At Bre’ the Rainbow Serpent flows from sponges

in colours pre-mixed in tins. Children reach up

to spread the curving back along the school wall

clammer to track his path in psychedelic spots
The river is a creamy slurry waiting for rain

They show me a bend in the gouged-out stream

Words point at fast currents folding in
     ‘See he goes under there’                                   
Their gravel voices fill with stories

legends of canoes, paddle steamers lost

Uneasy fingers twist through hair, check

with a side-ways look as they whisper

his name. Their sleeping giant
     ‘No one swims here any more’   
                         *
     ‘Missa, Missa them blacks out there

            gunna’ burn our town!’
Someone had burned the station one night

They’d already torched the only pub

Hotel swings from the Liquor Outlet now

a no-frills affair: roller-doors down at ten
And we’d heard talk of wild kids, good with fire

living on the edge of the next failing town           
                         *
Goodooga’s a cross-roads place shrinking

from drought, the end of our ‘Outback’ tour.

A lonely petrol pump’s the last truck-stop

to ‘Brissy’. All roads lead to places livelier

than this, branch off in dust, heading straight

to homesteads. Station-runs standing still.                      
                         *
The aluminium space fills with children’s voices

claiming the Rainbow Serpent story.

Young men, bros and cuz, come in from Dodge

take control of our ‘Art in Schools’. Paint

the silent magic of their Muruwari Dreaming

Leave their pride in an air-conditioned hall. 
Dodge City‘s on the edge of nowhere. Off-limits

to finger-pointing tourists or ‘blow-ins’ like us 
This painted landscape is already too old

or too new for change. Shaped

by late-model cars

– white goods rolled in dust

Useless inclusions in houses

that never had power or water
The people remember centuries of water holes

in scrubby grass. Shifting to camps, penned up

like sheep. They watch other tribes move in

take over towns: living well on their country
Made guerrilla war in lightning strikes

with the only weapon they knew           
Bre’: Brewarrina NSW

Dodge City: Former Aboriginal Reserve