Mount Beauty River-walk
Kiewa valley 'settled' in 1835.
Prior to that six Aboriginal tribes
yearly gathered in this sacred place
to settle disputes, feast ritually
on Bogong moths.
Mount Beauty in the Kiewa valley,
at the foot of Mount Bogong,
established in utter practicality
by the State Electricity Commission,
1946, to house construction workers
from the Kiewa Hydroelectric scheme.
The Alpine-shire such civic dignity displayed,
in planting parkland trees
along the Kiewa river, now so stately
as anywhere worldwide might envy.
Among native gums, elms, poplars,
willows bring so much Englishness
I expect to look up, see Kings collage where
instead high lines of bearded mountains
look down smiling unconscious archetype
in the more than genial sun,
in truth hot enough for a 'Phew
What a Scorcher! August day
in Grantchester Meadows.
But the river here no green slab, impeded
by fallen boughs, but energetic -
the merest 'tashes of white water
between aproned carousel undulations,
levered into linearity.
Sitting on a shaded bench, we drift
into the chambered music such rivers play
and the cyclic rhythms of cavorts and eddies
that thoughts stray rugged,
lilting from some long, low thrumming
and dragonflies seem,
among the rushes, such
intricate machineries of dream.
