They arrived –
not as whispers but as thunder,
white sails bruising the blue sky,
forests watching with rooted trembling
as axes rang out hymns
older than their god.
They took the trees first,
each trunk felled
a broken sentence –
uncut stories collapsing into dust,
the perfumes of eucalyptus
rising into loss.
Land, once a tapestry of belonging,
was crosshatched and strung
with tight barbed wire,
cruel fence lines crawling like scars
over hills that remembered footprints
light as bandicoots.
Every paddock an edict,
every plough furrow a forgetting.
Good Christians –
they knelt in neat pews
while camps filled with sorrow,
while children’s laughter
was wrenched into silence,
while language dried on parched tongues
like creekbeds in drought.
They gathered the survivors,
herded them into missions,
their spirits pressed and stored
behind whitewashed walls,
names taken, songs forbidden,
souls measured, corrected,
washed of country until
the earth beneath grit teeth
and the sky learned to weep.
Later, their reach sharpened –
they came for the children,
stolen soft from mothers’ arms,
dreaming still of red dirt and gum leaf,
dressed in strange clothes,
given new histories to recite,
told to pray
for a salvation
that meant disappearance.
All this –
done in the name
of a loving god,
while grace was preached
above fields brimming with ghosts.
And the land, forever listening,
remembers the old ways,
whispered in the wind
for those who can still hear.
They brought with them animals of white fleece,
heralds of another hunger –
sheep spreading across plains,
taking country from kangaroo and emu,
feeding on roots where stories once burrowed deep,
hoofprints stamping over sacred ground.
They loosed fox and rabbit,
hunters and thieves in a fragile balance –
red-flash tails and gnawing teeth,
ripping holes through echo and ecosystem,
undoing creation
stitched together from the dreaming,
a quiet devastation that multiplied
behind fences and fences and fences.
Rivers silted, grasses gave way,
the ancient symphony collapsed
to a hollow, strange refrain.
Yet still,
beneath the strangeness and sorrow,
the land carries memory –
in every shifting shadow,
every ghost gum’s sigh.
Listen:
there are truths still beating underfoot
for those willing to hear
what arrived,
what was taken,
and what endures.