By Mike Ladd

My father was an Australian microbiologist specialising in soil enzymes and my mother was a primary school teacher. They spent several years working in England before my pregnant mother carried me across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary to New York, then in trains across America to Berkeley, California, where I was born in 1959. Later, we sailed from San Francisco on the Arcadia, returning home to Australia together, where I grew up and still live. 

After my parents died, when the family was clearing out their house, I found a wooden box containing 400 slide images. Most of them I had never seen before. The first images came from the mid-nineteen fifties, before I was born, when my parents were a young, working couple in love. They showed their life in England and America, then building their new house in Australia, family scenes, and my father’s travels around the world for his scientific work. The last images date from the nineteen-eighties.

Looking through the lens of the slide viewer, I could see the images were sharp and full of those glorious colours of Kodachrome from seventy years ago. My father had a good Pentax camera and lenses, and being a scientist, he was fastidious about light meters. Each slide was carefully labelled in his neat handwriting. I dedicate this poem with visuals to the memory of Jeff and Meg Ladd, who made these photographs.

A Box of Slides

Chromatics of the ’50s and ’60s: 
mid-century crimson
and that wash of cobalt blue –
meticulously labelled
by my father’s ghost hand,
where, who, when…

My parents are so young, 
so vulnerable 
under my glass cyclops eye –
I stare down on them like a god 
now they have no right of reply, 
no chance to say:
That’s not right, 
you don’t understand us at all.

Sheffield. Autumn morning. 1958.
I am conceived in this depressed town 
with air the colour of tarnished cutlery.
A heavy coal-smelling mist, the sun an orange pill,
people in the street are shadows 
through a womb wall.

Arrival. New York.
Pale, pregnant, seasick mother 
feeling the rumble of the ship’s backwash 
through the wooden deck 
as the Queen Mary docks.
Sky, a petrel blue-grey.

Broadway  –
a blur of red and gold against deep black
and the busy cabs.  
TIME
and LIFE ‘Puts You In The Picture.’
Burt Lancaster and Rita Hayworth
dine at SEPARATE TABLES and there –
an air force kind of blue 
on the bottom of the PEPSI sign.

Trains across America –
Lake Provo, Prussian blue.
Yosemite, a wall of folded denim.
Then the Berkeley sky –
my father standing in front 
of the campus disaster shelter.

Children of Depression and war,
young adults of boom and Cold War,
what survives of them 
I’m made of too.

Coastal scenery, Pacific Grove, 1959.
The whites of the surf tinged with icy blue,
the tang, the free gull shriek of it.
I’m about to be born.
A wave of sixty-five years ago 
breaking on a rock, still exists here
as we might too, every instant of a life
in a multiverse box of slides.

Alta Bates Community Hospital.
Mother leaves with me wrapped in a blue shawl –
just down the road, a hearse, rear door open,
waits for its own delivery.
Life and death – twins holding hands 
in the early morning –
the pale one, the bright one.

Monterey, Reno, Dallas –
Father was there, afterwards at the knoll,
the women in knee-length coats 
placing red flowers and white wreaths in the grass.
I remember my mother crying when
the voice came on the radio.

In the Arcadia, we cross the equatorial line,
wake churning the mid ocean blue
to my new Australian home. 
King Neptune and Queen Amphitrite,
rope wigs and cardboard tridents,
the women passengers in one-piece bathing suits,
golden leis slung over their bare shoulders. 

Suburban sweetness, backyard posing 
in a child’s gunslinger outfit
while the US Airforce was napalming Vietnam.
Only now do I understand how I was cradled
in the petrochemical,
the savage empires
that gripped us our whole lives.

My father was always travelling far from us,
he was sometimes just a postcard.
Scientist of the soil,
he loved to photograph workers in many lands:
fishermen on Kos, a cook in Nanjing,
a flower seller on the streets of Capetown.
In Damascus, a westerner asks some boys for directions.
How many of them became victims of Assad,
how many joined his secret police?

Later, the slides retreat home 
into pictures of daisies,
lone figures on beaches, 
landscapes with a buried history of massacre,
and finally, just an empty road. 

You’re on – shine briefly on the wall –
you’re gone.

Today I pour the speckled builder’s sand of their bones
at the foot of this rock where they once stood
looking at this view.  
Young, strong, everything before them –
the valley, the shepherding hills,
the creek winding down to the smudge of blue.

Mike Ladd is a South Australian poet, essayist and nature lover. He has published ten collections of poetry and prose, including the natural history Karrawirra Parri, Walking the Torrens from Source to Sea, from Wakefield Press. His most recent book is Dream Tetras (2022) an experimental collaboration with visual artist Cathy Brooks.  Mike was the editor of ABC Radio National’s Poetica program, which ran for eighteen years and brought Australian and international poetry to a wide audience. His New and Selected Poems is due out from Wakefield Press in 2025.