E. Phillips FOX, Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770, 1902, NGV

We call them pirates

Whispers and scratchings
through the London cosmopolitan.
Empire, Empire, Empire.
Let’s scrape
the convict off
the hardened white
teat of motherland.

Not long in linear time.
White sails flex
across the ocean
heralding
white man’s magic.
Terra Nullius.

Ghosts rocked over
lightning forked blue vistas
wearing makeup and eye patches.
Between reading pages of Robinson
Crusoe
they buggered, drowned, hanged,
each other those diseased pale ghosts
blowing hot air into trumpets and
thumping chests.
Gone mad at the wait
time.

Such innovation.
Such a civilising mission.
Such bravery in the white man’s
burden they said and prayed
to a being in the sky.

Remember,
this kinda magic was before
magic realism was even a thing.
Before postcolonial
was a neuron snapping.

Can you envision?

White men played at being pirates.
They truly did.
They plundered and pilfered
and imagined with their white
unbounded imagination
what an island home could be.

Australia.

By Graham Akhurst

They call this making

My grandfather told me the facts
said you could take Cook’s early maps
& wow, son, they were damn accurate!

He’d learnt this in the Royal Australian Navy
where he’d charted life & death’s in-between
by poking bobbing bodies in the Yangtze river

Circumnavigate the globe: a young lad with a stick
for accuracy. Each body was an island declaring
territory. If the body moved, the body worthy.

He never spoke about these could-be men
over our games of pick-up sticks. Instead:
tales of Endeavour River & Joseph Banks

The sort of rewriting of history that wasn’t just
precarious but pre-selected. A self-perpetuation
because sonar always neutralises a heartbeat

The same way a map talks to distances
rather than proximities. Easier thinking
that river was lifeless & empty

Facts: they took seven decades & his own
death to excavate why he had to believe
in the certain accuracy of cartography

By Tim Loveday