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Authors: Alexis Wright
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be the traditional owners? Doesnât that count for anything? Serious! Well! They were right about that. So! Alright . An Army general put in charge from the Government said they were the traditional owners of a convenient dumping ground for unwanted people now.
What were unwanted people? Well! They were little people who canât fight a big thing like the Army in charge of all the Aboriginal children â little pets owned by the Mothers of Government who claimed to love them more than their own âinhumaneâ families. Disgraceful business? So inter-racially intolerant Australia was still the same old, same old. Aunty Bella Donna, now old as the hills, said that she felt like a thief, even a kidnapper, and she went around the place like a mad woman trying to mop up any insinuating words she thought were generating from out of thin air â I told you myself, that I found herâ¦in a tree . If she had saved the girl or not â what did it matter? The girl could answer anyone herself about what it was like to be saved if she thought about pillaging a few words from somewhere in her mind to speak. She could have said that she did not know who she was. Or that she was so damaged that she could not speak. She was under a spell. But she felt nothing about pain or joy, night or day. She thought no life was worth saving if it was no longer your own.
I think that girl caused all of this Army business coming here . Holy smoke why had the swamp people forgotten? The Army had come a long time ago. But this swamp was plaguing for revenge andpumped itself with so many compelling ideas of fear they were now far beyond the capacity to clean the floor off with a mop.
You should have left her where she was .
The cuckoos and cockatoos heard every single thing and, it might be, their nervous flinching and tapping of beaks on wood were imitating insecurities in the hearts of the children.
The light that came from the sky at night was relentless. It was the Army swinging around the searchlights. Where was the joy in this? Ungovernable thoughts unfurled into the atmosphere from the heads of people hiding beneath folded wings that might have belonged to the black swans that had died in the swamp. Yes, those grand old birds flying high into the greatness of life without paying a dollar for the flight could just be angels.
The swampâs murky water was littered with floating feathers, and it looked as though black angels had flown around in dreams of feeling something good about one another. Well! Not around here when you were nobody, you donât feel like an angel, Bella Donna said as though she read thoughts, but she was just passing traffic â generalising about what was going on in the girlâs brain. She had no idea of how the girl saw those wasted grey-black feathers.
Ah! All these feathers were just sweet decoration. Feathers floating on fading dreams, obscuring the address that was difficult enough to remember for transporting the girl back to the tree, where in her mind the route she chased while sinking away into slithers of thoughts slipped silently in and out of the old threads woven through the forest of mangled tree roots. When she runs in these dreams, her footsteps crush the delicate crisscrossing patterns of the worn stories, that reached deep into sacred text, the first text, in saying, We are who we are . Fancy words, scrolling back and forth in the girlâs mind, float like the feathers that stop her escaping back to the tree.
Rubbish stackings, tied with yellow clay-stained stockings â too many of these human nests encasing the swamp. The sand bank that had grown to mountainous heights still separated the brackish water from the sea, while a fast-growing population of Aboriginal people from far away places was settling, living the detention lifestyle right around the swamp.
The truck people kept on arriving. They were more like arriving cattle being segregated and locked up in
What were unwanted people? Well! They were little people who canât fight a big thing like the Army in charge of all the Aboriginal children â little pets owned by the Mothers of Government who claimed to love them more than their own âinhumaneâ families. Disgraceful business? So inter-racially intolerant Australia was still the same old, same old. Aunty Bella Donna, now old as the hills, said that she felt like a thief, even a kidnapper, and she went around the place like a mad woman trying to mop up any insinuating words she thought were generating from out of thin air â I told you myself, that I found herâ¦in a tree . If she had saved the girl or not â what did it matter? The girl could answer anyone herself about what it was like to be saved if she thought about pillaging a few words from somewhere in her mind to speak. She could have said that she did not know who she was. Or that she was so damaged that she could not speak. She was under a spell. But she felt nothing about pain or joy, night or day. She thought no life was worth saving if it was no longer your own.
I think that girl caused all of this Army business coming here . Holy smoke why had the swamp people forgotten? The Army had come a long time ago. But this swamp was plaguing for revenge andpumped itself with so many compelling ideas of fear they were now far beyond the capacity to clean the floor off with a mop.
You should have left her where she was .
The cuckoos and cockatoos heard every single thing and, it might be, their nervous flinching and tapping of beaks on wood were imitating insecurities in the hearts of the children.
The light that came from the sky at night was relentless. It was the Army swinging around the searchlights. Where was the joy in this? Ungovernable thoughts unfurled into the atmosphere from the heads of people hiding beneath folded wings that might have belonged to the black swans that had died in the swamp. Yes, those grand old birds flying high into the greatness of life without paying a dollar for the flight could just be angels.
The swampâs murky water was littered with floating feathers, and it looked as though black angels had flown around in dreams of feeling something good about one another. Well! Not around here when you were nobody, you donât feel like an angel, Bella Donna said as though she read thoughts, but she was just passing traffic â generalising about what was going on in the girlâs brain. She had no idea of how the girl saw those wasted grey-black feathers.
Ah! All these feathers were just sweet decoration. Feathers floating on fading dreams, obscuring the address that was difficult enough to remember for transporting the girl back to the tree, where in her mind the route she chased while sinking away into slithers of thoughts slipped silently in and out of the old threads woven through the forest of mangled tree roots. When she runs in these dreams, her footsteps crush the delicate crisscrossing patterns of the worn stories, that reached deep into sacred text, the first text, in saying, We are who we are . Fancy words, scrolling back and forth in the girlâs mind, float like the feathers that stop her escaping back to the tree.
Rubbish stackings, tied with yellow clay-stained stockings â too many of these human nests encasing the swamp. The sand bank that had grown to mountainous heights still separated the brackish water from the sea, while a fast-growing population of Aboriginal people from far away places was settling, living the detention lifestyle right around the swamp.
The truck people kept on arriving. They were more like arriving cattle being segregated and locked up in
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