Aunty Hazel Collins, founder of Grandmothers Against Removals (GMAR) in Gunnedah NSW, addresses first GMAR protest outside NSW Parliament House on 13 February 2014 - the anniversary of the National Apology. 

Transcript:

My name’s Hazel. I come from Gunnedah. I am a Grandmother. I am a Great Grandmother. Many many years ago my Grandmother and my Aunty were part of the Stolen Generation. All the pain and the heartache from that Stolen Generation is passed down through generations and we are still suffering from the effects of that. Throughout my lifetime I never dreamt that I would be so impacted in such a personal way by having grandchildren and having other family members taken throughout the same system under the guise of protection, assimilation. 

Who in fact do we need to be protected against? Our children are being ripped out of our arms. They are being isolated and alienated from us, as their family we are unable to pass down our culture, our heritage. Our children are losing their ancestral footprint by removal. We have no form of being informed about the way that we have restoration of our children. All these things are denied to us. We can’t beat the system. We are a silent voice and we’ve been silent for too long and we might be small in numbers but united we are mighty in voice and governments and the people of Australia need to acknowledge and look toward better policies and procedures. Policies that are workable, that are friendly to Aboriginal people. We need to be involved in these policies so that they’re living documents that we can monitor and enforce, that these things are happening. We have the right to be empowered instead of disempowered by a system that is failing Aboriginal people. Our children, they have silent voices. We, as their Grandparents, we, as their families, we need to be their voices, for our little babies. We want our babies home. This cannot be continued. 

I challenge governments to acknowledge the wrong that they are still committing against Aboriginal people. This violence that they are committing against us and our babies is wrong. They need to acknowledge. Rudd said Sorry. That doesn’t mean a thing to us, not when our babies are being ripped out of our arms and we have no end in sight to get our babies home. When they turn eighteen, they turf ‘em out, they don’t wanna know about them anymore. We always wanna know. We want our babies. But when they come home, how do they reconcile with a culture, a family, that they have been raped by government and bureaucracy. They can’t reconnect so therefore they’re gonna always be on the fringe of Aboriginal society. The emotional, the psychological problems that DOCS are inflicting on our children and our families. The impact is just so great. It can’t be imagined unless you are going through it. Every Aboriginal person in Australia needs to stand up and support this issue because it affects us all. You go back through generations, history, and you will find that you too are connected to Stolen Generation. There is not one of us that is immune to the effects that it has. So we need to stop this and stop this now.

Aunty Hazel address first GMAR protest 13 February 2014

NSW Greens MLC David Shoebridge addresses first GMAR protest outside NSW Parliament House on 13 February 2014. 

Transcript:

Thanks everybody for coming out. I would like to acknowledge as well that we are meeting on the Land of the Gadigal People. Pay my respect to those Elders past and present, both of this Land but also those Elders who have come from across NSW, across Australia, to come to gather together to break the silence about Stolen Generation and to tell the world, and to tell those people that will listen, that when the Prime Minister stood up six years ago today and apologized for the past Stolen Generation, he forgot to tell the world, he forgot to tell Australia that the Stolen Generations are still happening and I would like you to particularly now, welcome those Grandmothers Against Removal who have gathered together and come from Gunnedah to break the silence and tell their story. Could you welcome them to Sydney. 

Just a little over a week ago, I went up to Gunnedah and after I’d had two Grandmothers come down to Sydney and say nobody is listening. They’re taking our children, they’re not listening to us. The children are not only going away from the family, they are leaving the towns, well outside their kinship care and those communities are hurting. Families are breaking down and it is a silent wave that is sweeping through NSW and Australia and they said someone needs to listen. So I went up to Gunnedah and I gotta say the stories that I heard were the same, repeated to me, that DOCS would sweep in, often of a Friday afternoon and do the ‘Friday afternoon special’ where they would remove the kids. That would be the first action with DOCS. They would remove the kids on an afternoon when they knew there was no support on the weekend. And family after family would tell me that when they went to court they had no idea what was happening. Their solicitors didn’t prosecute the case for them. Their kids were removed with a rubber stamp and years later, I had parents saying they did everything DOCS asked of them and they still weren’t reestablishing the care. 

