Fallen Tree

This poem was first published at Verse-Virtual with the following introduction.

The treatment of First Australians is a deeply shameful. It’s impossible to rank the various crimes but what has become known as “The Stolen Generation”, the subject of my poem, is high on the list. Between 1910 and 1970, under an act of parliament, aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in various institutions. Estimates of how many children were stolen vary from 20,000 to 100,000. After years of resistance from conservative politicians, in 2008 the Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, made an apology to the Stolen Generations one of his first official acts. Perhaps it is a small step forward, but there are many others that still need to be taken. 

Fallen Trees.

I.

Hidden by reeds higher than my head,

a huge old gum tree had long ago

released its grip in the boggy ground

and fallen across the narrow swamp.

Now, every morning, my way 

to the two-roomed weatherboard school 

bypassed the mundanity of the road.

I ran freely through the bush,

past the smooth, pink barked angophoras,

down weathered sandstone outcrops

and over my secret bridge.

I was maybe nine or ten.

II.

At school we learnt about indigenous people.

Aboriginal people didn’t own land.

Aboriginal people offered 

no resistance to colonisers.

Aboriginal people lived 

a life of hunting and gathering.

Aboriginal people dwelt 

in temporary bark huts called gunyas.

All wrong, the myths of conquerors,

but the most wrong of all was this:

Aboriginality could be totally bred out

in just three generations.

Then assimilation would be complete.

III.

There were no brown faces in our school.

Later, much later, I found out why.

For sixty years aboriginal children,

as a matter of government policy,

were kidnapped from their homes.

I ran free through the bush.

They were stolen on dusty roads

or on their way to school.

I day-dreamed in class.

They were denied an education

and trained to be domestic “servants”.

I ran home in full assurance

that my parents were there.

Their parents were turned away

from locked gates, many 

never to see their children again.

I suffered occasional punishment

They were locked in solitary confinement.

I received security and love.

They were denied affection,

beaten and sexually abused.

IV.

There is no making amends.

Some things can never be made right.

When those first boats

sailed through the narrow heads

and dropped their anchors in alien water,

their cargoes were not just filled 

with England’s unwanted

but with the grief and ugliness 

of colonisation and dispossession 

and all its concomitant, 

self-justifying myth making.

Those old myths I learnt 

as a child were not sustainable.

They grew in boggy ground.

They had to eventually fall.

What can come from their falling? 

Could it be verities strong enough 

to bridge myth’s thick, matted reeds

and history’s stagnant swamp?

Where is that place where all children 

can run freely through the bush,

past smooth, pink barked angophoras,

down weathered sandstone outcrops

to walk together over our shared tree?