'Taxpayers think that looking for work is just as serious a job as actually working. Looking for work on 'the dole' is not an optional activity but an absolute requirement. After all, if you don't turn up to work you're not breached, you're fired.' – Senator Amanda Vanstone, 11 March 2002.

'Life is not a rehearsal. Make every day count.'
 
 

(i) The Working Wall Hall of Fame

Ben – telesales
Priscilla – full time study
Annie – wait staff in a five star hotel
Redhoune – taxi driver
Anthony – factory worker
David – singing telegrams
Victor – building fences
Misbah – fruit picker
Barbara – call centre consultant
Arun – fruit picker
Baldwin – Public service exam
Mark – security guard (lapsed)
Scott – process worker

(ii) Generation Next

Mendel, the world's
first geneticist monk
(so pre-Dolly)
breached by his Archbishop,
his sexual revolution of peas
forgotten, his bees
too ferocious
& his papers fired.

 
 
(iii) Grand Old Dukes of York

'When it comes to atoms, language can be used
only as in poetry.' – Niels Bohr

The genes are strung out.

The New Holland poets,
the long extended chain
of metaphor, identity, rhythm

split into two camps soon
after colonisation – landscape,
the unconscious, the symbolic.
The two-helix camp & the three-
helix camp respectively
(so Seussian butter side up
versus butter side down!).
Strands of words twisted around
each structural may-pole.
Neo-Boetian cultural objects
always come in pairs; thongs,
meat pies & tomato sauce,
even poetry wars. A spiral
staircase of ascending/descending
obligatory forms.

'When they were up they were up
When they were down they were down
& when they were only halfway up
they were neither up or down.'

An oracular cell division
of Murray/Tranter proportions.
New Holland poetry caught
in an Anglo-American stoush.
Mincing words with the best(?).
That magic dichotomous number again,
those poets with PhD's/MA's/MFA's
& those plain old worker bees
shut off from hive diversity.

All poetry is genetic fancy.

'While the vast majority of people who receive welfare payments are honest and entitled to those payments, unfortunately, there are a small number of people who still seek to cheat their fellow Australians. Australia is a generous country with a generous welfare system but taxpayers expect welfare to go to the needy and not the greedy. This report sends out a clear message to those people who are thinking about cheating: if you cheat, you will get caught.

'If it is meant to be, then it has to be by me!'

 
 
(i) A covenant of salt forever

On his last day, Baldwin
promises to send Redhoune
the bunch of poems he always
wanted to write, but never did.
'Algeria,' Redhoune says,
'is one big epic poem constantly
being rewritten. Its language wind.
Its words sand. Its rhythm,
the rise & fall of revolution.
Its metaphor, the people.'
Redhoune, one brother in America,
one in Australia, never became
a poet, became an architect
of dreams instead.

Drew lines in the desert
of his nomadic skull.

The poems arrive one day
out of the sheer blue.
Tossed up by a dust-storm
& stuffed in his letter-box.
That morning, after a long
stint at the wheel, screams
multiply through Redhoune;
a powerful structure of faint
but irresistible hope.

(ii) A covenant of salt forever ii

Everyone's waiting for
the 'salt money' to roll in.
Are we all pensioned off now
like Roman veterans? A parcel
of arid doctrine to swallow,
after all those years of service?
The Dole Army's banner strings
across mainstream Australia's
nose/out of joint. There's nothing
better than a witch-hunt gone
wrong for ratings.
Ask the Paxtons,
those neo-Salem kids
so media un-friendly (?)
A powerful sign of the times
which had to be brought down,
by the powers that be.

Remember the 'Long-haired men
will be served last' culture
of oppression we developed
in the seventies, when haircuts
actually meant something?

What's Ray Martin's
excuse for living?

What bargain did he seal
as he crumbled salt crystals
over the tree-frog thin defence
of these Dole Army icons?

This salaried man
with the Witch-finder
General's hair.
 
 

(iii) A covenant of salt forever iii

Stanthorpe, Queensland, 5 February 2002 AD.

'Nine Newstart payments were cancelled & 151 customers will have their payments reviewed, in a crackdown on welfare fraud in Stanthorpe, Queensland, today.

While the vast majority of Centrelink's customers are honest, the message is clear: if you cheat the system you will be caught.' – Senator Amanda Vanstone.

 
 
(iv) A covenant of salt forever iv

Arun & Misbah, steely
from job search training,
wave three year temp visas
at the g-men from Immigration.
Salt walks out on their bodies
a crystal/industrial dispute
inside the rusted Belmont ute;
their working wall hall of fame
stalls at the first cattle-grid.

(v) On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules

The little perpetual
motion machine orbits
suns, planets, selves.
There are worlds within
worlds of unemployment.
Baldwin, the 3-D video
artist charts pixels, HTML
atoms of electric speech.
Entered the JJJ video comp
waits for his big break
to descend, the quanta
to spark in his head;
the chunk of iron meteorite
he saw once in the Adelaide
museum hacked apart by
a diamond cleaver, feeling
for its structure.

(vi) Job Position: West Stands, University of Chicago 1942 AD

1. 20th Century Alchemist: (Needed. Energetic, sporty, scientific type
to sharpen world's first graphite reactor. Must have diploma or certificate
from a recognised institution. Must have 40,000 personal references
from the city of Nagasaki. References from Hiroshima acceptable as well.)