Tuesday Poem - Fettler by Geoff Page

XVIII   Fettler

Sometimes if it’s quiet at smoko

I like to think about the lines,

the way they radiate from Sydney

all over New South Wales,

those parallels of travelled steel

shining in the sun —

and sometimes all the human shit

that’s dropped at speed between them.

A fettler’s life is not romantic,

not the way a Sydney teller

might glamorise a swaggie,

‘out there in the open air’

and all that style of thing.

We hold the whole damned state together

if ever truth were told,

keeping everything in trim,

smelling out the rotten sleepers,

checking on the gauge,

measuring a bridge’s sway

and testing out the signals.

Not a lot of status but

it’s more or less secure —

though all that asphalt on the road

might change a thing or two one day

but not while I’m around.

Life gets scary though at times

out here on the gangers’ trolley,

all that up-and-down at speed

between the goods trains and expresses.

It’s organised, of course, but as

the poet Robbie Burns has said:

‘The best laid plans of mice and men

oft gang agley’. OK?

You hear vibrations in the rails

rising through the wheels,

levering out towards the ten-mile

or back home to the depot.

At times we’ve had to stop and run —

or tip the trolley off the rails

before it’s smashed to pieces.

The union’s not too bad on this

but accidents do happen.

Not today though, I dare say,

not out here and on our way

back to Eurandangee.

I check my watch; it’s half past two.

We should be home by four,

having left some honest sweat

along our stretch of metal.

With Harry on the other end

we’ll go a round or two, I reckon,

back there at the Royal.

‘Bit of re-hydration, eh?’

as Harry’s prone to say.

Fettler is taken from Geoff Page's wonderful new book (maybe it would be best 

to describe it as a sequence? or is it a verse novel?) 1953, just out from UQP.

See the link below for how to purchase and pic and bio of the poet.

http://www.uqp.uq.edu.au/Author.aspx/1694/Geoff%20Page

This book really worked for me, and I am just old enough to know how authentic
it is. A time-traveling adventure in literature. There you are, back in 1953. 
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Very hard to pick out just one taste of the book
- but I chose Fettler because I have a soft spot for those gents. 
The cottage we lived in in Wingello on the Southern Highlands was built by a 
fettler. He had an apple orchard on the side, mostly worked, I would imagine, 
by his wife and eight children.

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