(Click play above to listen through the website. The file may take a moment to load)
Below are some gentle instructions to keep you on track, or refer back to once you’ve finished.
Location: KRRFM Community Radio Station (big yellow building)
We’ll guide you along our desire line through Kandos and remember that the Cementa website contains our map to refer back to. So trust us. Let us lead you.
Walk away from the radio station and up towards Buchanan street, looking up at the mountain range to your left.
< You have arrived >
// have you arrived //
this is the reception area
Under signal mountains
we are meeting here
A welcome
An indifference!
What are the indifferences of Country
That Country meets us with
Let it whisper your name
Land-whisper, footwhisper, tiptoe your light tread across Country
maybe now you can hear what it has to say
This way the ancestors too can greet you
Get to know you too
Location: Walking along Buchanan street past Kandos Museum
You might pause and take in the machinery of the Cement Works, sitting rusty and proud in the Museum yard on your left, and then continue on, down this living, breathing street of Kandos, toward the historic Train Station platform.
These mountains have always communicated
Once by light and now radio waves
Glinting shells, a transmission
A pulse that connects
Connected by a pulse before the humming of powerlines
K
A
N
D
O
S
Each letter for the men who ran the company
Australia’s first true company town
Imagine it here
Before they cross the mountains
Before the settlers
Before Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson crossed the mountains
Imagine it here
Location: On the Train station platform, nosing yourself towards the park.
Have you made it to the platform?
Find your way under the station awnings and fix your gaze on the cement stack.
Carefully cross the tracks towards the grass slope on the other side.
Follow this desire path. Emerge through two pines onto the footpath alongside Ilford road, and turn left. Keep walking on the path towards a gate to enter Simpkins park.
Imagine it here
Before the sounds of cement
Before the factory
Before any town
A long unheard frequency of place
Remembered only by Country
Have you ever tried to imitate a magpie call, a cockatoo screech
Have you ever tried to imitate a machine
Lyrbird now sings songs of the anthropocene
Its songbook one of change (songbook of change)
Spectacular feathers of this local bird
pluming free from those mother-pluckers
simply singing the songs of its forest-home
Volumes of industry
Noise increasing over time
Amplifying new layers
Changing the natural amphitheatre
Location: Gate, across burnout pad and oval, toward grandstand
Enter the park. Head towards the left, past the building in front of you, taking the asphalt road.
Find yourself at the natural centre of things..
This gathering site for different collectives spoke to us during our time here. Burned asphalt and rubber made a poetic echo with marks on scribbly gums.
What changes when there are boundaries, over the course of a mapping
How could something else be a map?
A time a place an experience
Land marks: ….
An object
we reimagine cartographies.
Create new cartographies of remembering.
be and feel all aspects of your ‘you’ reaching out into every corner of the park.
It’s a sense of freedom to take up space.
to have a sense of belonging enables (entitles?) your sense of self to be realised fully
The audacity of thinking you can claim a place
The audacity of thinking you belong somewhere
What is a map if not simply a snapshot of a moment in time.
Closing remarks
As you leave this spot, let it soak in.
What words rise in your mind? We invite you to write them down.
As you move through the weekend, as you drive across country home, consider the sounds you hear. How are they shaping the space? What stories are they telling you?
Do you want to capture them? You could use your phone, a voice memo recording, and then when you’re tucked into your own environment you could recall them, and remember sitting here, under the Coombalong mountains.
Thank you for listening with us.
Scribbles I make in the grand scheme of time
My time (& yours)–THIS one
Seems like the only time
{ f o r e v e r }