When ‘The Bringing Them Home’ Report was released in 1997 about the Stolen Generation, there were a little under 3000 Aboriginal kids in long term care across Australia. We wind through to 2012 and there has been effectively a five fold increase in the number of children being taken from Aboriginal families across Australia. Shame indeed. Here in NSW, it is actually the worse. More than one in ten Aboriginal children in NSW are in long term care excluded from their family. The Minister will tell you that the majority of those children are placed with Aboriginal families and that’s true but they’re Aboriginal families with no kinship connection, often hundreds of kilometers away from their family breaking all those traditional ties, breaking the hearts of Grandmothers and parents and it must change. 

The minister today acknowledged too many Aboriginal children in care, well, we make the challenge to the minister today. Let’s stand back here in 12 months time, we will come back in 12 months time and we want to see less Aboriginal children in care, more families being helped rather than hurt by DOCS. Could you welcome Aunty Hazel, who is one of those Grandmothers against removal. Could you welcome her. Could you open your hearts and hear what she has to say.

NSW MLC David Shoebridge addresses first GMAR protest 13 February 2014

Paddy Gibson, senior researcher at Jumbunna Indigenous House of Research (UTS) addresses first GMAR protest outside NSW Parliament House on 13 February 2014. 

Transcript:

Thank you so much Aunties for coming down here, standing up and taking a stand on this and actually bringing it out into the open. There’s the issue, that is just the tip of the iceberg what you are hearing here about whats going on across Australia and somewhere someone has to draw a line in the sand and lets make it that line today to say enough, bring the children home. Enough is enough. 

I just wanna share two quick stories from some families that can’t be here today that we are helping at Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, to get some justice. One Nyoongar Grandmother sitting over in Perth had one of her grandchildren come home, the boy come home and say to her ‘Nanna, the welfare took my sister from school today’. By the time she got on the phone to the school to find out what had gone on that child was sitting on a farm in Gladstone in Queensland. A Nyoongar child from Perth had been abducted from the school with the police forces, put on a plane and sent to Queensland before the Grandmother, wasn’t even given the courtesy of a phone call, even knew what was going on. This sort of thing happening absolutely all the time. 

Up in the Northern Territory, in a remote community of Daguragu, we’ve been standing up for and trying to support a family who still don’t have their kids back. The police raided that house, again just in the morning when they were eating breakfast. Abducted a three year old child. Put it in the car and sent them 700 kilometers away from that community to sit down in a white family in Darwin who don’t speak the language. And why? Because the child was losing weight. Because there was a report at the clinic that the child was losing weight. You think they’d send some health workers around to have a yarn with the family about what could be done instead of police to abduct children, kidnap them, steal them. We must say steal them. The children are being stolen. They’re being stolen across Australia and it has to stop. 

And I just wanted to finish on where we are and where we have actually got to, how we have actually got to this point. You see through the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s, the families here, what they’ve gone through, everyone in the audience knew what was done in the name of assimilation, in the name of White Australia, the babies were taken from black mothers right across this country. Right. And there was a movement that said no. There was a movement that fought. The Aboriginal Tent Embassies, the mass mobilizations, the fights on the streets for land rights. They said, ‘Get the welfare board off our back and they broke the welfare board’. They said, ‘Give us our land back and they won some land’. They said ‘Give us our children back’ and they established Aboriginal child care agencies right across this country and they fought and they did get the children back. 

Here down in Glebe in 1973 the children’s home that had been taking Aboriginal kids was occupied by women, women’s liberation groups and others said enough and marched in there and demanded that institution was shutdown. That’s how they stopped the Stolen Generation last time not because people thought what we’re doing is wrong, we’re really really sorry. Because people stood up and fought but where are we today?

(Listen for the rest - word count is reached!)

Paddy Gibson addresses first GMAR protest 13 February 2014

WARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners are warned that this audio contains images and voices of deceased persons.

