Dried Waterhole dead meat. Roos with wool attached, mud trapped. Green flies, blowflies, bush flies, maggots, meat ants, crows thrashing around. So much death in this parched dry place. Eyeballs in skulls, carcases, stark rib cages and yellowy pelvises. The pile up exceeds the capacity of scavengers to affect their removal. A young fox, crouched, intact, still. A smell like body gas - a released sigh of disgust. We stand our hands covering our noses, taking in the water hole alive with the process of death. When the animals entered they entered the foulness, their last resting place, the ruin that had drawn them to the end of their journey, offering them, not the comfort of water, but the image of death and stink as they took their last breath of stillness.
The Old Homestead is approach along a rutted, flat, salt brush edged track. Now a pile of rubble only a stark burnt out chimney place stands with crumbling bricks as a sign of habitation. The smell of stale piss and broken glass covers its base. I rub the rotting mortar of the stones beneath my finger tips. The perspective of the past clashes with the present. Moods of dread, of renewed anticipation out of necessity, romance, anger and greed, pain and hardship flow through me. An image of romantic decay, remote from ordinary life sensed. Behind the old house, a cold room built deep into the earth. Down flaked cement steps into the gloom, the air thick and stale. A rotting carcass and the sweet smell of death.
Inside the tin shed, stale shit pellets. A breeze shudders the loose iron walls. Serrated and grey fleeces of dead wool. A fly blown lump spread in the corner, white bones showing.