This poem is a short affirmation and image of a small holiday island some eleven miles offshore from Fremantle, Western Australia. It began as a prison for aboriginal men and boys after 1838, and from 1902 served as a gubernatorial retreat from the intense summer heat. It is sear and dry, bereft of natural surface water, and now is a watery playground for fishers, boaters, surfers and many others. Paul McCartney called it "the rotten-est island in the world". Cheek!

 

Chariots of the Sun

 

Sun chariots whiteline the blue,

sheltering confusion in foaming sheets

like empty bottles

flung across riotous rock-streams;

 

pounding soft billows flat,

the phaeton riders, bounding

to salt-dry Rottnest

(sea-sucking on Indian Summers)

 

to Helios Island, firing

in hexagon diamond light,

 

squat, like an ochre toad

on the lip of the sea.

 

Chris Hubbard

Perth, 1996