RIP Uncle Ray Jackson. 

Uncle Ray Jackson, President of the Indigenous Social Justice Association and member of the Stolen Generation addresses GMAR protest outside NSW Parliament House on 13 February 2014.

Transcript:

First of all as a proud Wiradjuri man I acknowledge we meet here today on the Stolen Lands of the Gadigal people. Always was, always will be Aboriginal Land. I pay my respect to their Elders and to the Elders of my nation as well. I pay great respect to the Aunties who are here today fighting against the system that should have died many years ago. The taking of the children. 

I was born in 1941 to a white Australian father and an Aboriginal mother. My white Australian father died defending this country on the Kokoda track. Did my mother receive a war widows pension? Did she receive assistance for the four or five children that were there? No, they came and took us all away. That was 71 years ago. I know that pain. I have lived it for that time. But I know  my pain is as nothing to the pain of mothers who have children ripped out, away from their very arms. Why do these animals need to go into hospitals and grab one and two and three day old babies and take them away? Are they wagging school? Are they losing weight? Are they somehow traumatized? No. The system is: assimilation must continue. It continued before. We thought we’d stopped it. It’s continuing now and we gotta stop it again. 

Reports are few but they do come out that it is endemic across this country, in every state and territory, that our kids are being taken away and farmed out elsewhere. We must take a stand against that and I am glad that plenty of us are here today and I am sure the rallies will continue, the rallies will grow and as long as I am able, I and my association will be here supporting the Grannies from Gunnedah. Thank you.

Uncle Ray Jackson addresses first GMAR protest 13 February 2014

Mary Moore from Children and Parents support group and a member of the Forgotten Australians addresses first GMAR protest outside NSW Parliament House on 13 February 2014. 

Transcript: 

Thank you. I speak today on behalf of a support group called children and parents and we support children, parents, grandparents and families who are victims of the child protection system, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous and on their behalf I speak today, and I thank the Aunties from Gunnedah for inviting me to come and speak today. 

Say no to another Stolen Generation of Australian children. Innocent children and families who have committed no crime are being traumatized daily by current state and territory government practices of forced removal of children and for many the damage being done will be lifelong. The policy of child stealing by governments has to stop. Families must be supported to stay together and restoration of our stolen children must be the first priority of government. 

Children are forcibly removed by police and department workers every single day in Australia on the opinion of an unregistered DOCS caseworker and often on anonymous false allegations. The inhumane treatment suffered by vulnerable children and families, victimized by the forced removal process, will haunt them and us for the rest of our lives as history has already evidenced for the Stolen Generation. 

The child safety authorities in Australia have too much power and no accountability for the actions and this breeds an environment of incompetence, misconduct and outright corruption. Families in need of support are not receiving the help that they need, instead families are forcibly ripped apart, so often without warning. There is no external complaints mechanism in the Australian child protection industry so evidenced complaints are not being investigated by anyone but themselves and the department is not being held to account for their criminal misconduct when dealing with vulnerable families and abuse of children in their care by anyone. Failures are being ignored and covered up. 

Child safety workers are not a registered profession in Australia. They have no governing body to establish and mandate codes of practice and conduct. No governing body to mandate even base levels of education and training. No external board is monitoring their performance to protect the public from the harm they are doing to children and families everyday. No one is holding these caseworkers accountable and it is an environment of secrecy until today. 

Child safety workers are not registered professionals yet state and territory governments have given these child protection workers more power than any other profession in Australia. They have unlimited power which many are abusing everyday to steal children and destroy lives. Their opinions are made without adequate investigations as evidence is not required in the secretive care courts. Parents are denied justice and deemed guilty in many instances because a case worker has failed to validate allegations or actually out right lied in their affidavits. 

You can’t have a system with no accountability that relies, not on evidence, but on an unregistered caseworker’s opinion to steal children and destroy families. That is why so many children are stolen and the system is, and always has been, a total failure. Some of these children are then forcibly adopted and the current NSW Minister Pru Goward, wants to make forced adoptions a priority for children in care. Adoption is for orphans not for children who have loving families.

