Over Two Thousand Generations

In the russet hush of dawn,
beneath gum and acacia shadow,
ancestral feet remember all songs,
tracks pressing memory into the open red earth.

Language shimmers on every breath –
Ngarrindjeri, Noongar, Yolngu,
echoes of Country sounding in syllables
older than boundary, map, or city.
They carve the air with laughter, or mourning,
with greeting, and with the hush of awe.

Ochre-dusted fingers stroke lines –
delicate, deliberate, infinite –
stories coiling inside bark and stone,
each mark a promise, a prayer,
each pattern a universe:
goanna, billabong, the arc of the river.

Children run beneath paperbark trees,
learning kindness as law,
watching elders who remember to listen
to the call of the kookaburra,
to the stillness in a lizard’s pause.

Sacred fires crackle in the dusk,
illuminating faces painted for ceremony,
while didgeridoo breath spirals through night air –
its drone holding the axis of sky and stone,
calling spirits home to witness
joy, grief, renewal, return.

Here, the land is not backdrop,
but ancestor, kin,
a living mentor written in saltpan and spinifex,
in the hush of hidden waterholes,
in the promise of eucalyptus after the rain.

Over two thousand generations
arc like a rainbow serpent across dream and daylight,
each thread held in songs that fill the dawn,
in art that speaks when words grow silent,
in a culture flowering with presence –
fiercely tender, enduring, alive –
reminding all who listen:
beauty is belonging,
beauty is story,
beauty is the land,
carried, cherished, kept.