The Genesis Engine

An Iron Heap, a Roofing Heap, a Timber
Pile. Old family farms are the Makings:
equipment yards, heritage recyclers, rare
hardware stores. What seems broadly to be
junk to quarter-acre eyes, are in the slower
longer, wider scheme: precious materials -
especially in those beyond-Season seeing
eyes of the sky-watching grounded man.

Our farm had an Iron Heap under the Cypress
Trees where machine or tool in disuse was thrown
for a chance to be the stuff of new matters
despite its glitzless shop window of surface rust.
There was a Rudge-Multi motorbike frame,
old harrow leaves, coulters, tynes, discs,
and soil slicers, a hand-operated chaff cutter.

Re-used horse-drawn scarifiers became
a linkage cultivator implement, harrow
leaves, welded to a frame made a raisable
three point linkage tool, old fuel drums
became a swim-raft on the dam, or else
when it came to a heavier fabricated sort,
welded end on end to make the drum barrel
of an automated carrot or potato washer
rolling on Vanguard car-wheels, rigged on
welded irrigation pipes and driven by
an added electric motor through a car
diff and gearbox, thus saving thousands.

An old truck chassis became a roof
truss strong enough to hold up a water
tank. Old brick bats were cemented
round a rust-holed corrugated iron
tank to make a brick reservoir with
a watertight seal. There was no GST
on these materials and no income tax
on the money saved, nor an Assets Tax
on the nous or creativity which turned
scrap into the constructive, work into
play -as miraculous as water into wine.

Us farm boys rigged up a full size car
held together by friction, gravity and early science,
made from four vintage Sunbeam spoke-wheels
down to the hubs, with farm pipes for axles
and an old truck-coach divan as seat, a
steering wheel off a cultivator, a gearstick
off a scoop, and on this we drove far, unmoved
as farmers touring the teleports of sky, with
an outrigger of a temporary conflicting brother
still in our convoy on the Rudge Multi,
staked up to earth and handle-barred
to make adventure on a tour we took
into thin geography under the far-horizoned
cloud edge, workless roads were discovered
with no tolls, just our sound-effects in passing,
a zoom on the wind in each driver’s telling,
as the ready Image of its human fuel
in the old tempered spirit-steel
of its Genesis Engine came free.

Feb 2006 © Wayne David Knoll -
The Cascades’ East Monbulk, Victoria