(Listen for more, word count is reached!)

Mary Moore addresses first GMAR protest 13 February 2014

Toni Macpherson from the Gold Coast Grannies Group address first GMAR protest outside NSW Parliament House on 13 February 2014.

Transcript:

I just wanted to say that Sovereignty has never been ceded in this Land, that I pay my respects to the Sovereign First Nations of this Land, the Australian Aboriginal People, to the Elders past, present and future. Acknowledge that I am speaking on Gadigal Country here and thank you for inviting me to speak. My children are Gamilaroi Bundjalung People and I ask that you keep in mind  while I speak that the belief that has driven me down here is that this always was always will be Aboriginal Land. 

My granny girl, she was born in a hospital not far from here a couple of years ago and she was taken into custody, or care, by DOCS NSW when she was about three hours old. I was very fortunate because I have a very strong network of family and friends who helped support us. We had an amazing legal team that helped to get our baby back and she came back to us. 

I live in Queensland and because I live in Queensland and baby was down here, my son and his partner were here, there was all sorts of problems but the legal team worked with us and our community and we got our baby back and I am encouraging you to do the same, work with your colleagues, with your other Grannies in solidarity because we need to keep our babies back. They are not to take our babies, they are kidnapping them, they are kidnapping babies out of the hospital. 

The week that my little grannie went, there were four Aboriginal babies that were removed from the hospital in that week. Four babies! Now you can’t tell me that not something isn’t going on. I also want to mention that I am an honors student  at Griffith University. I’m just in the process of submitting my thesis. I am a constructivist social scientist and my specialty is politics so I believe that ideas matter. 

So how can they take babies from the hospital? How can they decide that a parent isn’t capable of parenting when the baby has just been born? There is an idea or a belief that is going on here  that some people are good parents, that some people are bad parents and that some people can have their children taken away and removed by the state and given to some other people to raise. 

That is what I am asking you is to challenge the idea that it is ok to take children, babies in particular, to take children from one group of people, from one family and place them with another because child rearing is the most difficult task on the planet for anybody and if you have any social issues, if you have any problems, if you have any health problems that are being used against you to take your children and why do we think it is ok to do that? It is not ok. It is not ok to do that. 

I also wanted to mention that I thought that something was going on when baby got taken and four other little babies were taken in the same week. So we got baby back and then when I went back to home, I started to look around and I found out that they are taking babies from the Gold Coast hospital too. Babies from the labour ward. Women are told when they are pregnant that they’re not going to be allowed to keep their babies and like, my own family, my mother went through a forced adoption. My eldest brother was taken, fortunately he come back when we were older but the idea, it seems like we are recycling the ideas, its ok to take peoples babies from mothers who have just had their babies.

(Listen for more - word count reached!)

Toni Macpherson addresses first GMAR protest 13 February 2014

"Our People would always say we wish you well and have a good festival but we also wish that people would come with good hearts, good minds and respect and so we say, you brush and tread softly on Country cos Country has so much spirituality and story" (Kevin Duncan, Darkinjung Aboriginal Lands Council, 44:43).

This selection of yarns explores the sacred stories, relationships and histories of resistance to colonial invasion on Darkinjung Country (St Albans, Hawkesbury River, NSW) and specifically stories connected to Camp Wollimi. It was prepared as an accompaniment to the Welcome to Country for the High & Dry Festival which took place at Camp Wollimi in 2009. The site belongs to the Metropolitan Aboriginal Lands Council and is greatly sacred to the Darkinjung People. These stories are told by Kevin Duncan (Darkinjung/Gomeroi - Darkinjung Aboriginal Lands Council), Darren Bloomfield (Wiradjuri - Sovereignty activist), Collin Lyons (Wiradjuri - Metropolitan Aboriginal Lands Council and caretaker of Camp Wollimi) and Ricky Lyons (Wiradjuri - Deputy Chair of Metropolitan Aboriginal Lands Council). Recorded and edited by Olivia Nigro. These yarns are interspersed with the following track list:

