We trod this land for two thousand generations,
bare feet pressed into ochre,
calloused on granite and saltbush,
knowing the pull of creek,
the shadow-message of standing stone –
our dreaming,
woven into night sky constellations,
pulled from magpie song,
eternal chatter of the blue wren.
Then the ships arrived,
bellies fat with shadow and steel,
canvas bloom swallowing the horizon,
carrying a different law,
rusting code in the mouth,
strange men who named us
other –
brought musket-crack, cannon-smoke, sword-glint,
brought fevers that ghosted rivers,
wire that bled the paddocks,
a rhythm alien to ground and sky.
Saw blades gnawed at sacred trees,
the old giants we spoke to – felled,
roots unbraided from the dreaming.
Ancestor bones scattered,
their peace disturbed,
their places marked with fences
and words not our own.
They tried to silence our stories
with proclamations,
signed paper pressed like a rock upon song.
Their law, drawn in foreign script,
sought to drown our fireside truths –
to shame our tongue,
make absence of every dreaming path.
Yet we whispered lore into cracks and wind,
hid knowledge within the folds of dusk,
carried secrets in the weight of silence.
They took our children,
tried to empty the old world from their veins,
make them silent and still,
teach them how not to be
themselves.
Promised protection,
sold us betrayal,
named us outcast,
banished us from the remembered land,
closed gates, cut pathways,
left us with holes and longing.
Still
we survived – ash over star,
heartbeat persistent in country,
held memory tight,
each syllable a stone against forgetting.
Now, slow, the land responds:
we walk, not as ghosts,
but as fire reawakening root and seed.
We speak,
teach,
remember the names – give them back
to creek, to tree, to hill.
We paint ourselves into morning,
dance as story,
sing as river,
an intermingling – old and new.
Mangroves still sway,
the burnout finishes, shoots return.
Land brims –
we are the memory and the now,
the sorrow and the flowering.
We dance.
We dance the poem back into the living earth,
country alive in us again.
