Taking Queen Victoria to Rocherlea is one of many poems which deal with these concerns, pointing out the cosmetic layers we as a society place upon such things as memory and historical perspective – embellishments which lose their freshness over time.

      In this poem, the ‘sepulchral lithograph’ of Queen Victoria which had earlier been ‘enhanced’ with lead white, now looks ‘gilded, cheeks daubed yellow’. The lithograph is likened to that Tasmanian layer of history which saw both the museum and the maternity hospital named after Queen Victoria; and about which today’s local populace no longer cares.

      An extra dimension is cleverly added to the poem; the conservator explaining the poor state of the lithograph is named Vicki. She is, away from the museum, a belly dancer, and during the conversation still wears her make-up from a lunch-time performance. Like the lithograph, she too has, as the accompanying photograph of a belly dancer in ‘regalia’ reveals, a decorative external ‘layer’.

      In this, as in many of the poems, Thorne suggests the ability of history to undo our ‘decorating’ plans. ‘Years jaundice more than pigment’ . And Vicki the belly dancer is different from the lithograph: for her as for society, there exists a more wholesome layer under the wrappings, below the layers of artificial loyalty, prettified history and uncertain memory:

‘… beneath cosmetic layers
the navel winking rude as naked health.’

As usual, Thorne’s work includes a witty humour and a love of word-play; for instance, when he talks about ‘the good old ineffable’ (in Low Tide); the fact that ‘the gulls are not gulled by this’ (Low Tide); or :

Touching up the monarch wasn’t thought a crime
in those pre-Keating days, was, in fact, PC
(Taking Queen Victoria…)

      All the poems are worth reading and re-reading, but for me some work better than others. I feel Tim Thorne’s poetry is at its best when it is sharpened by his sense of the historical and his sensitivity to past and present injustices, as in his poems Comrade Revenant (about the Inveresk railway yards), The Last Muster of the Aborigines at Risdon, Sydney Cove (a trading ship), and Bound to Please (about the way women’s fashion throughout history ‘shape[s] the fantasies of men’, i.e. …Allure/is always fashioned for control.). My favourite is Led, wherein the poet humorously poses a conjecture about the future of those who carried ‘Tea caddies lined with lead’ about the British empire:

Lead poisoning, we now know, destroys
the sense (among others) of direction.
How many intrepid surveyors,
heroic botanists, muscular missionaries,
stirred themselves anti- and clockwise
through the scrub till they dissolved?

As a bonus, the book includes an article on the unpublished and possibly unknown poems of Eric Scott (1899-1986), once Director of the Queen Victoria Museum.