The Immortal Muse website has featured the works of P.S. Cottier related to Canberra.
There’s a lot there, and a lot worth thinking about.
Perhaps best of all is “Houses of Gungahlin”:
What space for expansive thought or emerald memory
in these distorted castles, hunchbacked yet grown giant,
perched on desecrated hills, cubist shrines to ugly Gods?
With their whole rooms for vividly flat screen projection,
but no space for gardens, no crevice to hide imagination?
Miniature Gormenghasts, ghastly in their smug blockpiled
dreams. Space is impressed like a soldier, rifled to last metre,
extra empty rooms exist to power an ozone hole of mind.
They say, like Ozymandias, look on me…and despair, these
Aussie mansions. And I do, at the slanted, squeezing brains
of goons that hatched these dread creatures of spewed bricks,
and rendered into angled hell a once elegant, scant rock hill.
But I’ll leave you to be the judge.
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