Buttons, by Kate Gardiner

SO MUCH once depended on them—bone, shell and metal. Once these buttons fixed cloth, fine or course, at chest and breast, at wrist and crotch, keeping overlapping cloth from flapping. Today, in a jacket of many zippers, I search for them, scattered in paddocks; I discover them covered in dust in rubbish hillocks, hinting at inhabitants long gone from the homestead on the hill.

From their size and shape and quality, we can guess who wore them and for what: linen, oil skin, moleskin for adults’ skin, muslin soft for that baby’s skin, boiled yarn for that child’s warmth, each to keep out the baking winds, the frost, the sun's glare. But neither zips nor buttons, nor weft and weave, keep the red dust out of nostrils, ears, and eyes. Miles of fences stitch these thousands of acres—posts hewn from felled trees, each post drilled by muscled force and hundreds of holes dug deep into hardened ground so that silver strands could lace the land; an elastic tensile wire for ‘roos to leap and pigs to plough, foxes to slip, and goats and emus to hurl themselves into and sometimes through. These fencelines keep no winds out, though, and so the skies have been made red: this country is scarred by knowledge brought from too far off: of stocking up and locking up and valuing only flesh; huge machines used to sew only monocultures into the once complex communities of leaf and root. And now, though treasuries swell, families are broken and the fabrics that once held are now frayed, and all creatures struggle as the rangelands are scraped and left for winds to lift, the only monitor an ancient lizard. The choices the land needs now are like the buttons that held the garments once, threaded through well with time. Discerning, slow, a better fit for a bigger purpose. Mending this broken web: resting the land between the mobs, letting the grasses grow right through their seasons, the soils deep, the communities rich and various again, recharging this place on which so much depends—the hungry cities, the creatures, us all.

Gratitude note: narrative format poem created with the assistance of Mark Tredinnick