Lachlan Brown called, in an interview with Fiona Wright, a quote from

my essay The Suburban Problem of Evil his favourite one on

the Suburbs: saying I said, “nowhere else can the eternal

                                                       and the eternally

reversing dialectic between icon and iconoclasm be so sharply

observed,” or something like that’, and, without my referral

to source (me), that does sound accurate. I live where the lights

from the Mountains, the glittering or fog-lost Glenbrook Gap,

horizon the trees that hide the far Nepean, with a long

foreground of streets where cardboard houses orientally cling

low to the earth like children in between, like children

playing a game in a ring, aeroplaning close again,

shrilly, to the strange familiar earth. My vast veranda

creates ghosts and spirits, asks them until they answer,

but none answer the same, and in their courtly structure

function to contradict themselves and then each other,

providing fruitful conflict for the centre. Moonwild above me,

squealing with summer, the flying foxes in the rubber tree

squabble and fuck and seem to bounce their siblings

up and down the steel roof like gremlins. I am thinking

of Yeats’s ‘The centre will not hold’ and, God, mine hasn’t. I

hope I have more luck with the bowing roof, since my

chair swing is attached to it and shaking. I am at this time

uneasy anyway about the suburbs. The great religion

of overseas travel has descended on them like a filter

with picturesque colours, every concrete curb and corner

a Women’s Weekly World Discovery for Fine Writing. I do not

know how far this penetrates the core: long insurrection.What

I wrote tested innocence, violence, and they crucibled together

in perpetual furtive catalysts as rhythmic as this weather,

as unprepared. The suburbs are never plainly seen. Their reverence

                                                      – the icon –

only ornaments their experience. They change ornaments

like holy diction but to distance from their dead:

                                         iconoclasm.

The sky is bled.

This grey roof holds alone.The moon becomes the sun.

Reversing magnets, to their caves, the river’s bed,

                                           the flying fox spin home. __________________________