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1842: WILLIAM LANNEY AT THE RIVER
This was the family that had remained in the bush after refusing to surrender
to the Mission Aborigines led by Robinson's son in 1836/37... They 'gave
themselves up' near the Arthur River - because, they said, they were lonely.
By the end of 1847 both parents and three of the children would be dead,
leaving only William Lanney and his brother, Barnaby Rudge (Lyndall Ryan, The
Aboriginal Tasmanians).
All here are gone
Gone from the sun
With the wind
As it flows to the east.
Who were the land
Its sap and its kind
Are lost;
In its silence the land is lost.
There are days
encased within banality,
the urgent
despatching the important,
mark of a life
grinding on
through the small meanings
of Carping John's country.
I am saved
on such days
by the machinery of dreams.
I ship upon a westing stream,
rouse
on a blustering morning north by west.
There is salt-smoke off the sea,
a smirr of gull-down on the breeze -
and the Black Bull Scrub astir
in expectation.
I would hasten things,
light a summoning fire, perhaps,
or call upon the sun,
call down its roaring power
to free the spirits
marooned upon time -
this latter more fancifully,
but know that I know nothing,
that I cast blind
and pointless as a volute's husk
tumbled in the tide.
It is not mine to know -
not mine to know why the last free people,
William Lanney's family,
chose a social death
to the solitary sorrow
of the ghost-fled scrub.
The tracks of the people blur for want of feet,
the ghosts retreat
to still places
in the distant heart of trees,
in the mat of sunken scrubroot.
And all around,
relentless
clamping silence fans to the sea.
The boy from the Black Bull Scrub
grows strong, childless, kindly,
well-fashioned to bear a people's weight.
He dies in the Dog & Partridge;
the local hounds of science
finesse the devil
for the chance to tear him apart.
All make the trick:
Bacon's children gouge and chop
and deem themselves noble
in colonial Hobart -
but I fly to the Black Bull Scrub,
lose myself there,
lean to the salt-laced wind,
wishing, for one omniscient instant,
to touch the lonely edge
of a family
stepped forth
from the hauntless bush.
All here are gone
Gone from the sun
With the wind
As it flows to the east.
Who were the land
Its sap and its kind
Are lost;
In its silence the land is lost.
©
Pete Hay |
