Have you ever woken from a nightmare
Where evil battles good
When what you'd decided was evil
Tramples you in the mud
Then you wake and rub your frightened face
And thank god it wasn't true
Then the face of the evil you'd woken from
Looks back out of the mirror at you.
That's how I awoke.
Old men tell the story
Under dim bare bulbs at night
Of how Safari Suit appeared out of the haze
Back in the mythical Goodoldaze
To set all wrongs to right.
Safari Suit named the unnamed earth
Tamed the untamed, gave it worth
This was for mining, that for sowing
Made the ancient tools for clearing.
Then disappeared where the scorched earth cracked
Leaving petrochemical white-shoe tracks
And the promise or threat to return.
Safari Suit is the mystery
Safari Suit is the lie
Safari Suit is the die that was a cast
A particular point in Australia's past
Between 'colonial' and dumping the cringe
Between familiar and terribly strange
Strangers in a very strange land
With a very strange outfit in their hands
Drawn from safari, Tarzan's call
Was it stylish Creation or sartorial Fall?
Hot Africa's response to Europe's thrust
Giraffes' necks nodding in the evening dust
Elephants swaying trunk to tusk
Ivory's wealth in piles where they fall;
And upon it a man with glinting eye
And gun, poised for the photograph
With servile niggers stood nearby.
But that's not all.
I rose one day with a bee in my ear
The itching bug of a quest
The sun shone sharp as the eye of god
That hit the window like a cattle prod
And flayed my mind with this test.
And I knew I had to give up my job
Flog off my chattels and cut out from the mob
Seek the graveyard of rejected styles, and find
Where all Australia's wealth must lie:
Our own white elephant ivory mine
Where Safari Suits go to die.
So I walked out where the highway ends
Where tarmac turns to dust
Where visions of Australia
Collide and are left to rust
I walked out there, seeking the tracks
Feeling in logs and peering in cracks
Tasting the spoors, and sniffing the air
Looking for clues to the place where
Safari Suits go to die.
Safari Suit is the mystery
Safari Suit is the lie
Safari Suit is place where the urban push
Met another rich white man's Bush
Of moleskins and Gundegai.
I walked to the foot of a long-dead gum
And sought for the carved-on cryptography
All I found were the softening nicks
Of a rent-boy's ad for finding tricks
In bad 70's calligraphy
Like the text on the unknown soldier's tomb
Or a Christian catacomb
With lions waiting outside.
No meaning. No succour.
No map to the graveyard of styles.
But I drew a line from the final cut
And followed the path from there
Stumbling on ancient ploughing ruts
Left by devil-may-care
Through deserts of salt-dried fields
That thrummed with the wind-driven bore's death rattle
Monuments to one-off yields
And unsustainable cattle.
Doors fell off hinges as I passed
Exposing their guts to the air
The personal effects of soldiers gassed
Settled to wrench a crop from there
From a marginal land where their thirsty tongues,
Breathing, sucked water from the earth
Leaving it leached-out as their lungs
And of about as much worth.
Safari suit is the symbol
A symbol lost in time
The salt that killed the old brigade
The salt that made the land degrade
Bleached my shoes white as lime.
I saw that hawks circled above
And fixed me with a watchful stare
I was the only thing on the move
That didn't have a hole somewhere
To creep towards, or a secret account,
Or a nest-egg box on the Holy Mount
Like a monopoly on divine love
Should push come to shove.
They marked my progress through the dust
Mummies on either hand
Mummies of sheep and mummies of roos
Mummies of dingos and cockies too
Like in some Pompeian crypt
Where pumice veneer makes an eternal crust
A funeral mask, the sole crop of trust
In the wrong bit of nature, ripped
In half, gutted and disembowelled;
Then comes the throwing in the towel.
And the crying over spilled milk and honey
All salted away as developers' money
Pasts to slash and futures to burn
Leaving ashes and dry tears in return
Degrees at the University of Hard Knocks
As marker's of Safari-Suit's tracks.
Safari Suit is the mystery
Safari Suit is the lie
Safari Suit is the crumb that was tossed
To those that development double crossed
Pretending their loss was everyone's loss
Then leaving them there to die.
The path circled in on a lonely stone
On a bulldozed sacred site
Where meaning was gutted, leaving bone
To dry out in sun's light,
Hacked aside as the fire-break
Around a long-failed mineral lease
Where Safari Suit's mates failed to make
The millionth buck and so sought release
From the obligation to repair
Leaving just tailings as the clue to where
Safari Suit sank into the recoiling dust
Was swallowed, shat downwards in disgust
By an earth forced to carry a beacon within
A pulsing drone to call his kin
Calling destruction upon it again
And again and again and again and again
That made the spot the boneyard of style
Where Safari Suits go to die.
