Park in Bundaberg, c.1895. John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.

‘No, I don’t remember Guildford’
– Robyn Hitchcock

Did I fly there? I may have flown there.
Maybe in something with the specifications of a crop-duster.
The Sugar Coast. Everything comes with a name. A name and a nickname.
The Soaked Coast. Bundy. Blue rustle of cane. Home to Rum City Wrecking.
[Farewell,] Bundaberg, Home of Bricks. Big Daddy’s Pies. Hair Force One.

And the nature. Grass trees, wedding bushes, acid frogs, termite nests.
Beaded or bearded dragons. Together or separately, I don’t remember.
I saw one, though, it was huge, in some undergrowth.
Harmless, probably, but ferociously ugly.

I left the workshop in the Rotary Club. I took the Bra Challenge,
or did not take the Bra Challenge. I headed down Bourbong Street.
Towards the Bennett or the Burnett (the sources are unclear).
One of those short catastrophic Australian rivers. The old bones of sugar refineries.
The pocked mud glistening with thousands of alert little mud-crabs.

The farmers came in to buy dry goods and do their banking and get soaked.
The mercantile brick paving, awnings, shade and a gentle breeze.
Horace would have appreciated it. Amoenus, I can hear him saying.
The twentieth century, the Wild East.

I occupied an array of public benches. Hours went by.
Chinese tourists mooched disconsolately down the pavements. Sol or sombra, to taste.
The inverted magpies. The Mediterranean social life of lorikeets.
The Golden Basket, the Golden Casket, the Golden Gasket.
Three for the price of four.

Bundaberg. Somewhere I’d no reason to be.
Anywheresville, as in miles from.
No dot on a marconigraph, semicolon, on no radar a single ping.
Or if there was, then just a ping singing to itself.