The River Caves

By | 23 December 2013
We were keen young cubs, members

of 3rd Mosman Bay Sea Scouts.

Twelve years old and full

of excitement, collecting donations

for the club house charity.

On bob-a-job week we walked

up and down steep streets

around the harbour, mowing

lawns, raking leaves, taking

on any work we were offered.

A woman asked us to remove

a huge white carp from one

of her garden ponds,

dead for a week, its smell clung

to our uniforms all day—

she had a mansion with a

suburban jungle surrounding it.

One Saturday morning

we ended up at Luna Park,

wandered in, and came across

the River Caves—a ride

that carried us through dark

caves and illuminated caverns

sitting in little brightly painted boats.

By the time we entered

the second cave we were looking

for trouble. The next cave

was an artificial South Pole,

with ice and hundreds of penguins.

I jumped out first—

the others followed, our boat

moved on so fast it left us

stranded. We heard another one

coming, and not to be caught,

I told my friends to ‘freeze’ as if

we were models of cubs in a landscape,

the frozen Sea Scouts of the River Caves.


This poem first appeared in Shark-net Seahorses of Balmoral: A Harbour Memoir
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Robert Adamson has worked as a poetry editor and consultant with Angus & Robertson/HarperCollins and has established several small publishing companies, including Prism Books and Big Smoke. He was the poetry editor the literary magazine Ulitarra from 1993 to 1997. In 1997 he became a founding editor, along with James Taylor, of the international poetry journal Boxkite. Adamson, with Juno Gemes and Michael Wilding, established Paper Bark Press in 1986 – a small press that went on to become one of Australia's major poetry publishing companies with a backlist of over thirty books. His autobiography, Inside Out, was published in March 2004 by Text Publishing. Inside Out was shortlisted for the Melbourne Age's Book of the Year Awards 2004, the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards 2004 and NSW Premier's History Awards 2004, State Library of New South Wales National Biography Award 2004, and the NSW Premier's Literary Award's Douglas Stewart Prize for non-fiction. Adamson has presented two new anthologies of poetry, The Golden Bird: New and Selected Poems in 2008 (Black Inc.) and The Kingfisher's Soul in 2009 (Bloodaxe Books UK). Recent publications include Net Needle, (Black Ink) (Bloodaxe UK) and (Flood Editions USA) (Shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards) 2020, and his latest volume is Reaching Light (2021 Flood Editions US).

http://www.robertadamson.com/index.htm

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