1. This Land is Mine - Kev Carmody & Paul Kelly
2. Moonstruck - Kev Carmody
3. Invasion - Mista Savona
4. Mamba selection - Yalkurru Marika
5. Blithe River - Rrawa

Radio High and Dry

Stories about Camp Wollimi on Darkinjung Country (27 Nov 2009)

The text:

Words blend:
	in the manic 
    crazed spinning of
scripts and blades
that beat between rusted broken teeth,
cracking, creeking like doors do in deserted church hallways where the echo of
preaching lurks, untruths ooze like pus from the encrusted
	rotting gums of a mouth malicious,
snarling like red eyed ficticous monsters 
scolding scaleless skin,
cold industrial claws 
unable to hail help
in-
hale- 
-in

so vile a presence , so sordid so incorporated 
normal
everyday, baited,
staring at you from every which way
every street corner, shop, school, doctors surgery stool, 
$7.00 visit chlorine filled pool, ing cars wheels petrol pumped up patrolling police men steel capped: boots workers disputes over unpaid overtime coal burning iceblocks bubblegum in childrens socks secretaries secret stash of staples state commissed violence maple syrup on pan, hands caked with yellow toxons, uranium despairing fellows in call centres, microtelephones near mouths hostile aimless shouts, lips glossed, dehydrated bloated masses faceless, base trivia front page newspaper. 

Yes.

Micro:macro, taxed roundabouts tracks crossing roads train platforms with no rubbish disposal bins and all thats left are unexploded bombs.  

Every glimpse of your reflection is stamped, encoded and barcoded. 

This is 
capital-is

um, um, um, 

This is 
capital-is-um

This is capitalism.

And this word is not said confidently enough, 
not made blunt like those blades that bade you concede. 
A spade is a spade. 

We are trapped.	(!) 
		not swallowed 
but lying languid in the seething stench of static breathlessness under undulating
utterances of this:
		and that: cryptic riddles that slither like snakes

scorching sinister acidic as 
He 
Capital H
...tries to drown out your pulse with the bitter lumpiness of 
the unstomachable:

And then: 

The once competent compass under your skin looses its centre,
whirling, clotted, crazed,
coughing blood
into the cupped  hand that is force feeding you.
You!
standing:under
	the storm of SENSE-LESS ideology regurgitated by actors in suits with brutish formulas that have shown,
soaking fear to the bone – works.

Works to saturate eyes that barely see 
senses fatigued by the constant onslaught of twisted facts and figures
survey statistics a strategy of sinister violence to serve the very specific interests 
of a few
who have you jumping through endless harrowing hoops
draining capacity, narrowing humanity dehumanised to the extreme

numb
	and the horizon, 
				is not lost, but it's not in sight
and 
bit by bit
is getting
bitten
by frost: frozen limbs that know there is nowhere to run.

And then:

you feel the concrete footpath under your feet
a swelling heat in your soles
as they impress 
invisible 
prints upon the streets  of mazed matrix mapped by multiple sides
one box, three box, five box, seven
and the linearity of direction,
or directedness reveals itself as 
nothing less than
absolutely
laden with contradictions
as are all the systemic premises which propell
us toward death
while we live and our eyes scream and bleed with the tragic iris of 
imposed alienation. 

And then:
you look at the sky, and you try to hold on
to some sense that some things 
arent so bad

and whispering in your ear is deafening looming knowing 

of 

flesh being ripped open by shrapnel monsoons in bedrooms where sleep is a dream,

of 

unspoken massacres blood drenched soil disguised by the moralised history of romantic toil,
 
the shadow of genocide, 

the colonised coersed as imperial masks shift and change, 
assimilate, anihilate, fated to the market, mainstream economy, homogeny, cultural monopoly, and on the board of real life lives are pushed into corners, self medicated substances abuse to survive the endless traumas of distorted notions of 

mechanical 9-5, criteria box tick tock tick tock, handcuffed and lost
to self, mental health epidemics, empty disconnected, frantic search for identity in a world drowned by glossed over gore, 
where words dont mean what they purport, 
where exploitation is taught, 
displaced, 
caught, 
the definition of living, 
cooperation, 
distorted, 
soulless, 
to be surrendered to a trade of grief and
  
for what? Pieces of paper with pictures on them, abstract commodities to exchange for labour or time or the rhythm of your breathing?

