Red Earth & Rust

ABSENCE

An absence haunts the land
Like a forgotten dream
An unwritten story
In a salt slip-stream

Footprints on the wind
A shard of burnt clay in the hand
A painting on a rock
An absence in the land

Memories of a people
Written on the wind
Footprints in the landscape
Haunt the mind

Footprints on the wind
A shard of burnt clay in the hand
A painting on a rock
An absence in the land

An unwritten story
An absence in the land

An absence in the land

I used to spend weeks and weekends with June Te Water in her shack on the edge of Langebaan Lagoon. She was an inveterate beachcomber and the shack was full of shards of pottery from the dunes on Sixteen Mile beach. These shards of blackened pottery, rubbing stones and bones, pieces of rope and glass floats from the Japanese fishing vessels, adorned the walls of the shack.
I remember staying there alone for one weekend. June had told me that ‘when the wind blows from the east you can hear the voices of the Strandlopers’. And sure enough, I was woken one night by an eerie discordant singing. I stepped outside and it stopped. The wind was blowing from the east. Back inside, it started again. After several repetitions of this ‘in-and-out-dance’ I noticed that there were strands of taut thick nylon line strung in rows over the roof to keep birds off and the rain water clean for the tank. This had created a kind of resonance chamber and the ‘wind from the east’ was vibrating the taut strings. That was the cause of the ‘singing’. I prefer her story.
It is the absence of those vital people that I feel so strongly when I hold one of their tools or a piece of pottery in my hand.

Yho baphela abantu
The people are disappearing

• Barbara Fairhead

NARROW DIRT ROAD

A narrow dirt road
A blue lagoon
The sound of salt, a bent tree
A white stone

The West Coast is a song
Burns like a fever
A hunger in the mind
Thirsty as a river
The light is a veil
Salt on the wind
The landscape is monotonous
It does strange things to the mind

A narrow dirt road . . .

And I listen to the silence
To the shadow of a stone
To the wide horizon
Empty as a bone
And somewhere beyond my mind
Beyond the chalk road like a dream
I hear the memory of their voices
On the wind stream

A narrow dirt road . . .

I hear the wetlands groan
With the incoming tide
I watch the narrow channels
Grow blue and wide
Dreaming this blue water
This fulling of the tide
And the dark hills holding
On either side

A narrow dirt road . . .

The vegetation on either side of the narrow chalk-white road is dark, almost oppressive. There is little to see except dunes and the low horizon of this scrub. The road winds around dunes, falls into sudden dips and struggles up eroded sections. And then, suddenly, there is Langebaan Lagoon, a great length of azure water surrounded by low hills.
The lagoon is tidal, exposing at low water miles of prawn-pocked sand flats. In the past, fishermen came to the lagoon to careen their boats. At high tide they would set anchor, and when the tide went out leaving their boats quite literally, high and dry, they would paint and repair the hulls.
The small church, built in 1905, still stands and the descendants of a colourful handful of adventurers, sailors and deserters live in the small village and still tell of their early beginnings.

• Barbara Fairhead