Vivian Smith: Two Poems

Olive Pink

Reader, I’d never heard of her before

a friend returned from Alice Springs

with bits and pieces of her well told story,

her garden and her work with local tribes.

It sounded like a Werner Herzog film.

I smiled when I heard her name,

the colours and the strangeness went together:

born in Hobart 1899,

anthropologist and botanist,

intrepid, independent, truthful, firm,

she clearly saw what others couldn’t see

and looked exactly like my young grandmother—

a pinch of mischief twinkling in her eye,

a way of just persisting, undeterred.

Vivian Smith

Hyde Park, Macquarie Place

Public parks and gardens—green circles, squares, rectangles between buildings where you can sit in the shade of a tree, looking, listening.

The first time I came to Sydney I stayed in a boarding house at King’s Cross and used to walk into town, buy a sandwich in a Castlereagh Street arcade and take my book to a corner seat in Hyde Park and write for an hour or so before heading off to the Mitchell Library.

Sydney meant hibiscus flowers, jacarandas, moreton bays—it was the beginning of a new phase of my life and I was the owner then of all my days.

When I moved across the harbour and started to travel by ferry, I discovered Bridge Street and Macquarie Place: enormous colonial buildings, Victorian facades.

Making my way down to Circular Quay after a day reading through old letters and diaries—how clear and generous the handwriting of those days—I used to think of Robert Louis Stevenson and D.H. Lawrence walking around here. They must have felt at home among these imposing buildings with their grand entrances and cool corridors.

Brennan and Lawson often went this way; cosmopolitan Nettie Palmer and Marjorie Barnard met here one broiling afternoon when Australia was another country and slowly heading for war.

What makes a place hallowed? The memories we bring, knowledge of those who were here before us?

I used to feel there was a presence, a meaning in this place, and that I could hold it all together—

the anchor, the obelisk, the palms.

A derelict talks to his bottle in the shade.

Vivian Smith