Beneath the Myth.
Because the colonizers broke our world
The colonizer’s justification
is neither veil nor deliberate lie.
It is the myth created so conquerers
can sleep easily in their beds.
So the Australian myth grew
of a primitive nomadic people
neither owning land
nor engaging in agriculture.
But sometimes truth will out.
Sometimes someone digs
far beneath the myth to find truths
both extraordinary and disturbing.
I read the work of one such person
recounting how the explorer, Charles Sturt,
exhausted, near the end, laboured
with his men over one last sandhill.
There they met a large party
of indigenous people who,
though they had never seen pale skin,
well understood human need.
They cared for all his party,
gave them a newly built dwelling,
nursed them to health,
feeding them roast duck and cake.
Cake! That meant grain
cultivated, harvested and ground,
bound with ingredients now lost.
“Sweetest cake I’ve eaten”, said one.
I read of another explorer,
the diarist, Thomas Mitchell,
passing through organised towns
of more than a thousand.
Storehouses were filled with grain.
Women ground flour and baked.
Crops were sown in dry creek beds,
their roots seeking the hidden water.
Now I, whose heritage
is long centuries of warfare,
dispossession and accumulation,
well up with strangely sorrowing awe.
I hear that their greatest achievement
was a co-operative system of government
and a respect for tribal boundaries
that extended across the continent.
What have we “civilised” societies lost?
We confuse power with “civilisation”.
Guilt and fear find comfortable excuses
in prejoratives like “primitive”.
Now “civilised” problems mount.
The seas fill with islands of plastic.
The poles melt. Species die.
The deeply contemptible win high office.
Too late to learn something from them?
Or will individualism and greed
continue to ride a runaway train
headlong into the future’s oblivion?
First Published at Around the Fire 6 (Praxis)
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