The Underwritten Plain

By Tim Metcalf

Set at an abandoned bore-hole in South’s Australia’s Nullarbor plain, this epic poem in four parts, sparse as the plain itself, offers its vast and solitudinous explanation of Australia.

Tim Metcalf is an award-winning poet who has for many years worked around Australia as a country doctor, giving him an intimate knowledge of t

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debbie Lee
• Release date: Jul 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9781760415785

Book preview

The Underwritten Plain

The Underwritten Plain

Tim Metcalf

Ginninderra Press

The Underwritten Plain

ISBN 978 1 76041 578 5

Copyright © Tim Metcalf 2018

Cover photograph: Tim Metcalf

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All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. Requests for permission should be sent to the publisher at the address below.

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First published 2018 by

Ginninderra Press

PO Box 3461 Port Adelaide 5015 Australia

www.ginninderrapress.com.au

Contents

To the reader

I

II

III

IV

Afterword

Also by Tim Metcalf and published by Ginninderra Press

‘How many do we know of who have fled from the sweetness of a calm life at home among people they knew in order to undergo the horrors of uninhabitable deserts, throwing themselves into conditions abject, vile and despised by the world, delighting in them and going so far as to prefer them!’

Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)

Essays 1:14

To the reader

This poem is set at the Albala-Karoo bore, which today is nothing more than a hole cut in the Nullarbor plain. One rusted strand of wire hopefully suffices