Elegy:
Kalgoorlie 2016
The distance between a Facebook page
and a mineshaft, where vigilantes threaten
to drop the murdered, is so very small.
Behind screens is only part of the damage,
it’s when bigots emerge from self-
illumination, self-images in their eyes,
that it all comes together: the running
down,
the killing, the justifications. In a
mining town
the burrowing down to what might be at the
core
of belief is also an attempt at erasure: to
mine
away souls. But desecrators unearth
their own demons, digging deep to find
the white goods they desire: as Dr Plot
conjectured in 1667: ‘lapides sui generis,
naturally produced by some extraordinary
plastic virtue, latent in the earth...’
this fossil
record we turn ourselves inside out for,
reaching too low. And so, frontiers
are made on the field of the screen,
and Kalgoorlie — out there — epicentre
of the goldfields, cutting edge of race
riots,
Superpit-proud of the venal seams in the
Aussie flag,
flexes its Midas touch on God’s Own Country
while a dead boy’s family grieve and grieve
and grieve.
John
Kinsella
