Ekphrasis: ‘Manhunt Near My Home’

by Irvine Homer

for Tom Carment

Robert Gray

The artist was a farm labourer,

in what he called ‘jam tin country’

and himself a captive

when he painted the escapee.

 

Nineteen fifty-nine, Emu Plains –

there met on a prison farm

two young men, in for car theft,

Simmonds and Newcombe.

 

They broke out. One was caught

in days. The picture reminds

of how at fourteen I admired

that Houdini, Kevin Simmonds.

 

Each day for weeks, the biggest

manhunt in our history,

and yet the wireless told us

that again he’d slipped away,

 

despite 500 police,

with submachine guns and flares

and a helicopter, and despite

the 300 volunteers

 

(who were shameful, I thought –

more than any society,

we oughtn’t side with overdogs

nor demand servility).

 

Despite the legends, rebellion

is light in our inheritance.

What outraged the crowd I thought

was in fact a mischance –

 

Surprised, in making their escape,

one of them gave a smack

to a guard, with a baseball bat,

and caused his skull to crack.

 

Something they had often seen

in a Saturday picture show,

but the sort of weight to apply

was difficult to know.

 

There are, I realize now,

further victims in such a crime.

They made him ‘comfortable’

with a blanket – waste of time.

 

The police look to their own,

they moved like a bushfire;

brought back Ray Kelly, inspector,

who’d wanted to retire;

 

his style, an axe’s bite;

the professed killer of three men;

in trench coat, felt hat, iced

spectacles; temper worn thin.

 

The pair hid in Sydney showground –

tunneling piled sacks of wheat

to make a cave; stole milk bottles

from doorsteps, before daylight.

 

Then, Newcombe was caught. Later,

they found what Simmonds would do

was break into cars and listen

to the police radio.

 

He flickered through ragged suburbs,

eluding the blades of torches,

dissolved in misty streetlight;

food sometimes on back porches.

 

After school, with my bike, I had

the newspaper delivery

for a country town; and each day

paused, to follow this story

 

in different papers. Then pedalled

at twilight about the town

on gravel streets and grass verges;

the rolled newspapers thrown

 

into the yards I pretended

were sticks of dynamite

that could scare off the bloodhounds

and put the police to flight.

 

A rebel with cause – the suburbs;

ahead of the sixties; his hair

like Elvis, but more admirable,

to me, than any pop star.

 

His sister spoke up for him;

she said he’d just too much life

and was good to his mother.

There were offers to be his wife.

 

And here he is in this picture,

near Newcastle, New South Wales,

a hundred miles from Sydney,

in a culvert as light fails.

 

He’s small, in the bottom right,

beneath the landscape’s grandeur.

There is a solidarity

in that he’s by the signature.

 

Along the base, a dirt road,

with a see-saw’s tilt, and under

this is where he’s hidden;

above, two policemen linger.

 

To the left, the road recurs,

close, on a black, cairn-shaped hill;

from the right, a wedge of forest;

between is a skewed triangle,

 

the foremost paddock, burnt orange

the same as the road, which makes

the shaft on a striking form,

on a broad arrow or great axe,

 

that’s completed with wind-break trees.

On this clearing, minutely, 

the police disperse, clothes-peg shapes;

like ants, you’d have to say.

 

No houses, but from the title

they must be somewhere near.

The hour of the chooks, rounded up,

of a redolent cow manure.

 

Then higher again, in this tall,

vertical painting, the sun

on other paddocks, their strewn shards.

And then, another dimension –

 

in long pleats, blue-black forest,

a cold slag, laid transversely;

light on undulant edges of

elided gullies. Poignantly,

 

a powdered thin straight line of smoke

is leaving, along a ridge –

contrasts with tree-forms’ splintered bone

among the stippled foliage

 

of the lower half. There’s a calm

that Lawrence called reptilian,

the ancient stillness of the bush.

A dog; a coughing policeman.

 

Then further up, dark headlands

and bleached straits of ocean appear,

out of the Northern Renaissance,

by Altdorfer or Patenier.

 

An electric sunset. Plum-blue

at one side, its stacked thunder;

a new world in the other half,

with rosy and golden moisture.

 

Coifs and crests of coral, their lit

engorgement; a confluence

of labile traceries;

a strawberry deliquescence;

 

some honied Apocalypse;

magnolias’ pleated ivory;

the bruised limbs of seraphim;

an orchidean Arcady – 

 

as though in divine armada

Deity called on us at home

wanting to anoint the Earth,

our estrangement overcome.

 

This to balance Simmonds, taken

in a swamp, at 24;

now open-faced, brave, resourceful,

but he was to race no more.

 

Vengefully they would throw away

whatever he might have been.

Laying hands on him for photos,

Ray Kelly, brought to the scene.

 

Is that sunset meant to show

a heaven he’ll never win?

Not an angel with its trumpet

nor a scroll has been painted in.

 

Is it to show us ‘the lilies

. . . on the banks of Italy’;

that there is no distinction

between beauty and cruelty?

 

The painter, self-taught, bed-ridden;

the brushes tied to his wrists,

both legs had been amputated,

because he’d spondylitis.

 

Simmonds was put into Grafton,

the most notorious prison;

I saw the law was blood-stained

that well knew what would happen –

 

I’d heard of the Reception.

Within a few years, hanged himself;

grown tired of being beaten,

the only way to get relief.

 

I often used to imagine

there’d been a chance for him,

that a generous woman beckoned

as in a Hitchcock film –

 

Like Psyche, at the prow of time

I see that figure stand,

within a window’s bay, a wand

of candlelight in her hand.

 

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Robert Gray is widely acknowledged as one of the nation's finest poets. He has published eight volumes of poetry. His memoir, The Land I Came Through Last, was published in 2008 by Giramondo.