The Poem Italy As School Boys Sam And Antonello Learned...

In Italy as school boys Sam and Antonello learned a poem a week. They could recite those poems word for word. But they were simple poems about animals and naughty children, about trees and rivers. Slav’s poems were long and complex, often they didn’t understand them but Slav’s voice reading the words was mesmerising and so they listened. From these poems, Antonello captured and stored images, be they migrating birds or the five cities as teeming sores, as parasites, they came back to him often when he was sketching, they forced him to look closer, to look from another angle. Some of these sketches, inspired by the poems Slav read to him were wonderous, unexpected, in them there were details that Antonello didn’t know he had seen. All three of them were happy to be working on the bridge, it was a big job but that gave them some security. At least for a couple of years they’d have ongoing work. And it was an essential project, everyone said so. But there were regular industrial disputes. The English companies did not understand the Australian unions, and there seemed to be a never ending inventory of problems, frequent demarcation disputes, and fuck ups. Many of the workers paid membership in more than one union to make sure they could complete whole tasks but occasionally a worker or a team was asked to do something that was not part of their job, when they objected the managers would insist, and at a moment’s notice the men had downed tools and marched off the site. The