Safari Suit is the mystery
Safari Suit is the lie
Safari Suit is the stone that is cast
By white man's present on everyone's past
Leaving the future to die.
The stone was sentinel to an unnamed grave
Crowned with a bleached-out cattle-skull
To proclaim the emptiness of what lay there
Shattered shards of what once was full.
Around it lay the sad remains
Of white man's beads and treasure troves
Of stubbie-tops, just rusted stains
That marked the edge of Safari Suit's grave
You could see the pattern from ancient days
That ancestors had etched to tell the tale
That Safari Suit here resting lay
Slowly turning into coal
Waiting the call to return again
To stir his body-without-a-soul
And lay his white shoe upon the world
And bring his munificence to all.
The pattern lay disrupted now
Kicked apart by unheeding youth
But still a discerning eye could pick
From among the dross the awful truth:
"Stranger, know that before your eyes
Safari Suit here buried lies
Look upon this fate and despair
And know it one day we all will wear"
I dug down into the unnamed grave
To seek the Safari Suit from hell
Down I went through the iron ground
As if through some chieftain's burial pile
And there with my spade as I turned the dust
I heard the rustle of polyester on steel
I recoiled in dazed disgust
I could taste it's slightly greasy feel
Around me nature went an awful hush
Even the cane-toads stopped and gawped
Lantana withered on the vine
As introduced nature felt its sap freeze hard
Sheep and cattle writhed in pain
As blue-green algae filled their throats,
And feral cats became tame again
Rather than witness Safari Suit's ghost
Maggots and blowflies with every load
Swarmed from below as if the tomb
Of Safari Suit served as the fecund womb
Of every pestilence from hell's abode.
All around creation wept
To see once more the madness of men
To see awoken what so long had slept
Safari Suit released again.
The myriad maggots squirmed to rebuild
The grinning corpse, and a million flies
Of a strange unnatural powder-blue
Coated the body like a hangman's disguise.
The cut of the flares and the half-way sleeves
Like ancient armour of antique lands,
And the shoes of pure Artesian white
That sparkled with ripped-off mineral sands
Announced that before me stood the shades
Of Safari Suits not long enough dead
Stained with taxpayer-funded lunches
And the marks of tax-free head.
They stood arrayed with their flies undone
Sucked at the ketchup stains
Moaned that the free business lunch was gone,
Along with their sweetest capital gains.
All of the memories of safari suits past
The memories of those that wore them
From Don Dunstan to Russell Hinze
Dared me to upbraid them
They paraded past my gummy eyes
Speaking as with one mouth
Leaving the message to pass to the world:
"Make this your truth:
Seek the safari-suit within
The roots squat in your soul
Leering out with a polyester grin
Like a white-shoed urban troll
Waiting with its trophy gun
And its excavator arm
Its cock the chain between two tractors
And its blue-rinse perm
Seek the Safari Suit within
Hold it up to the sun
See the sun shine through the threads
See what it's become
Tie and padded smoothness
Button-pushers in a row
For all Safari Suit was ugly
It's a bugger of a sight worse now."
Safari suit is the mystery
Safari suit is the lie
Safari suit is the convenient symbol
The symbol of cutting the old school tie
The tie that bound past and present
The old subservience school
Accomodation to climate
As an anti-imperial tool
An anti-imperial surface
For a very imperial history
And a very imperialist present to which
Safari suit remains the mystery.
Have you ever woken from a nightmare
Induced by who-knows-what
And you thank any powers that may have survived
The death of Truth and God
That what you'd dreamed could never be,
Could never force the world to choke
It's children in preference to such a reality?
That's how I awoke.
I rose and walked to the shower
Passed through the living room
I saw from the ashtray's contents
My journey had been but smoke and fumes
Yet as I stepped to the mirror
I saw glistening on my skin
Traces of salt in bad 70's calligraphy
Saying "Seek the Safari Suit within".
Seek the Safari Suit within:
All the clear-felling you've done
Your salt-encrusted landscapes
That may twinkle in the sun,
Are but your farms and ravaged mines
Each grain a tiny lie
A jewel set in the cattle-skull
Of unnecessary compromise
Seek the ugliness inside you
The Safari Suit within
And bring it to the surface
Wear it like a skin
Examine it as the light of day
Splits it like a prism:
Wearing a Safari Suit
Is an act of exorcism.
2000