We were here
before maps, before fences,
when the rivers carved stories into earth
and the sky stretched wide with kin.
They came –
steel and sickness,
flags planted as if to root us out.
Tongues forbidden, names unspoken,
bodies forced onto narrower and narrower tracks.
Yet the campfires didn’t go out –
they flickered under blankets of law,
smoked signals through silence.
Grandmothers cupped language in their hands,
grandfathers buried seeds in hungry earth,
children learning to walk between two worlds –
bare feet and classroom shoes.
We survived.
Not as ghosts,
not as relics behind museum glass,
but as pulse and memory
threaded through city streets,
across saltbush paddocks,
through footy fields and poetry slams
and the hum of a didge
in the back streets of Brisbane.
Now –
our art is carved into galleries and alley walls,
our words in books and courtrooms,
our faces on stages –
singing, dancing, finding new rhythms
rooted in the old,
reaching for the next sunrise.
We rise –
with every sorry spoken,
every truth unearthed,
with pride drawn from ochre,
with languages returned and retaught,
with land cared for as only we know how.
Dignity is not given by governments or parliaments –
it grows in the way we greet each day,
teach our children,
remember those lost and hold those yet to come.
We carry what they tried to break –
songlines stretching forward,
spirit unbroken,
feeling for the path that is and always was,
finding – with every step – a way
to belong fiercely in this century too.
Thank you