for my bardibardi kujaka:

Gloria Friday, Marjorie Keighran & Clara Roberts
This is my recovery road, to follow the bardibardi

into the Gulf’s wild pharmacy; I let myself

                                                   surrender

                 to those hallelujah hands outstretched

to a sandalwood’s leafy collection

                 dis one dumbuyumbu an millad mob

                 boil jungkayi tea, tis pick you up:
                 continuing to choose our leaves

between cabbage palms and billygoat plums, three kinds

                 of paperbarks and bikabaji green plums,

we arrive at a shrub, dog’s balls, and everyone

cracks it: tis one kurranga, dem hangin’ sweet lil-fruit:
as we walk these medicine trails of baked black earth

                 we watchfully step the tessellated tiles

                                  of the sandy-poor bush floor

and the bardibardi sing their appeasement to spirits –

                 corralling us gently to a billabong’s shade:
                                  we wash our leaves

before adding them to a billycan’s brown rolling boil

                 and as we drink together

the bardibardi tell me of the blind mermaid

                                                                    of Robinson River:
                                  a moonstricken old lady

                 journeyed to an exhaustion’s

drowning in a billabong’s calm lily pad

                                                   run on water:
her blind transformation from breathless

                 air to a reservoir’s faint trailing

song percolates through this lost city

                 of stratified sandstone spires and columns

as the curlew cries, grief-stricken,

                 against the acclaimed phases of the moon:
                                  depression scarring

                 is cheeky history inhaled

                 as trauma’s din and breaching

the efficacy of our bardibardi’s jungkayi bush brew –

                                                   in a spent aftermath

                                  we are left reading leaves for traces

of blind worry-bird’s shared resurrection

in the slender crescent of a new moon.


Bardibardi: is Indigenous language (Yanyuwa/Garrawa) in the Gulf region of northern

Australia for respectfully referring to older women. 
Kujaka: is Indigenous language (Yanyuwa/Garrawa) in the Gulf region of northern

Australia for respectfully referring to your mother and her sisters. 
Millad: is Kriol in the Gulf region of northern Australia for the first person plural

pronoun: we, us, our. 
Jungkayi: is Indigenous language (Yanyuwa/Garrawa) in the Gulf region of northern

Australia for a person who stands in a guardian relationship to the ceremonies of

managing his/her mother’s Country. Today this term is often used to mean ‘boss’, ‘most

important’ or even ‘policeman’ and is also used widely by members of the Gudanji and Mara

peoples.