Wheat and Moon

Cass Lynch

You hear her approaching, the whump whump whump of feet on wheat. The rhythmic roll of paired appendages lifting and spearing among stiff straw stalks on undulating agricultural boodja. Over the night horizon she appears, a low pale moon that lifts off the ground as if to ascend skyward, only to hover and sprout limbs — two, four, six, eight. Limbs that branch from behind cephalothorax, multiple glowing eyes a constellation on her face. The legs are lengths of millet, the coarse head is hay, the round body a tapestry of cereal grains. The giant spider made of wheat walks with horse-rhythm across beige fields burdened with kernels. Soon combine harvesters will make straight tracks across colour-leached land, guided by satellites, plucking seed top from crop.

The great spider is looking for somewhere to rest. There is remnant scrub at the edge of a paddock, the lumped granite there hostile to machinery, with a she-oak looming shadow-like in the moon’s rays. Spider feet grope forward, brushing over rock and lichen, and she senses something acidic: not mammal urine, not rotting citric fruit. It’s nitroglycerin. This granite outcrop has been dynamited in the past, partially, unsuccessfully, an attempt to make more pasture, more bleached sameness. She traces the stone with curiosity, her stalky chaff claws admiring the rock that runs too deep to crack.

The spider is mostly wheat, but not all. There is a tractor chain rattling around in her abdomen, tufts of sheep’s wool cushion the shoulder hinge of her trochanter limb, there is barbed wire in the long metatarsals of her foreleg. The spine of a bible sits behind her carapace, railway spikes make a dark stripe along her back. Two curved kylies form her fangs, draped in kangaroo skin chelicerae. The jam tree wood of the fangs clack musically as she rubs them with palm fibre pedipalps. Her jaws are hinged by dynamite fuses, ropey and papery.

A bloom of canola emerges from a rear knee, yellow and oily. She scrapes this against the granite and sheoak roots, attempting to dislodge it from her form. She has not always been made of crop, but she has always been this place.

When the land was cool and green, the spider was made of banksia, acacia and quandong. She could make silk then, build her reverse tower into earth, and listen to the dreams of subterranean thinkers in the soil. Now hot breeze and livestock feet have transformed her, she cannot produce silk in this place of dry horizons, she cannot make her burrow home in such hard dirt. Strange seeds cloud around her and aggressively take root, while familiar plants fail to bloom.

The canola in her knee is an interloper. She will tear this leg off perhaps. Walk rhythmless until it grows again.

A baked night wind moves across the wheat, roaring like a parched ocean. Her spider body rustles in return. She has become the land that has become the crop. The last silk in her body is her lungs, brittle folds where air moves like water over gills. Dry air now to drown in.

The she-oak on this granite outcrop is an oasis in a new desert. The soft needles whisper where the million heads of wheat shriek. The nitroglycerin on the granite is soaking into her feet and will join the 1080 in her venom glands. She cannot stay here.

She strides under billion-star sky, whump whump whump. Tiny trapdoor spiders pull their doors shut as she passes over, as they do to pig, sheep, horse and cow. She encounters a wire fence that intersects two paddocks and slows. Considering it, she pulls the fence up, out of the ground, uprooting it star picket by star picket. She holds the arc of wire above her head, stretching it, testing it. Satisfied, she curls it around herself, creating a burrow palisade to crouch in for a few hours. Eight crystal quartz eyes roll upwards, seeking out the moving points of light that guide the harvesters as they reap the earth. She spies the pale face of the moon and imagines that as her burrow, leaping out and snatching the satellites as they pass by in dark space. Her fibrous body stills, and the trapdoor spiders of the fence line open their little moon doors again, tiny eclipses blinking in the dry.

Author’s note

I was entranced by the lightness of Katie’s artwork, of using floating fabric to bring the image of star pickets that line the edges of paddocks in the Wheatbelt into the gallery. It’s a great meditation on the nature of territory and transformation, especially to call the artwork ‘Fence lines and digging sticks’, making a connection then to the wana or digging sticks of Aboriginal women. My character of the spider emerges from this concept as another version of territory transformed.

Cass Lynch is a writer and researcher living on Whadjuk Noongar Country. She has a Creative Writing PhD that explores Noongar stories that reference climate change. She is a member of the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories group who focus on the revitalisation of culture and language connected to south coast Noongar people.

‘Wheat and Moon’ was first published by Westerly, 68.1, 2023, pp. 35-37