Thursday, May 5, 2011

The New Australia

* the New Australia *
These place-names are so Anglo-Saxon
As if before Cook and Banks
No one else was here to name
Land on which suburbs have grown
Dennis Ivanhoe Westgarth
Easy spelling for local demographic
Those who walked here for 40,000 years
Have no say or place
If they linger must feel as strangers
In this tamed white man's place
Open gullies and forests tamed
In their place urban neatness
Houses in regimented lines
Along black flat frozen river of a road
The sounds of bellbird and wattlebird
Drowned out by cars and trucks
White names white laws white sounds
What was is lost history.

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