I READ this piece’s first two stanzas as a recognition of the poetic persona’s attunement to Huonville having a colonial history. ‘Rome’, being the colonisers of Britain directed my mind this way. 

As a non-Indigenous poet who also seeks to engage critically with colonial histories, I am curious about the contrast that is drawn between the title’s specificity – Huonville – and the symbolic breadth and length – Rome, diamond – extant in these first two stanzas. 

How did you intend to position your persona? 

I WAS thinking of it as kind of a pairing off of these colonial histories.

This poem aims to depict this kind of expansive colonisation which goes outwards and then retreats, so there’s this idea of Rome going outwards from mainland Europe into Britain and then slowly narrowing down as these empires fall, so I also try to think about colonial decline at the end.

I often label my poems with the place where they are being composed, because I’m really interested in not creating these perfect objects, like perfect object nation-states that stay in stasis and are preserved. 

So, I always like stating where my poem is because it contains something of the roughness of the process of writing it. 

This poem is referring to a sign that I saw in Huonville and I also wrote it in Huonville. 

But I guess in terms of how it’s positioning my persona, then it’s saying that I’m at this exact point, in this exact place.

And as the poem proceeds, it talks about contemporary time, but then linking backwards to how we got here through these widening circles of colonisation that have gone out and have retracted.

I guess in those circles is where I was wanting to position it.

YOU evoke a sense of ‘progress’ by mapping changing modes of transport in stanzas 3-6. I like how this ‘progress’ culminates parallel to danger being introduced into this piece – “100kmph don’t even pause” – meaning such danger becomes attached to this ‘progress’.

I am reminded of Ambelin Kwaymullina’s poem Time in which she writes (about linear time):

A version of time

that is always carrying people away

from an unchangeable past

into an unknowable future

giving the illusion of progress

regardless of whether

anything has changed (20)

Are your enjambed two-line stanzas a way of ‘calling back’ to Rome? Is the car’s aggression a way of showing a persistent violence?

I WAS so interested that you picked up Ambelin Kwaymullina’s Time in thinking about this poem. 

The poem definitely talks about linear time. The car’s aggression could be seen as a symbol of persistent violence, but also as a symbol of other forward-moving modes of transport, and by this symbol, I try to think about that idea of progress as a colonial imposition, as persistent, unshakable and sometimes violent.

I am always thinking about different time-scapes. 

For instance, time in terms of the climate catastrophe. 

I was in pilates today and they were like, ‘it’s 24 degrees in May every day, it’s the best May it’s ever been’, and that’s lovely but also frightening, because the larger geographical sways which mark climate catastrophe aren’t that noticeable now. 

But even ancient Rome is nearby in the context of the tens of thousands of years of continued First Nations storytelling and climate knowledge. 

I’m always trying to problematise those different time-scapes as concepts that remove people from the current issue, that distance what can contextualise May’s weather, for instance.

IN this piece, I was interested by the ‘might’ that follows “I only winged it”, which to me implies that this is imagined speech.

I wonder, then, are these speech marks a way of making the symbolic ‘driver’ a more tangible being? 

How do you see ‘symbols’ functioning in your poetry broadly?

I’M interested in deforming everyday units of speech, like that idea of ‘I only winged it’ and what that does to a poem, how cliche images can be used to defamiliarise the familiar.

So, making the driver a more tangible being is a narrowing-down, the poem goes from being wide to more centralised, more of an hourglass-shaped column. 

This shape also comes from the ‘my’ in the centre – they’re my child’s legs, and then the driver’s legs are more distant, less familiar, so there’s a distancing-out there again. 

As for symbols, there are a lot of roadsides in my poetry across time. 

These are symbolic because their meaning can be broad. 

But there are different ways of doing symbols, like for John Kinsella, I would say many of his symbolic resonances are built-up across his oeuvre, they begin as super-ordinary images; and they become symbolic through consistent usage.

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Swan Crossing Sign Huonville

When all roads lead to Rome

and more come back again

what to make of the yellow diamond

roadside with the black bird appliqued on?

Runners, horses, carts all limited

in their ability to fold the living thing

back into itself, even my child’s legs

adept at kicking what they shouldn’t

would always miss the head, and now

fully automated, the metal boxes

travelling 100kmph don’t even pause

or flash a red warning light.

“I only winged it”, the driver might say

as if the wing wasn’t the whole point

of the bird, even though, on the sign

they paint them, always, tucked

to the point of invisibility, and waddling

as if they’ve never known flight.