Blue, Green, Red and Purple: Adelaide
“It is a brown city this,’’ says Betty Collin’s poem which, though painting a picture in a single hue, makes Adelaide sound most appealing.
It’s a brown city this:
touching down in summer
from a pale sky at a brown airport
in a planar landscape like the surface of a distant windless sea:
the faint odour of eucalypts hangs in soundless air: and
you move through brown suburbs, with brown houses,
barely there
under the mottled trunks of dry old trees:
but think of an old-style housewife,
creating rich treasures in a dark kitchen:
or of a fecund eastern woman
concealed under a brown burka:
So,
when turbulent autumn rains hurl down
the last of the brown leaves
stir things hidden
Here in this brown city
the fullness of brown reveals itself
the richness of plum pudding
the comfort of the familiar,
and the need for littleness.
