For the Love of Bendigo

My chain goes clack at the moment because it is old. I cannot afford to replace it and get the SR on the road. So I tunelled through bush roads, with the bumps and the clacks, and when I broke through it was Sutton Grange.



Sheep found their way down the slopes while over fences dogs barked, marking farms. But as I rode on only silence entered my ear - or it might have been, the clack and the engine's hum subduing those sounds like fog.

In Bendigo, stumbling down paths through the pine, I happened on details that insist: the bat-smell and their shriek. The silhouettes and lamps of a Jack the Ripper.





The dead are buried within us. New eyes see what they saw, live in the houses they built, and bear their mark. In Bendigo I can still smell their gold.



Their other purposes.



Their mulch and mood.



Days later Fee and I rode home in the sunshine. You can travel in place but not in time. At least not in the same way. And yet as our bodies moved away from the regional city, our minds travelled to future times when we will live in that place.