Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Survival Day

  • unAustralian Day

    The aspects of Australianness I feel most dearly attached to, and which are also the aspects Germans, Americans, other people seem most intensely curious to hear reports of whenever I’m travel outside Australia, are these:

    1. the land (the shape of the land, like an upside-down heart); the surf, the rock formations, the desert, the landscapes.

    2. the creatures we tyrannize and extinguish and who seem to threaten us

    3. the peoples whose cultures, whose survival and quietude makes them an irresistible secret, beloved of every thinking person, a guide to what we are generally doing wrong and where we might go right

    Survival Day: a clue to the changes we are making too slowly to survive, all of us, aboard our beloved earth. Unfold the new flag, raise up our fresher songs, institute a Council of Advisory Elders to put a check on our Parliaments. I want government by tribal elders and old women. I want pride and humility to be our standards.

    [-O-]

  • Survival Day

    Survival Day gleanings. This is what I cleaned out of my bag after we got home. Started out to hear the speeches and to march, ended up with our hearts broken and opened up all over again, robust in anger and delicately rejoicing, heart flooded like mangrove roots with a myriad various Indigenous faces including people I’d had warm contact with in the past and hadn’t thought of as Indigenous until we met again in this context, fringes of greenery shaping the old wood lace under the eaves of beautiful Jagera Hall every time I looked up to give my mind a digestion break from John Pilger’s movie, bellyful of sweet crumbling smooth bunya nuts and lilipillies, whole handsful of intensely beautiful gleanings from overhead and underfoot. The ones that caught my eye today were the colours of blood, resistance, kidney, heart, lung, fury. Oh and we brought home a bird. Just a tiny baby wattle bird, who fell down out of the overhanging tree onto a lane of the road as we passed and was kept alive in a sun hat filled with grasses and fed on pulped lilipilly and coaxed to take little beaky sips of water fed to it on a stalk of grass. He seemed to bond instantly with my companion and rode home serenely – we walked, under starlight and bursts of fireworks – on an outstretched finger. By the time we had reached the river he was asleep, with his scrappy head tucked into his fledging feathers, bobbing gently as we went along. Yesterday he rode around the house on his new, male, mum’s shoulder and began to let out lovely peeps. Today he is feeling more adventurous and is being given flying lessons, in German, by a man with no feathers, no beak, and no wings.