Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
Sacred Remnants
By Charles Freyberg
Interactive Press
Paperback, March 2026, 133 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1923435308
Though I wouldn’t want to go back to NYC in the eighties, there’s a part of me that’s still there, walking the dimly lit streets and taking in the strange and beautiful characters performing in public places, in alleyways and behind closed neon doors. This is a world that Charles Freyberg conjures beautifully in his poetry. It’s Kings Cross rather than Times Square, but the atmosphere is the same, along with the nostalgia and reverence for people and places that no longer exist, at least not in a recognisable form. Freyberg chooses to see the beauty even when it’s little more than memory, and to delve deeper into the gaps left by people and places whose traces are still palpable. Chapter one of Sacred Remnants reads like a sequel to his previous poetry book The Crumbling Mansion, celebrating his glamorous and marginalised friends from days gone by and exploring the ways in which the once exotic Cross has been commercialised and gentrified for profit to the detriment of the local residents who live and work there.
Sacred Remnants explores aspects of Freyberg’s past and the links between colonisation and gentrification and the ways in which history and culture can be fractured by the impulse to sanitise, exploit and commercialise. The book is divided into three parts. The first, Mavericks and Divas, focuses heavily on the colourful characters of Kings Cross who impacted directly on Freyberg, like burlesque and strip tease performer and painter Elizabeth Burton, a frequent subject of Freyberg’s work. Burton is an animating force, sparking something in the shy, uncomfortable teenager:
My lips loosen from their pout
as something gathers within me
hidden and gorgeous
bursting through my check shirt.
She really sees me (“To Elizabeth Burton”)
Freyberg takes us on a tour of his Kings Cross, from the Fish Market to now defunct nighclubs like The Bourbon & Beefsteak or Les Girls, focusing on performers like Mae, an aging friend in a nursing home, Candy Royalle who ran the open poetry mic at The Rattler, and Ayesha, one of the original dancers in the Les Girls troupe. It’s a nostalgic trip through time and space, enriched by paintings from Freyberg’s own collection.
When the buildings are demolished
will all their stories be homeless?
Or will some stockbroker be awakened
by the pounding of stilettos
by Juanita’s bloodied corpse. (“Rattler”)
These slowly disappearing people and places form a network of memory, the ‘sacred remnants’ of a once vibrant scene.
Part two moves away from the Cross and into Freyberg’s own family history, using the voices of his mother and great-grandmother, Bridget Ahern, along with a great-grandfather who was part of Queensland’s frontier massacres. His great-grandfather was one of the early settlers who destroyed the sacred places of the Gubbi Gubbi people, cutting down trees and removing First Nations people to Cherbourg, a newly formed government reserve:
The killers knew where they gathered:
A holy place
where the creek meets the lake,
scattered with middens and bones from feasting,
now erased by— (“Mansions at Weyba Lake”)
The poems move through Wakka Wakka and Kamiliaroi Land, telling stories of travels, forced migration, stolen children and lost histories, and Freyberg doesn’t look away from the trauma, but neither does he judge his ancestors without empathy. Freyberg’s mother Deirdre Freyberg was sent to Goomeri in 1942 at the age of 10 to stay with her great-grandmother Bridget to keep her safe from the war, After that, she never went back. Much of this section is Freyberg’s attempt to understand the past, his mother, and Bridget, but also the wrongs that Bridget committed. The reckoning is not only with the dispossession of First Nations people but also the way in which stories, language and connections are erased, spirituality is denied and beautiful is undermined by forces of greed and efficiency:
As you ordered the stockmen to cut down the bunya trees
to clear a new paddock, you did not see their tears.
You diminished yourself as you diminished them,
So your songs lost their meaning.It’s left to me to find you again—in poetry. (“Piano Accordion”)
The final section, “Sacred Land”, goes deeper into the forests of the Blue Mountains to find connection and offer a way towards healing. The forest doesn’t contain binaries. There is no prejudice. Everyone is received equally in the end:
A leaf tapers to a point
rounded pebbles are churned by the stream
purple buds are opening on crooked stems
boughs twist upwards.
A song hums
somewhere in my head,
a motif repeating
like textures on rock
fern fronds and flowing water. (“Hidden Passageway”)
Though they are remnants, Freyberg’s writing is consistently empathetic and does a lovely job of bringing those remnant together. Sacred Remnants does justice to the past through Freyberg’s distinctive combination of wonder, humility, and care.