Somewhere in the clutter of memories consigned
to yellow boxes of Kodachrome slides,
there is a moment of me, caught by my husband-to-be,
at my only visit to the Brisbane Ekka.

I am wearing an old dress of my mother’s—
1940’s vintage, a Vogue Pattern immaculately stitched—
retrieved from her archives in a camphor-scented drawer.

That August, I am almost twenty.  The views
my inner camera collects are of horses, shining
molasses-dark, as they leap over tidy tests of rails;

halls of cakes and bottled fruit; a Champion bull being led
from a ring through its nose—and in Sideshow Alley,
the wound-mouthed clowns, avoiding pot-shots.

Smells of lanolin and dust … frying fat for Pluto Pups …
wind back the film and old manure mixes
with the heat of November, jacaranda flowers belling
as we file into the sheep pavilion for university exams.

Wind back … wind back … and ghostly in the rings
the horses are being tested for battle, not Blue Ribbons;
their riders from the country have Certificates of Excellence
based on height, weight, horsemanship and shooting.

It’s August, 1914.  My grandfather, just turned twenty-seven,
wins his Enlistment Papers here.  Suddenly he has the gravitas

of a soldier, not just a grazier, or a husband-to-be.

In his photograph, all kitted-up, the emu feather on his hat
is a jaunty wisp.  His boots have an Ekka horse’s gleam.
He stares at a view out of the camera’s range—

his hands so tight the knuckles shine,
all the forces of will and luck he will need to survive
hidden like clods of home-earth in each snapped-shut fist,
as he waits to ride in the wild sideshow alley of war.

JEAN KENT

(From The Shadow Box (Pitt Street Poetry, 2023)