a new mea culpa
Sorry Day May 24th 2020
if ever there was a day to grieve
so flattened by a melancholy action
that it makes you want
to close off your mind in disbelief
hold your aching heart
indeed cage your heart with steel
a day the healing song is silent
and your eyes weep red dust
when you had watched the first episode
of Operation Buffalo about the arrogance of Maralinga
and excused it
as happening before we were enlightened
and the ghost of Terra Nullius
still plagued our history books
when your mind is still etched by the ignorance
of the Taliban’s Palmyra destruction of ancient Buddhas
you realise that Australian miners have just blown up
with approval
rock shelters at Juukan Gorge
a 46,000 year cache of bones and tools
from before the last Ice Age
cutting connection with ancestors and heritage
of the Puutu Kunti Kurrama people
making Indigenous people of this country
walk in desolation
voices still unheard
and another piece of the soul of our nation
is blasted away
all in the name of profit
well today is just that day
We Australians still live in ignorance of the legacy of our first peoples and this land we live on.
It is the most ancient land on the planet.
The Indigenous people of this continent are the oldest people on the planet and carry memory of a wisdom we have forgotten to listen to.
Even if we try to listen its whisper is muted by the loud noise of Greed who yells profit over and over that we make expediently from the earth. We forget
the ancient wisdom
“Only after the last tree has been cut down,
only after the last river has been poisoned
only after the last fish has been caught . . .
only then will you realise that . . .
money cannot be eatten
We must stand up and speak out that this type of destruction never happens again.
Imagine if someone threatened the Lascaux, Palaeolthic Cave in France
or if someone touched Angor Wat in Cambodia,
the Roman Colosseum in Italy,
the Istanbul Bascilica in Turkey.
Remeber the world’s collective grief
watching 12th century Notre Dame burn
and remember the loss when the Barniyan Valley stone Buddhas
were blown up by the Taliban . This is the loss we have
and yet it is still not fully felt by Rio Tinto Iron Ore Compny or the Governement.
Shame, shame, shame.
Note the Taliban did not win completey, for the Buddhas shines again
in the towering cutouts in the mountainside
where they stood for centuries . . .they are back thanks to 3-D projection.
Above one of the illuminations. Thanks to modern technology.
What can we retrieve of the Aborigine heritage of our own First Peoples. ?
No modern technology can bring back this loss