AustLit

'The poem as a whole reads, Chinese characters, a shelf on which stand burnt sticks of incense and three oranges, wind gusts broken branches mauve shadows under the jacaranda and oddly, a row of cypress pines along the tin wall of the Rheem factory Apparent gaps in the poem give the visual record of omission. Unlike the previous poems discussed, "Blue Hills 38" is not aerial but works at ground level, describing the historical layers of a suburban area of Melbourne; the poem as a whole reads, Lanes I will never trace of sheoak and flowering gum fork through these suburbs under the campanile, Mentone, where the rail curves towards the bay and its townships: median clock towers and creek borders, overtaken by the city, the lowlands between, drained, filled in, overlooked by railway stations, a vista from Edithvale to Wheelers Hill. The speculation here regards the question of art's relationship-in this case, of non-Aboriginal art-to its environment in Australia and its willingness to allow its language and conventions to be thereby changed. [...]the line democratizes art and heat as simply two small words, two potentially volatile ingredients. The properties of art and heat in "Blue Hills 48" are mirrored by a transformative exchange between architecture and art: australian mercantile lanD concrete lettering embossed around the warehouse entablature broken off on one wall leaving the infill of words in red brick, a negative space with the unexpected gravity of a Magritte.' (Publication abstract)