Monte John Latham - Author of Great Southern Streetwalking NomadUrban lyric and creativity for Australia.

Hear me Australians,

the writing hand street-sweeps clean our urban-nomadic colour-printed pillow. It sleepwalks our rough edges, for easy-eared simple town hearts; marries those who bind the great  infinite intelligent, remembers with the depth of a country in the merging brewing shallows of individual mentalities. There is no movement at this station; … yet ‘a colt certainly is getting away’ and here some ‘word is getting around’.

On easily the main island of the Tasmania group, this writing is stationed, in or on the third day after say the 2,014th Christmas since the well-known, by name at least, Jesus Christ established a vital path via corrected death.

… national atmosphere is misting

I am in my own lounge of my ‘owned’ home-ground, in a big big island continent land, of still more islands and which somehow separated be from many islands more and continent close north; some lengthy swims south to ice and east to oceanic delights.

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Quietly the national atmosphere outside is misting the writer’s thought here on Frogmore Peninsula, which is an oft forgotten beauty, lying in sheltered shallow waters, animal-nude under its fence-tapestried suburban shawl mindset. Our Australia is tangled and extremely varied in sprawl, country towns, oil rigs, bushland homes, room-kernels, loungerooms, offices, ancient songlines and territories, drifting jet vapour, workplace kitchens, camps, surf, snow and more and more zero room

… local atmosphere is misting behind pixilated curtains drawn by scatty fatted neurons. Here at Frogmore sky open and watered inland, eucalyptus fragrance and wattle blossom through open windows float. In the quill the clouds are charged. Anytime bright bolts will brighten the gloom, momentarily for the clouds and with great value to the witnesses. A bellyful of fresh apricots, nuts and coffee in the presence of a Gregory Peck western movie, finds union with the charge. The time is now, albeit bonded with moments future and pasted past writes, as word-based expression transmutes to visual imagery for a reader’s witness, among others. The lightening will crack, rumble and awe even as it is a mere peep in the almighty order … spread like an endless canvas intrinsically receiving fresh oil colour sufficiently abundant for all witnesses to find an interactive story in their own. .

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The eden place; where climate no shelter requires and mindsets no clothes need, defecation no paper needs. There shadows lift as the sunlight kilometres above is bending every whichway through a shell of water suspended between gravity and centrifity, holding the air from the seeming vacant deep deep distance deep deep deep deep and starry. No possibility of manic depression here, gloom is physically impossible, not an optimism supreme nor a position frozen – all with souls interacting in flight, in fluid ecstasy as music evolving, voice and colour, all uncluttered with counter clacker. In the beginning the big bang sound was that of intelligent articulation then as now .. the thunder voice boom together with the pronunciation of a creation. Take me don’t take me let me go with you away engulfed in your sea of joy. When can we go and where will it be. How can we go and what will we see. Take me true one, let me go with you, where the way is the journey and this place is at hand; that road any road is an egg taking one somewhere until it hatches … a place into. Some hit the endless loops of bitumen surf, riding not driving connected techno bliss to any of many populated communities or solitary ‘out here’ moments or campfire nights; choosing not the dusty red track fork, where the rubber tread eventually naked feet becomes, the track spring grass shoots little creature scurries and the communities smaller uncluttered bonded structured eldered and local be. And it seems the ‘indigenous’ skinned black is and the ‘hitech’ skinned white from the northern ‘europe’ area.

Nestled in tangle, some partly earthy red of this vast heritage object of country and coast, geographic architects knowing that a chunk of lead fluid is and a volume of oxygen might somewhere someday solid be, know the world earth is a spaceship corrupted and that all worlds are  likely earth accessible via a transcendent internal cube, that all stars react the same nuclear fuel and that the black is what is the black, the deep ink deep deep deep into which we turn cannot nor become - even so some souls white robed mill around black cube. The gloom is only our fear and yearning for the tropicana pineapple juice, coconut oiled muscle and grass skirts. Seems there’s always that something that only our unabstract maker can know as we, who creatures be, have an edge, a skin, a containment that is in fact our identity or part thereof.

The geographic architect knows that; that arrogant of their constructions is made in our blindness, mars the country picture and turns our eyes inward, blinkering us further and harder-in-heart, locked by faith in technological product and glitz interior, unlike those of our company in the peoples of the land and a dreamtime, whom we in small part married after ‘they’ and ‘we’, (for all inherit of our fathers’ crap), had first kicked the heads from some of their babies we …..

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We went, we go, a sustained way ‘Austroriginal’ dark & swarthy lithe & family, my legs are my frontdoor, my fire is my television; and we go sydney box, soft underfoot deodorised poncificated still under captain cook, now shaking a bit but comfy electronic indoors, take the car to the bush if I … the time and money have; and enthusiasm. Boats, sails, tents and boxes. Carts, horses, door knobs and property property property always with impropriety realty reality and toffeed snobs.

Unabashed; architecture is more than building.  Built, it is powerfully relevant cultural currency; becoming future imperfect. Oft compromised buildings sit in property curtilage - in urbia and in country - merging blending lending and talking with their surrounds. In architecture are planned urban flavoursome vibe, town and country. Part of building is sacrifice; of potentially irreplaceable bits of our vast object, the Southern Land. Bleeding heart chef eggs cracking for urban omelette.

The currency of tasmanian construction-taste politically sleeps alongside our big southern island so dear to the frogmore animal-raw under-street. I am here at Midway Point and remind them that Frogmore Peninsula is here too.

The sum of all our political home-locales equals a shawl on our national southern land. Hobart’s Sullivans Cove is same animal-raw, under where a federation-born city hall sits adopted and loved as a social heritage hulk bulk, loved unconditionally where it sits right there with a dozen long ironbark legs down punched the banks through, shores and spiritual heart flowing of the watery broken brooken soul of its settlement place. A  testosterroniouscable-born takeoff from atop this built heritage bulk, riding to the mountain brow of an ulururian kunanyi, would cause more concern for the sacred cow socially clothed building bulk; more than for the browed metaphor shewing raw unshawled the atmospheric dolerite with eons of piped weathered tunes of perfect stone presence soaking morning sun sheltered from well travelled western prahna. These stone organ pipes for some earthling adopted design connection, useful geomorphic urban design edifice, rare precious opportunity for highly nuanced architectural currency and future heritage possible in adaptation of the city hall with the  vicinity’s ‘oh so wonderful right on the doorstep’ natural heritage. Nay some no ears have. Usually the unseen, and oh so unacknowledged, is the architect’s vision to make the natural and built heritage connections in the fabric of renovated currency. The heartfelt butterpaper sketch breathes not for time blinkered politicians - ‘not viable’ is the vision so. Due again for renovation the town heritage protocol in all its wonder is. The british bulldog cum gentleman cum asian ‘how are you’ call-centre hegemonetary conservatives need to be racked by gaians and both gaian and bulldog then educated by the endemic indi-gentry and ecopically adapted to a sane beautiful compromise - compromise: a rational, and therefore perfect, solution … oh dear!