POEM'S BY LAUREN

TERRITORY PAINTING

I left a painting for you Of the world It's ugliness in acrylics Browns and beige and sun-faded Greens and blacks And reds The earth in peril But you didn't see it. You didn't see how the cycads emerged from the brown and the charcoal Fluorescent emeralds Gems of the landscape Life teaming from the rocks and the soil and the arid horizon. I left a painting for you Of the beauty In the ugliness Of the remote The desolate And the abandoned The human spirit failed Despite its survival. I left a painting for you Of the Territory Truth, love and the harshness You don't see it Yet I do.

ON DARWIN

Masculinity reeks queues of steel capped boots dressed with ochre coloured sands in the creases of labour and the land. disposable incomes souvenir warehouses the tobacco tax warring with the street people sugared liquor replenishes the parched and sunburnt asphalt transient seasons ebb and overflow with first world surplus pockets lined tangles of electronics compiled by nimble offshore fingers global gossiping cross cultural consumption patriotic cohorts roaring slapping, sipping, shipping to the beck and call of the mines. small towns derived of cubicles, hot-desks and open plan workstations administering ministries in work groups, task forces and jargon whole towns fly in and fly out committed to generous enterprise agreements political flux and mambo jumbo government sanctioned apartheid as the destitute glitter the pavements of the Rich City. culture is whored out to amicable foreigners with sandals, maps and accents and ignorance and money. scaffolding and cranes frame the Rainbow Horizon; Darwin booming and the First Peoples edging closer to Death.

Lauren ventured to the Territory 5 years ago unintentionally and was immediately enchanted by the breathing and heaving land and social-scape. She seems to be perpetually studying having done Arts, Education, Social Work, Indigenous Studies and now Psychology at CDU.