Gossip spot-fires in Borroloola’s Big Camp,

excitement incites The Gravel,

at Malandari, shopkeepers look up from their stocktaking

and the whitefulla foreskins forget their power:

dem people fightin’! twobula bardibardi ini dirt

an dem whitefullas can’t stop’em…
The grey nomad traffic to King Ash is incensed

at the effrontery, claiming a flotilla

with the miners for gawking. And crowds keep streaming

from the catchments, this build-up’s broken:

there’s two old women fighting down there

and no one can obstruct them.
The close combatants are tearing hair and stomping

toes; bowed knee to knee like breaking kindling; gouging

and screaming as though into mirrors: jirda! dat munga

cartin’ yarn at me ini! The fierceness

of their fighting has the crowd banked up, pointing
and impotent in the late afternoon burning,

a dehydrated alcoholic crankiness; and the riot squad

is back in Darwin, worn out with the fighting,

their vacancy unfilled like the punch line of rainbows.
Some will say, in the years to come, that the young

blackfullas lit up their ganja, or sniffed,

at the spectacle; the expectant mums pissed

as coconuts fermenting in sand:

but that soap-box’s bent boss-eyed.
What do munanga know of salutarily singing Country?

Of the numinous mischievously stirring strife

amongst already sabotaged custodians whose kujika’s scorched?

Who will tearfully sing him, big business, with millad mob

in the dirt, pressing forwards, hoping for peace?