When does the master plan end? I remember they cut the ribbon on the road connecting the murdered swamp and the capeland, as if they weren’t already connected. I remember they permitted the first trickle to enter Lake Orr, when the hills housed more than just urban sprawl. I remember my classroom bordered the edge of the school, that the windows showed a universe among the trees, and that months later there was bare earth. I’ve been allergic to construction work ever since. Kurrawa Park has me in hives. Don’t talk to me about the Guragunbah floodplains.

*

The mixed business has become more focussed: a café; blue-drab and clean, and surely fair-trade in this day-and-age. Chemical free. The house built by doomed wishes to live the wrong life right— demolished, three-stores of luxury private underground burgeoning against the zoning laws— the street stretches straight into its sound barrier— painted green, an acre cleaned— for property, for poverty, pressed and swelling into the edge— the woolly vines and downy wattle won’t last much longer— houses rolling over battlegrounds and cowpastures. It’s comforting to see history being honoured like that.

*

I don’t know how you feel homesick for a place that was never your home, or that you only ever saw in greyscale. It was my mother’s home and she was my first home; the threads she worked from there to here were never too tight, were always securely loosened, and were wet with everything but the leviathan, and yet still somehow on fire, and yet still somehow a single fibre strung from singed to savaged ends. We always had cherries, apricots, and a salón; always lived along the water, made our own aniseed dough-bait, and caught our own fish — I have never in my life bought a fish — we tended for a time a towering coniferous faux-pine, whose death cast on the torso, the main body, the sleeves all done and edges waiting, and actually I prefer crochet these days. So now I knit too tight, my fruit bowl is empty, and the fish are all blown up.