In parliaments and precincts,
where power is passed with a handshake’s wink
the ghosts of hoods crawl beneath blue uniforms –
ashes of intolerance ground into government carpet,
old words muttered behind closed doors,
soot in bureaucratic lungs.
Klan Kops Kanberra:
the name spoken in whispers,
in lives uprooted, cases gone cold –
justice is a smudged badge
bought and sold over whiskey and smoke.
Paperwork disappears in fluorescent hush,
but broken ribs echo in suburbs unseen.
History curdles behind tinted windows.
A pattern:
files left open,
eyes kept shut.
Dashboard cameras blinking like guilty eyes,
but the footage lost, accidentally erased,
just as sure as voice memos:
we did what we could.
Unwritten rules speak louder than sirens.
They patrol with arms crossed,
smirks taut over centuries of white paint,
brandishing the bleach of ‘otherness,’
OMO white washed into every sign,
every statue that still stands.
Shadows long across Anzac Parade –
blackfellas missing,
migrant cries drowned by bureaucratic thunder.
Deaf to the songs of mothers,
the keening for sons who won’t come home,
names replaced by numbers,
by glances exchanged in the barracks –
don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t touch
what doesn’t match their measure.
Yet love, though trampled, grows wild
in alleys and backyards,
graffitied in languages the Klan Kops pretend not to hear.
Candles flicker after funerals,
statues topple in midnight rain.
A mural rises by morning:
laughter painted in colour no uniform can erase.
In Kanberra’s heart, each hushed account
thickens into a reckoning –
for every unchecked baton,
for every closed case file,
hope returns in letters, in marches,
in hands that won’t let go.
We remember.
We speak:
Your chains have weight but our roots run deeper,
your walls are high but our stories climb.
You polish your boots for your parades,
but our hearts spark in the cracks
of your silence –
unafraid, unextinguished,
unyielding.
