The great push at the You Yangs
Every year we went to those hills —Now rendered into strength by Williams —To try and break through the rocksAnd beat the opponents,Just as those ancient people,The originals,Were pushed off the landInto a nothingness.
There were invaders and defenders,It was an uphill attack,And small tags of yellow ribbonCould be lost and lost,Until suddenly you were redundant,Taken out of the combat,And reminded of loss.
'We will decide who comes here'
It might be an epitaphOn a tombstone,Or the mottoAbove the doorAt a memorial bordello.
Whatever,It glows in the dark,Flashing its signLike an ancient call to prayer,An anthem of certainty.
Forget the ancestral trespassers,The heritage forbears,The gin and bitters people,They didn't ask,They just used their gunsAcross the waters,Across the sands,Across the plains,Across the hills.
No decision-time then,As the map was bloodiedTo imperial pink.
Ancestral invitation
When you said one day,
'I long to go back to the hillsWhere the old winds whisper and sing,Where the stones are scattered into stories,'
I wanted to answer
'I'll come tooI'll join you.'
I wanted to walk between the treesTo finger pale scars on trunksTo see my parlour pallor shadow theirs.
You held your black hand out to mine,Yet I couldn't go: my feet were too softAnd pain's strange discipline struck again.
The bark hung like snake skinsSome had crumbled into a carpetIts texture made by a day by day decay.
My appetite would embrace the snake,My sight the light's danceLearned from shadow's rhythm.
I could say,
'We could change donations for giftsAnd measure difference all round.'
'We could cede ourselvesIn the hope of forgiving ourselves.'
The trouble is
Our diseases knew no dutyAnd time's tariff remains unpaid.
Apology
We acknowledge the hurt and painsuffered by our fellow citizens, theIndigenous people and, particularly, thechildren of the Stolen Generation.We acknowledge that injustices wereadministered in the guise of justice andthat cruelty was camouflaged in compassion.We acknowledge that many lives wererobbed of their ancestral birthrights,that lives were robbed of their families,and families were robbed of their lives,that lives were robbed of their spatialand spiritual landscapes, and thatlives were robbed of life.We now speak to all those hurt and in pain.As a nation, past and present,we owe and give to those hurtour collective and