Long-hauled in the hot zone

a road train tugs on the rightist strings

and precedent is damned like tokenism,

an outmoded supply strategy

that has them talking of extracting

organs from prisoners and sustaining life

to promote suffering, suspicion

the family value, a mystery prize

NO LONGER on the wheel of fortune, childcare

keeping the nuclear family mushrooming

like a bad joke in an ideal economy,

plays pleasantly unfolding to capacity

audiences who think they’re watching

a bloodsport, confirming

their eruption from malaise.

David Malouf says Australia

is an amazingly successful social

phenomenon, while that “weepy warbler”

Mariah Carey says when I watch TV

and see all those starving children

all over the world, it just makes

me want to cry. I mean, I’d like to be

as thin as that, but not with all those

flies and death and stuff and an

Aboriginal family is forced

into the baggage compartment

of the Indian Pacific at the request

of the “cleaner” passengers

and Manning Clark was seen to wear

the red ribbon of the Order of Lenin

and as such is posthumously elevated

to the ranks of Russian Spy. They

call this cutting the deficit,

cutting the fat from government.

It’s a jungle out there!

The twenty-dollar dame’s claim

to utopia as the regional declines

into nomadic wanderings. Now

we don’t need visas to tour

the nation of our becoming,

wheat subsidies and open markets

colluding on a test zone called Woomera

or Uruguay, war brides on the catwalk

and an increase in the military budget,

portraits of the Queen sneaking

into the national pie like additive codes.

Let us marvel at the national Panopticon,

let us consider the narrow coastal strip

turning like a pinwheel around The Rock,

Uluru, the tower of rapid eye movement

in the new parlance – explorer

stock laying claims to its spoils,

Ayers Rock the subtitle

of a new White Paper on immigration.

The kangaroos in the South West

are struck down by blindness:

crashing into wandoo and jarrah,

caught up in wire fences, mowed down

by tractors, drowning in dams. A turning point.

Seen it time and time again

old timers allegorically maintain. Speculation

inhabiting the virus-laden air

of Kangaroo Island, a semantic

sibilance as high winds strafe the gaping

spaces and those skies of deep blue

open hard though systematically

over the red sands while the market

watches with a hopeful eye –

doctors in Zaire report

a breakout on the Ebola River –

a georgic sucked dry of RNA.

Lobbying freedom the seven proteins

unbraid their complex plait, back in the kitchen,

neither dead nor alive, a filovirus

that takes a massacre to show

its presence. Frank Fenner,

hating small pox and rabbits,

fires a warning shot – ruptured

ecosystems release their viruses;

a survey line in the jarrah forests

moves a hundred metres when

no-one’s looking, a farmer covets

a dozen drums of DDT, threatening

to use them ’cause fifteen years ago

he paid good money, new viroids

sprouting from the paddock’s surface,

memory prompted by shifting fences.

A comparative analysis of candidate

strategies, the imposition of tariffs,

contours snaking through the Venn diagram

of shared usage, the eco-tourists

and land share liabilities glossed-up

in time for the election. Who says

for merriment this planet is not

well equipped? He needs to know he

exists. She knows already but her voice

is disguised electronically. A shift

in preferences results in the syndic’s

authority being strengthened; a

facsimile on curling paper

brings excitement to the editor’s

office: integration ends all racism!

A tightening of the English language

literacy standards for would-be immigrants.

A considerable body of militia

are hiding their weapons.

Quiddity is the word.

The roaded catchments

heaped rolled and compacted

ensure maximum run-off with little

precipitation, this national psyche

has been drought-proofed

and well promoted.