Summer nights are my favourite time to watch you. Your eyes are almost black, like mine, and my Mother’s, which helps me see my reflection in them as you turn your beautiful face skyward.

You mob hardly use the light switches now, which is nice, because when I was a miyaay most of the arguments in our household were about electricity. We used to have a cost to live. You get to respect the time for the night and the time for the day. I’m so happy for you babe.

Now, I hear that hot wattle seed drinks replace the coffee that kept everyone on the wheel; clean water repairs our DNA; and traditional medicines for sadness replace the introduced ethanol that made our people meek. Fresh air now allows everyone — and everything — to reach their full potential. There’s more perch now than we could have ever imagined, and the traps are fully functional again.

In 2037, I watched them stop polluting the worrambul. They ordered all the satellites to be taken down, returned, retired, and recycled back down on Earth — and baby girl, now when I look into your eyes, I see the clear reflection of my face and the milky way behind it. Thank god they stopped trying to colonise Mars and the Moon.

Since the sky litter got cleaned up, your children know all the meanings in the stars. Our skills of navigation have returned. Knowledge is sought and revered, and now acknowledged as part of the reason why we are all still here. All still alive.

People are no longer breeding animals to kill them, and in my lifetime I got to watch the end of the international export of animals and three Gamilaraay native grasses return in abundance. Things are now called what they’re supposed to be called, and everyone speaks the correct names for what is healing them and what is nourishing them.

Dead coral was cut away and released — being used to construct the shell beds for the baby oysters to regenerate. Farms that you now eat freely from. Up north, new coral opened its lungs in the available space. The healthy seagrass and the resilient reefs began to balance the wave energy that arrived to the shorelines near Cooktown, and in turn, shorebird song returned for the people. The colour in the coral nurseries could be seen from helicopters passing over, and when they were transplanted from the gardens to their rightful homes, the sight was seen from the sky — from the high planes. The pulsing and resilient reef, paired with the movement of the returned animal kin, mostly big mother sea turtles, brought a heartbeat back for the FNQ communities. Trade and festivals returned, and people were able to meet their totems in person, not only in story.

My children’s generation watched the cows, pigs, cats, and rabbits return to where they’re from, so they’re no longer being born, hunted, and killed en masse. The marks their feet left on Country are healed now because we used the machines to help us turn all that soil. This taking care of marshlands, wind plains, and wetlands brought the abundance back for us all.

We kept the horses, I know you know that, but don’t forget that was a decision self-determined by our people. Yarraman remains special for our people for seeing spirits. Yarraman and mari’s are maliyaas.

In 2047, they finally stopped growing cotton on my Country, acknowledging the immense strain on our water systems. Native fibres began to replace fast fashion and we ditched the online shopping and our feelings of deficiency.

In the generations between us, our people have largely been responsible for the laying to rest of harmful structures. DCJ and family policing largely retired in my generation, and my career as a midwife began to flourish as all the Mothers started healing.

Now in the year twenty-two hundred, our babies thrive in bush schools and blackfella centers of excellence, I know this cause I’ve been watching your eldest one walk the little ones to school.

In 2024, I saw the blackfella population reach one million — which seems like a tiny number now babe, but when we saw that, we knew the future was in good hands. You’re living longer lives now. All our people are with big, happy quandong eyes, and the past has begun to fade from their browlines and shoulders.

Now, because of what every person — non-Indigenous and Indigenous — lost with the destruction of Mother Earth and the prioritisation of growth at the cost of justice, our land and its healing is well on track. All of this has been for your future, my love. You get to live your excellence as a strong black woman because of the Eldership, and allyship, of the six generations that separate us.

I know I held you in my body back in 2025 when the doctor woman used that gliding corded seeing stick to count the eggs in my belly, but never would I have thought that you would look so much like my great-great-grandmother Biddy. Watching you is such a joy.

The thing that makes me most proud to be an Ancestor now is that everyone thinks of the children. And that now, our babies and futures are once again rematriated, safe, and born into black hands.

Remember the Mother is always sleeping above or below you. And wherever it’s all going sissy, we’re here — at the beginning and end of time.

Just remembering,
Nan Lu xx