The male stands simply enough in regulation grey. It has two tall slab sides, an informed roof, and three red lights which continually flash in dumb warning. As might be expected, the short female is more complicated. Broadly built like a tin house, she reveals a square doorway filled with dangling black strips of rubber, able to let bulky belongings through onto rotating belt, first, and then a marshalled band of steel rollers. These carry solids away for up to three meters.
Her steady green light remains on display, matrimonially close to his ruby trio. Lacking the distinction of rollers, he at least rests on a figured crimson carpet. They patiently complement one another, even when silent. Mutual loyalty is the name of their game. To live inside an airport, that must be something.
About Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Chris Wallace-Crabbe earned a BA at Melbourne University and attended Yale University. Wallace-Crabbe is the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, including By and Large (2001); Selected Poems 1956–1994 (1995), which won the Dinny O’Hearn Poetry Prize; The Amorous Cannibal (1985), which won the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry; and Blood Is the Water (1969), which won the Farmer’s Poetry Prize. He also published the novel Splinters (1981) and several critical works, including Read It Again (2005) and Falling into Language (1990). He has edited numerous anthologies, including Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New New World (2004, with Judith Ryan), The Oxford Literary History of Australia (1998, with Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss), and The Golden Apples of the Sun: Twentieth Century Australian Poetry (1980). In 2011, Wallace-Crabbe was awarded the Order of Australia. Over the course of his career, he has received the St. Michael’s Medal, the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal, the Human Rights Award for Poetry, and the Christopher Brennan Award for Literature.
Further reading:
