March 26.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
‘The song is gone.’
Oodgeroo, Judith Wright and the ‘Bora Ring’
"And then came [an] introduction to another poet when I [Oodgeroo] was in my teens and I was quite amazed at this poet because (a) she was white, (b) she was a writer and (c) she cared so much that on riding out one day she saw what had happened to a bora ring and was really upset about it. In later years when I met Judith Wright she explained to me that as soon as she saw the damage done to the bora ring she turned her horse around, went home, sat down and wrote her now famous poem called "Bora Ring":
The song is gone; the dance
is secret with the dancers in the earth,
the ritual useless, and the tribal story
lost in an alien tale.
Only the grass stands up
to mark the dancing-ring: the apple gums
posture and mime a past corroboree,
murmur a broken chant.
The hunter is gone: the spear
is splintered underground; the painted bodies
a dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot.
The nomad feet are still.*
Only the rider's heart
halts at a sightless shadow, an unsaid word
that fastens in the blood the ancient curse,
the fear as old as Cain.
She felt very unhappy about that very sad thing because she said she looked in vain for the Aboriginals and she knew that they'd all disappeared. They had been absolutely wiped out."
Acknowledgment: Kathie Cochrane with a contribution by Judith Wright, Oodgeroo, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1994, pp. 217-218.
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Further on Oodgeroo note: Oodgeroo : A Tribute. A special issue of Australian Literary Studies Volume 16, No. 4. Edited by Adam Shoemaker, Laurie Hergenhan and Irmtraud Peterson. University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1994. Reviewed by Livio Dobrez in Aboriginal History, Vol. 19, (1995) pp.185-186 and Obituary to Oodgeroo of the Tribe Noonuccal by John Collins in Aboriginal History, Vol. 18, (1994) pp.1-4.
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* The reference to ‘the nomad feet’ prompts one to observe that currently there is worthwhile debate on how to view the economic existence of Indigenous people prior to the European conquest. Key texts to consider are:
Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu – Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture, Magabala Books, 2018.
Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth – How Aboriginals made Australia, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2012
For an extensive and significant critique of Pascoe’s writing, note Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe, Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? - The ‘Dark Emu’ Debate, Melbourne University Press, 2021.
For an extended excerpt from Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? See the entry for 3 August.
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So many Europeans thought their Christian task was to smooth the pillow of the dying race. Aboriginal people consider that as just a smokescreen behind which to steal the pillow of the living race.
Acknowledgment: Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu, p.203.