I am Wiradjuri.
My people have lived on this land for sixty thousand years.
The land of my ancestors lives in harmony.
Everything on the land was laid out at the beginning.
Biyaami, our creator spirit, sky father and lawgiver.
His law holds still.
He set it down once, it stays set.
It’s law made for everyone.
All are equal under Biyaami’s law.
Not like the law brought under sail,
from the butcher’s apron
and the lion that never was,
which bends and is rewritten by wealth and privilege.
Biyaami’s law does not move to suit us.
The old people say: this is not yours to change.
You keep it.
In Bollard the Supreme Court said
we were entitled to our own laws,
until we consented to English law.
Biyaami’s law still stood.
In December 1835
Jack Congo Murrell and George Bummaree
killed two men of lineage
on the public road between Richmond and Windsor,
over a dispute that belonged to them.
For the first time since 1829
the attorney-general brought it to court,
and the court, reluctantly, agreed to hear it.
1836 came the last contest
over how far settler law could reach.
Burton knew how to make a people subordinate.
He learned it drafting Ordinance 50 at the Cape.
English law follows settlers everywhere.
Ultimately the English say
Biyaami’s law is no longer law.
By the end of that trial he had left us:
no sovereignty,
no jurisdiction,
no law.
But Biyaami’s law does not wait for a judge.
It was never an English judge’s to give,
never his to take.
Wiradjuri country was never terra nullius.
It is our land.
It always was,
it always will be.
by Bakchos
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Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.
© Bakchos, October 2026
Australia always was, always will be, blackfellas country.