An extract from HEAT 19

I’m watching a kookaburra with a small snake dangling from its mouth fly into a gum tree. The snake is no more than twenty centi¬metres long and as thin as a bootlace. The kookaburra has the snake’s tiny head pincered in its beak. The snake keeps kinking its body, trying to wriggle free. It looks like an ebony swizzle stick against the sky’s cocktail blue. When the bird finally flies off with the snake still uneaten, trailing from its mouth, I continue on my walk. It is December 31st, the last day of 2008, exactly three weeks after the death of Dorothy Porter. The scene has just reminded me of the song ‘If Snakes Could Fly’ which Dot wrote for Paul Grabowsky and Katie Noonan and which they performed at her memorial event at the Sydney Opera House. From the lyrics come these words:

If snakes could fly
I would hoola hoop
across a bright
and burning sky

if snakes could fly
I could with free
and generous heart
say an absolute and final
goodbye.

There is certainly a bright and burning sky, a snake has flown, and I am here saying, not a final goodbye, but one of many that I will say to my dear friend, Dot. Today is the last day of her terminal year. Tomorrow, when 2009 arrives, it will be the first year for fifty-four years that will be without the physical presence of Dorothy Porter. This day marks a turn¬ing point and Dot would have known why I have chosen this day to come here. She would definitely have got the numbers, even though in one of her recent poems, she says: ‘I get magic…/ but I don’t get/ numbers.’

As I’m walking down Paradise Avenue, the air is pulsing with cicadas. The noise is like an auditory pins and needles, but the screeching pitch doesn’t stop me from remembering and re-experiencing the ravishing beauty of this place. Paradise Avenue is the only access to a small run of sand, a little wharf and a netted baths known as Paradise Beach. It faces the sparkling channel of Pittwater and looks across to Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. Where the sand meets the embankment, I notice there are more racks of rowboats, and in the channel a great many more yachts and pleasure craft than there were twenty-three years ago. What has not changed is the little concrete pier that runs along the left side of the baths. When the tide is high, as it is now, the water laps and spills over the sides, just enough to wet the bottoms of one’s shoes. But I remember it mostly at low tide. Where it juts over the water, the concrete has broken and falls away to make a little, rocky step. It is hard to believe this place is almost exactly as Dot and I said goodbye to it in March 1986 after having spent so many evenings here during the summer. It became a ritual that we would walk down to the pier from our place in Trappers Way, bring two plastic wine glasses, a sachet of cheap white wine and a packet of peanuts. We’d sit on the end of the pier, drink, munch and talk. We adored the place and our time here cemented our friendship so that we became each other’s closest friend for another twenty-three years…