Postcards of Colonial Ghosting

(1 of 3) Frost In the Ground

A reindeer herder stood on a beach and looked out to sea. It was springtime, her reindeer had come to this place to give birth. Up on the moors snow had begun to give way to open patches of moss, an archipelago of birth places, and from the sea a welcoming breeze came in, a forerunner of the season to come. As I walked by the herder turned to me with a brooding frown and said she’d heard seagulls here that sounded like infants’ crying. I knew what she meant when she said it. That’s the kittiwake, I said. Only I’d never before considered that sameness of sound. That language that precedes language. Now in winter even, I see stills of that bird when I walk these beaches and if sounds had stills I’d hear them too. Mirages of sound waiting for someone to come by and hear just them; these inchoations of language whose lives now flicker on the open Atlantic Sea.
 
 
(1 of 3) A Scorched Earth

“All Aborigines from Sydney onwards are to be made prisoners of war and if they resist they are to be shot and their bodies hung from trees in the most conspicuous places near where they fell, so as to strike terror into the hearts of surviving natives…”

Governor Lachlan Macquarie…orders to troops…circa, 1816…

 
I will not be moved…
Long have I recognised the states of being on this country; collaborator or captive…the drought takes too many prisoners…and those who are compliant end up living on their knees anyway…in the heat-haze, barbed-wire fences sing 3-bar-blues…twang, twanging twang, twang…accompanied by murders of crow. In their black capes punctuating an endless blue horizon…red-dust twisters smothering everything in sight…wind-swept plains of nothing are still something…the rich ghost nation we have sewn into the fabric of our identity…this scorched earth…
I will not be moved…

(2 of 3) Frost In the Ground
 
Winter compresses branches and stems, drives the sap down in the roots. At the tail of this long hibernation villagers wade through snow into the woods to cut the trees. From the trees that are cut a message seeps out through the bark to other trees. It says brace yourselves. Tradition is that villagers don’t cut adjacent trees, in among the stumps life goes on as normal the following months, sap rises, sprouts pop, leaves flicker in the wind. But the message from the severed trees lives on in the standing ones, self-preservation becomes part of their identities. Below the stumps in the slowly dissolving roots amber is meticulously being forged, petrified distillments that remind us why we are we.
 
 
(2 of 3) A Scorched Earth

I will not be moved…
Nothing else in the world smells like bushfire…early morning curlew-wings sing death into burning-season…the unique perfume of burnt eucalyptus welcomes new life, unlike cordite and the screams of murder…the scars from purges run deep…we all bleed red… nature and nurture…a seasonal inferno may bring destruction but desecration by inhuman action delivers curse…a grass will not dance until it’s seeds are seduced by flame…a death-mark will never yield life…
I will not be moved…

(3 of 3) Frost In the Ground

 
Someone once gave this hill a name as a tool. Juopmovárri was named for the sorrels that grow here in abundance. The instruction in the name reads that Juopmovárri is less-travelled pastures for the sheep that wander these hills, but that man does wisely in visiting Juopmovárri in early summer to reap the sorrels, these lanterns of vitamin C after winter. But also, this: Those who named Juopmovárri did it not solely as an act of pragmatism, it was an act of love. It is here we meet on midsummer to celebrate the acme of the sun or as an excuse to get shitfaced, we feast on these sorrels still into the light night and our bonfire is bright and shiny.
 
 
(3 of 3) A Scorched Earth

 
I will not be moved…
My memories dwell and never dwindle in the solemn air of my late-father’s study…a street sign liberated like a trophy, hung above his desk…NIGGER CREEK…as a child I sat in his big chair, my mind bewildered by what kind of hatred could craft such a trophy…and burnt into my mind’s eye, the incomprehensible simplicity of how ignorance and fear can produce such horrors…the ghosts of those quiet hours are branded into my memory forever…how the abuse of language can char a place in the conscience…to stay fixated in  that place, as a witness on this scorched earth…
I will not be moved…