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ESTHER OTTAWAY
Binalong Bay 2005:
A Tasmanian Demography
surprise!
around this coast-twist
here's
Melbourne & Sydney, run away -
priced out
of their own urban sprawl, poor things,
they're
whooping & throwing sand in handfuls:
"cheap waterfront!" Picking our way around
the coast
we observe, like age or divorce,
one of
those things we stupidly
never saw
coming: its empty S-bends
are scored
with grey-clay driveways, spidered
into ugly
skeletons, soon to be fat-fleshed
with
uglier two-storey villas. This feels
like a
common-law breach - don't they know
the beach
should be ours? Somehow? Howled down
by Market
Forces, my shack-fantasy vanishes
like last
light into a flesh-fold of auctioned coast.
Yet it's
our fault: we left our run too late,
you can
see us grinning on the eighties postcard
titled
Apple Isle - Nothing Changes,
knocking
back $8000 beachfront fibro
because,
cursed with genetic travel-avoidance,
we won't
commute. That's me
leaning
against the packing shed, exclaiming
"all
the way to Scamander?"
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