industry

best practice'. You can see

where this is going, catch

its drift, and suffer over time

accordingly. Tracy’s father

had asbestosis when he

passed away. Our lives have

been haunted by asbestos

contamination. And now

the miners talk of spraying

water and having barriers

and air quality testing

as they disturb the spirit

of earth. They talk of such

things being 'typically seen'

at nickel mines in WA.

The local newspaper’s

questions seek to pin

the miner down, and though

each answer is evasive,

they confirm as well. ‘Local’

is disposable once profits

and ore are dispersed

around the globe. When

litigation comes decades

later, dynasties will have

risen and fallen and every

battery will have lost its spark.

 

 

            John Kinsella 

Another Poem for the Slaughtered Trees on Toodyay Road (just south of Toodyay town)

Seeing an Excavator Tooth-extractor Push Over an Old-growth Wandoo

            On the Road to Perth Just South of Toodyay

Subset of incantatory praise of CAT planet-wrecking machinery —

the 50-ton excavator with range of buckets — shears groomers

grabs skeletons mud rock batter teeth — that will debranch and tear

a trunk will twist to push and rip out the old-growth wandoo

before your eyes as workaday as time sheets. Watch the headstrong

tree pushed over to tilt at planners’ windmills tumbling into gully

and reach for your mouth your maw always that bloody dental

analogy tedious as jawing and mouthing on and on so phobic and gory.

Excavator tracks knuckle by knuckle scallop by scallop levered

forward chain of command steel confrontation with tree flesh

resilience till give — root and nerve sans anaesthetic bare to the gaze

of sadists or maybe just the blithely indifferent. Cruel and clear sap bloody.

Subset of incantatory and cruel as therapy designed to get you back

to work that damages, keep you dulled to pulling and pushing,

tearing teeth from the jawing and mouthing the wordy planet —

induce an illiteracy of presence, an exclamation of pain without

vocabulary. After all, who can speak with a numbed lip anyway?

This CAT-induced literacy of being the excavator that pulls and pushes

as well as digs, this deployment of rough surgical equipment, this grooming

of planet to run roughshod and unmake syntax to realign sense.

Where is this room for finding in a subset of incantatory praise?

Surely there’s room to find a way in and back out via the gap

made by the CAT 50-ton excavator’s work ethic, its showing

the way to what will be — bloody mouth empty of tree-teeth; smiley-faced?

            John Kinsella

Poem of Anger, Sadness and Frustration at the Destruction of Trees Along the Toodyay-Perth Road

Tyrant Spells in Excessive Heat Sees Old Trees Uprooted Alongside Toodyay-Perth Road as the Biosphere Collapses In a Heap to be Mulched (Seeds Collected for Later Resowing in the Spirit Of...) in The Name of Safety

            ‘But a tyrant spell has bound me, 

            And I cannot, cannot go. 

            The giant trees are bending’ 

                        Emily Brontë

These trees I see now on this surveyed zone

are not ours per se, but we have responsibility

under the tyranny. Even if we plant

a seed and it grows to sapling and tree

we do not own the growth or even

the tree’s body when it deceases.

And so the local naturalist club does

a deal with government tree-killers incorporated —

‘give some up to save some’ — and ‘stakeholders’

who are informed make their cases and seeds

are collected and deep-seated flooded gums

are tumbled. Offsets. In the jaws of the embodied

hologram of an arcade claw machine transmigrated

to do its coin-feeders’ bidding, always responding

where aimed and succeeding in grabbing the killed trees’

fluffy ‘all the same’ canopy and dropping down

the mulcher’s gullet — steel-capped grin. The personal agony

of failed protest before protest can even happen aside —

it’s on your doorstep and signed off on righteously

(road trauma is real but there are other ways of holding back

the slaughter) — vested interests tearing down life-towers,

intensive housing project for non-human life along the roadside —

and the compulsory reclamation of what’s

outside the reserve to enact the vision

of transport. Giant trees bend then are torn out

like teeth, the heavy snow of fallout in the overheating —

I cannot pass without the pain deluding

me into an acceptance of falls with machine’s

anaesthetics offering nothing more than a brief

respite from culpability — ‘the community’

having answered in all our names, Babbeled tree-talk.

Why not travel slower, speak slower? Take

curves gradually with shade against the burn?

Let life-growth show a way through office-decisions

all bravado in the field — suits mingling with work clobber

hard to get clean: break the tyrant spell, and let us all go,

go through unbreaking unbroken less excessive less overheated.

            John Kinsella

Concreted protest poem against bauxite mine at Morangup

NO BAUXITE

MINING

AT

MORANGUP!

WHEN IT’S GONE IT’S GONE

THIS IS MORE THAN A POEM

These photos are taken outside the office of the mining conglomerate seeking to establish a massive bauxite mine at Morangup, just south of Toodyay. The conglomerate is inculcating itself into the community, as many mining companies do, mixing notions of beneficence and largesse, and suggesting that the local people’s standard of living will rise, without illustrating the long-term costs. The destruction of habitat is not correctable, despite what is all too often claimed, and what is left is an emptied shell of place and space.

The photos here are protest poems. They are words on an A4 page, working as protest slogan and concreted poem. I used this size paper rather than a larger ‘poster size’ format to capture the printed working page, to show the dynamism of the poetry page as space. The text on the page is inseparable from the context in which it is written, within the moment and location of protest, but its message is polyvalent and polysituated.

The idea of the ‘temporary local’ (only here when it suits) that underpins the mining conglomerate, their incursions into local social and business bodies, their making of a politics of extraction into a vanguard-of-benefits modus operandi, is typical of the industry. The proffered wealth attracts the greedy and the needy alike — such companies require both, and the anodyne middle ground who will hold opinions (either way) and do nothing. (I am not demeaning or challenging the needy here. I use the expression 'greedy and needy' in the context of how mining companies perceive their access points to community. Obviously I am using the expression within this 'diegesis'. The expression is glib because of the glib nature of the mining company's take on their potential employees and the communities in which they operate.)

The poem/text in these photos is a prompt to take the discussion out of its niches, to join with many other conversations and protests. I recall once being told my services were not required in a pro-refugee protest because someone already had the ground covered — as if I would be taking their ‘protest air’. When such cadre politics and politics of personality overtake the cause, the cause is damaged. The poem should be about the cause, to my mind, and in this case the minimalism of the text is an attempt to achieve this. Including myself in the photo is a registering of personal protest against the mine in dialogue with the text I created, but also independently of it. It is also assuming responsibility for the views expressed (as is Tracy’s taking of the photos). There are many vectors to any position we take and they all need to come into consideration.

    John Kinsella