Absorption
The waterways of Lutruwita
(Tasmania) flow, they absorb
and carry and redistribute.
They swell and break their
banks. They dry and capture
at their edges imprints of birds
and wallabies, cows and sheep,
kayakers and anglers. The
original names of these arteries
of Country are little known and
hardly spoken. Some are lost in
time. —Julie Gough, 2021
These waters await new names in First language by their Aboriginal
people, words that respect their past and purpose and alliterate their
flow since invasion, since colonisation. Survivors. Kin. They guided
my Ancestors who walked alongside and waded their depths. These
rivers and creeks, estuaries and lagoons have absorbed so very much
of our blood, our stories, ourselves. They hold our past yet helped
erase our presence, our pre-occupation of this place before the British
planted their flag in 1803. We were dispersed, killed, reduced to ash by
colonists, then flushed like so much detritus through the river systems
that once sustained us. Every story of us, my Ancestors, is held,
absorbed by waterways that have been tortured ever since, controlled,
condemned to serve.
To be home truly, on Country, is to become it. Particles. Substance
of place. Belonging. Inhale. Exhale. Everything seems to swirl around,
to gather, reform, then set out again. Like murmuring birds everything
attempts to test and reset, in order to work properly, know its place,
align to synchronise. And yet, on walls in state galleries are lauded
colonial renditions of such places where my forebears were killed
or from which they were banished. These don’t carry Aboriginal
placenames and rarely show the original people, because these artwork
landscapes claim place much like land title deeds, then fabricated and
since inherited.
In boxes in state museums our Country lays by the ton. Our
Ancestors’ stone tools were taken, shipped offshore. Their absence
wilfully erases evidence of the longest occupation of any place by
a people. How can a culture of colonists arrive, new and blind, and
believe they can own the living land, its waterways, its creatures, and
therefore control time, the future? How can original people wake them
up without sacrificing too much to the task? When I kneel by a river
on my island home, I don’t need to see my reflection to be grounded.
Our Old People are in the wind, my imprint in that mud is the same
repeated, over millennia, by family.
