The Great Rock
Nothing is sacred,
When you see a long queue to the peak of Mt Everest.
When the mystique of the Himalayan Range can’t simply be admired for its grandeur.
When humans push themselves so far, the force of ambition takes over
In the next prosperous step, to strike off our list: that we “climbed that cliff!”
When the queue of traffic means people can’t listen to their bodies,
And instead, fall dead.
When you see a long queue to the peak of Mt Everest.
When the mystique of the Himalayan Range can’t simply be admired for its grandeur.
When humans push themselves so far, the force of ambition takes over
In the next prosperous step, to strike off our list: that we “climbed that cliff!”
When the queue of traffic means people can’t listen to their bodies,
And instead, fall dead.
When rivers worldwide, polluted by antibiotics.
Where wildlife swims in the thick water streams,
Which exceed environmentally safe standards by over 300 times.
When, from the deepest depths, we trawl out plastics
Idly strewn at Family picnics.
- III -
Nothing is sacred
When gas pipelines, built over significant sites.
Lands which hold a different wealth.
Half-baked assumptions that modern infrastructure, fit entire populations,
Do not take in, for our consideration…
First world standards placed firmly on third world conditions.
We spend our time thinking:
“why is this not working?”
- IV -
No-one is sacred
20th Century Australia, generations of babies, stolen from families
Bred into white society.
Death of a culture on slow cooker.
Lost leaders and knowledge systems,
Desert survival techniques caught up in an earlier slaughter.
Over 200 languages in Australia alone
drop down to 130,
And we only consider this as we read the statistics.
We pour poisonous alcohol in the colonial wounds
It widens the gaping gap of inequality.
Parallel existence running alongside poverty
Does not give us immunity.
- V -
When a white man, has a budget in his fat hand
and the introduction of white flour
was so long ago now.
Authorities hold identities in the form of plastic.
Cards with numbers and names on record.
Water is the only sacred resource left
but pipelines don’t reach all communities.
In 2007, Central Australia, during “The Intervention”,
Government gave themselves authority
Again, to remove children from their families
Judgements made of systemic abuse.
This time, they sent army troops into remote townships
taking babies from their mammas.
The removal of children from kinship.
Systems which are complex
and none of our business, really.
We’d only spent the last few decades putting band-aids on the loss of a culture.
Nothing is sacred.
When the stiff upper lip gives way
with a pompous puff:
“I’m-a-gonna climb that giant rock!”.
That rock now, Uluru now,
Traditional owners have passed a white-man’s law somehow, that it is a “significant site”.
Has meant working for decades alongside
Institutionalized bureaucratic leaders.
Learning a language that symbolizes many deaths
of original dialects,
In order to give it a current presence.
Schooling in systems that were not their own,
To learn laws that had nothing to do with their land,
Fight fights detracting from strengthening own identity.
And as I sit here, with my memories,
Feeling strongly ‘bout what should be.
We’re dumbed down by our flashing screens
As we scroll down to find the right article to read
So, we can all stand quite proudly and say:
“It is politically incorrect to climb the Great Rock”
… and in the last days of tourist trailblazers
Trudging toe to toe
The same ignorance
Shown true class by
Riding down on the skin of their arses.
Is nothing sacred?
Institutionalized bureaucratic leaders.
Learning a language that symbolizes many deaths
of original dialects,
In order to give it a current presence.
Schooling in systems that were not their own,
To learn laws that had nothing to do with their land,
Fight fights detracting from strengthening own identity.
And as I sit here, with my memories,
Feeling strongly ‘bout what should be.
We’re dumbed down by our flashing screens
As we scroll down to find the right article to read
So, we can all stand quite proudly and say:
“It is politically incorrect to climb the Great Rock”
Trudging toe to toe
The same ignorance
Shown true class by
Riding down on the skin of their arses.