Paddle-wheeler

 

The Gorge’s morning peace

Is disturbed:

Splashing sounds

Chugging dins,

The intruder? A white paddle-wheeler,

The leviathan’s giant wheels

Ploughing upstream

Like giant pectoral fins

 

We marvel quietly -

Golden sunlight,

Emerald greens

The Nepean’s muddy blues unfold:

A landscape dream of patience,

In Hawkesbury sandstone

A tiny stream carving itself

Now 80 million old

 

But perhaps

The paddlewheel chugs

Not just in

Gulumada’s bluish space -

The landscape surreal

No longer same

A palimpsest appears

In forgotten Dreaming days

 

There, a bunyip creeps

Eying a meal

On the other banks

A diprotodon crawls

Trees and climbers - fecund,

Dripping

In tropical steam

In Gondwana’s rainforest halls

 

Liverwort tarps

Plunging from the cliffs

Giant ferns, and fungi

On which, even larger lizards crawl

A Titan’s Eden

In its primordial form

We, tiny visitors from a distant land

Our spaceship white and small

 

Time stops,

So do the paddle-wheels

As pouched lions, striped tigers

Stare from a hidden glade

Is that a yowie now?

Have we crossed the boundaries

That Dharawal lores

And Dharug tales forbade?

 

When we return

The track of time is lost,

Was it the Pleistocene

In the Nepean, still afloat?

Penrith’s honking cars assure

Phew, we’re back indeed

Faraway, a time capsule,

Is pierced by the wheeler boat…

 

7^th December 2025