FIBRO.

   In the early days
   you were Herculite
   Titanic and Eternit
   but we always preferred Fibrolite.
   We washed you in Kalsomine
   covered your shame in strap-work
   and you sheeted the pastel suburbs
   the working man's marble
   brittle as a poem.

   My Uncle Les sold you in Gosford
   and called you Durasbestos
   he even put an ad in the local paper
   and had his name beside yours
   imagine that!
   He was the first petty bourgeois
   in our family of quarrymen.
   We cut sandstone from the mountain's hip all day
   but it was you we slept with at night.

   My grandfather built his home from you
   a Hudson ready-cut
   we'd shout at each other through your sheets
   on Sundays you'd reverberate with madness
   you were witness to the past like carbon:
   the crack where my uncle smacked you with a Resch's
   and put his beery shoulder to your face
   the hole where my father threw his fist
   the draft that blew through you.

   Sometimes you imitated wood
   on those clinker-faced houses
   or even corrugated iron
   (although you were here before it)
   but you were always at your best
   when being honest
   in the susurrous suburbs of Holdens
   and promising nothing more than a smooth flat future
   where painted families smiled in catalogues.

   It was in the country you were most egalitarian
   on gentry homesteads, the Big Willandra Station
   chook sheds and churches
   ethereal sheets suspended across paddocks
   (sacred fibro was always alb white).
   Your shards held the ice chest level
   but you could bite when broken
   I still have the keloid on my thumb
   where I ran it down your squarrose edge.

   Sydney almost filled its basin with you
   from International style to curved P&O
   some suggested a fibro white opera house.
   Across the water at Luna Park
   people slid and spun within your walls
   fun park fibro-Coney Island
   buckling with gravity and fear
   along the railway fennel border
   fibro reflected in the harbour's olive face.

   Melbourne and Adelaide
   all but rejected you
   preferring their quasi European veneer
   and brick respectability.
   You were most popular of all in Darwin
   until Tracy demanded more than you could pay
   and you flew through Christmas Morning
   decapitating wandering families.
   The Aborigines collected you for humpies.

   Your only fault
   was those hooks deep in your DNA
   from that slurry, the very fibre of your soul
   that made cells want to multiply in lungs
   and saw the men who dug you from the ground
   walk home like powdered ghosts.
   Now spacemen have to take you away
   chipping at your ash-grey crust
   you are bagged and buried.

   The shibboleth of my underclass
   you made sleep-outs possible
   smothered verandahs
   and helped us build a laundry in two days flat.
   Your poor cousin, Masonite
   never made it far beyond the backs of cupboards,
   but you ...
   You are "modern as the moment"
   so strong and fireproof
   I'm sure they build with you in hell.