a lawn isn’t a lawn until it’s a sit in
by Tim Loveday
Perspective: South Lawn
Get directions: 37°47’54.6″S 144°57’36.8″E
i can’t remember who said it;
if it was one of the political science professors
posturing toward a lecture theatre or a bambi-
legged kid who goes all deer-eyed when the ping
-pong ball swings skyward; i can teach
them what it is to be an instrument
of demarcations; though i forget
they do not need this; this part
of me that pontificates my forgetfulness;
to register only the immediate is progress;
to be a body this large is to be a dialect
detached from the mouth of the singer;
i am certain i had a mother but who is it;
the clocktower sometimes seems
like a fine intervention; someone drops
a leaflet & someone scrunches it;
if memory serves me i’m as good
as a memo; though this time the pitch
casts a shadow; though zip zips past me;
though if i had to tell you
i’d say there was truth here; the deadliest; i am
made of hardened things like refuge concrete
& old manila folders & someone’s long-lost
dependency on namesakes; but still the scarcity
of flour is what gets to me; how cooking bread
on me is illegal; how a camp-chair announces
my forgetfulness; demarcates the complicity
of box-shapes; i am one arm arming another;
i used to be heath; uncultivated; not virginal
but treasonous by nature; i was
earth-born & blood-soaked; then excavated;
i am not the eye nor the pencil stroke;
i have been taught how to bend
around corners; i have been taught how
to bend as in to fold; there is no flight
in this folding; no freedom; these pegs
are what germinate; do not mistake
my sit-ness for silence; to sit like this
is resistance; there is glory in this knowing;
i am as much a canvas as a banner;
one of them; alive; living; unwilling; dead;
do not forget this; remember this.
Fancy responding to the South Lawn?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Loveday is a poet, writer, educator and baby academic. His work explores class, masculinity, online radicalisation, rurality and climate collapse. He won the 2022 & 2024 Dorothy Porter Poetry Awards and the 2023 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Award, and was a finalist in the 2023 David Harold Tribe Poetry Prize and 2024 Montreal International Poetry Prize. You can find out more at: timloveday.com
Words from Tim
‘a lawn isn’t a lawn until it’s a sit in’ was inspired by the artifice of settler-colonial institutions like the University of Melbourne, wherein forgetting is built into the very architecture and infrastructure of the university grounds. It is written from the perspective of South Lawn; the lawn, while describing itself as ‘one arm arming another’ ends up denouncing its forgetfulness in the presence of student protests. The work stands in solidarity with the 2024 pro-Palestinian student encampment, and all those student protests before it that have resisted settler-colonial violence.
Find out more
South Lawn is also a South ‘Roof’ to an underground carpark, guarded by Atlantes Statues.
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