Joe writes regular comments for the gazette.

Well, you wouldn’t read about it: It’s the beginning of our seventh year of publication. Posterity will judge the gazette as a reflection of Tasmanian society at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We published anyone who felt that they had something to say. Poetry always ends up as the expression of the unconscious and although we live our lives on the surface, it will take its most horrible revenge if we suppress it. The surface life is not worth living. We find this out eventually, no matter how desperately we run from it.
Judy and I went to the March Relay For Life in Penguin. We marched round and round the oval together with hundreds of other individuals who try to bring the horrors of cancer into awareness, where we collect money for cancer buses (which hopefully may be alleviated if all those political promises come into being to build cancer treatment centres in the north-west of Tasmania). I have been the recipient of their benefit.
I’ve just published nine booklets. One of Burnie Scenes which shows some of my watercolours and a re-publication of Philosophical Sonnets with paintings of such understandings.
The gazette can also be viewed on Google: "Europa Poets’ Gazette".
This year we have decided to hold the Burnie Gold Pot (won by Pete Stratford last year) and also a down-scaled poetry reading event for Burnie Shines which occurs around October 8, the anniversary of Edward Curr’s decision to start a road from Emu Bay, after Hellyer’s disobedience and his consequent demise.
My sonnet, in the next column, relates to the booklet I’ve just published, called Musical (nonsense) Verse. I like this kind of ambiguity and hopefully my poetic pretensions will be heading in this direction in the future.


Sonnet
In Dreamtime, just before the time of Oz,
Did Birraloo, the king of all, decree
That Dirilling, the noble bod, was boss,
As spirits from the billabong would see
The stretched-out hand of Goo, the gum-gum tree,
Who wished that all should live in greatest ease
Where food and dreams came flying with the bee
To free the spirit for the sake of peace.
But forces of the Doog and Birraloo
Would rise to plead with discontented glee
To cleanse the Earth of dreams and fagaloo
That all decisions and their aims be free.
So did the king decree, that war was near,
To fight the blind intruders that we fear.
© Joe Lake