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The Empire of the Primrose

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  Empire of the Primrose poem The city fell in a single night.  Holding it would take longer. So the painters were summoned,  and the saints on the walls were given his family's eyes. A bloodline was found for him,  older than the walls,  older than the kings who raised them. Now even the earth must forget it ever belonged to anyone else. The Empire of the Primrose - Station 1 Do you have recurring dreams? Travel Sketches by metamodernist artist JJFBbennett The cycle always resets at dusk, like waking inside the cold architecture of an unyielding, repetitive dream. I walk the wet, cobbled veins of an ancient European city, passing beneath stone arches hung with heavy, lifeless flags, heraldry drained of colour, damp cloth clinging to wooden poles like dead skin. There is no breath of wind, only the low, humming pressure of an era turning in its sleep. I reach into an iron sconce and tear loose a torch of roaring, ragged fire. The flame casts jittering amber shad...
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From Montpellier Park to the You Yangs

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Beautiful sprawling Geelong
A veneer of suburbia each and every way
And all of that granite just 22ks north east
With distinct pyramid like peaks
Making the flat plains so much more

It has not always been this way
Station Peak Flinders Peak
A discovering with sheep
Reporting that the natives were unwilling to work
Waves of squatters drove off custodian resistance

Conflict
Aboriginal massacres
Procedural lack of evidence
Enforcement through denial of representation
Legitimizing colonial  right of way

Never to be officially documented
A systemic off the record ‘land grab’
Plunder and claim
Victim accounts reduced to word of mouth
Forever locked into what can be deemed acceptably plausible

Dogs must now be controlled
There are walking and trial bike trails
Picnic tables and toilet facilities
It is challenging and family-friendly
This, the now unquestionable modern day Australian landscape







Location: Montpellier Park, 8 Westbury Terrace, Highton VIC 3216, Australia

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