Inhabited Merbein’s caravan park

or our hut, tin sheets over log posts, Paddy Lyons

a pensioned Swaggie who’d seen the real Red Sea,

not the one on the bottle top, Peter and his mate.
Their massive American cars swaggered in to work,

they picked twice what locals could manage,

arrived a day before the season began, left

the day it ended.
The women wore lipstick

or had half-a-dozen kids, they didn’t mix,

locals didn’t talk to them

unless it was something about the grapes.
Between seasons, they chased other fruit, tomatoes, peaches, sugar cane,

whatever hands could grab, it was the job that they were born for

and it was the circus we kids dreamt

we could always run away to.
Roy penciled Indians, cowboys and six year-old me

and a decade later was convicted

of sleeping with a 15-year-old boy, had his diary read aloud

in the bar of The Commercial Hotel, the court room of the town.
Peter picked four for each bunch his mate could manage

but insisted their pay be equal: years later

my brother said he surprised them

asleep in a single bed.