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.
(1 of 3)
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)
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)
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 prisoner, as a witness on this scorched earth…
I will not be moved…
