My Grannie told me about the time the country finished up. That sun came down over the land – the kangaroos, wombats, snakes, flies, crows: just about everything melted. A terrible wind blew, howling like a lonely, sick dingo, sucking life up into a big hole in the sky. The ground melted into a hard sheet, covering the hills and our mother, our country. A deafening silence came. It settled across our blackened, Tjarutja lands. We can’t go to our country no more.
Mobs went missing. Hunters, mums and kids got really sick, as campfire stories everywhere told of the emptiness, of a really bad place. We can’t go to our country no more.
The whitefellas went there. Years later we heard that tourists go to that Maralinga place, to see and hear the stories of the sickness, of the time when the army men from Britain – where the Queen lives, came in planes and trucks, and made the sun come down and burn everything. A bus takes the tourfellas for short-trips – that land still got too much sickness! We don’t go to our country no more.
Blokes came with bulldozers, dug big hole and buried all the country inside. That big hole is covered up – they call him Taranaki They built a big fence around some other land – sign says “Plutonium – keep out”, forever, they reckon! We don’t go to our country no more.
New blokes came and took pictures. They walked around, talking. They got camera that can see the country, underneath. They wrote a story, saying the country looks like Oman, that country overseas where everyone rides camels. They say Oman got lots of petrol underneath.
We don’t go to our country no more.
Poor bugger me;
petrol, maybe
but no country
To look after we.
(* Maralinga was the site in remote, north west South Australia, the traditional lands of the Tjarutja people, that was unilaterally gifted/leased by the Australian Government to the British, to conduct their atomic tests between about 1956 through until 1967.)