And it is about wars,
warring social relations, rich get richer, poor starve more
the  maintenance assymetrical wealth and power incantations of soured heartless rhetoric.

Social Darwinism is wrong 
and
democracy is a farce 

and I feel dark and angry and sad
but still breathing
in that ancient way with the rhythm of the tides

a deep sigh 

knowing
that we can
and we must 
breathe together, walk, march, scream, weave together
orchestrate our hearts to fight to be free together

that we can
and we must 
breathe together, walk, march, scream, weave together
orchestrate our hearts to fight to be free together

as 
soon 
as
is
possible
soon
is
as 
possible
soon 
is 
possible
is possible
is possible
is possible
is possible

dot dot dot

is happenining
full stop. 


Capitalis-um?

Big thank you to Si Fixion for the backing track!

The Science Fiction of Racism - written for Gil Scott Heron Tribute, April 1 2012

The constellations formed, 
A sailors puppeteer 
And the slave ships were shackled to the shores
With red raw muscle and tears falling.

The ocean reared with rough waves
Like a bellowing body bruised, 
swollen and sliced open
by the blade of a whip
as stolen lungs, gasping for air,
Choked on darkness, death and despair under the deck. 

And above, 
Coated in plush velvet,
Were white plated golden hands tracing maps with blood,
Lynching borders with their sordid flags
As they price-tagged non-human humans 
Who became the crystal ball of history.

A particular kind of racism was given birth, questioning who is human enough, who is a slave, worthless unpaid, denied, as heathens not even breathing… and the breathless empire saught only to trade, the exchange of muscle and land and with a bible in one hand and a gun in the other, the massacres were laid bare, smothered in murdered mothers… 

And the rulers used hanus ruling devices
To measure the cranium size of lives
And the twisted lies of a science fiction misplaced the rising friction 
To carve deep façades of competition
between us and them, now and then, 
tidal scapegoats on hated boats that dissolve in oceans of crazed campaigns for votes, the threat floats on the croak of hypocrisy to distract the masses with a cracking coated lack of democracy, an un- fair go with tapped eyes closed to the rising tides of out of sight out of mind, race based intervention segregation lines or the secret suicides of real refugees crying behind bars or child removal rates higher now than at the peak of the stolen generation, still stolen by assimilation and the disproportionate apartheid rates of incarceration where the young black and deadly end up dead under the fists of unpatrolled pigs. Terrance Briscoe, 28 years old, murdered in an Alice Springs police cell on January 5th 2012, after being arrested for drinking. 

And what are you thinking now?

How the past is present as the present is passing and we keep asking why colour and not class, the correlation creeps up clear in the cryptic forest of fear campaigns, “in a wilderness of heart break and a desert of despair” where violence is blamed on the other, while childless mothers scream in the night between gun shots as they fight to get out of the ghetto blues and crimes climb like vines toward the neck of the confusion. The tactic is simple. Divide and rule. Ruling over the divide of tools, the distribution of wealth is the distribution of health and collective wellbeing is slaughtered on the alter of capitalism. 

Did you hear what they said? 

Another brother is dead and he can’t be buried behind the barrage of broken hearts, the cracks in the footpaths, the black night, falling like an axe on quiet prayers for everybody to be free,
And overhead
The vulture empire circles obscene,
Screaming the anthems of its borders
While a distant comet in the corner of the cosmos combusts
and then the vulture utters a contradiction 
-	human rights - 
while dark skin rots in forgotten plantation rows 
and in the tainted corridors as factory fodder still chained to the imposed
or in the ghost cells of detention centres where human rights don’t apply to humans
or in hospital beds in Indigenous communities where deliberate government neglect amounts to systemic genocide. 

And lest we forget… that nationalism is the gun and racism is the bullet

And lest we forget… that the trigger finger is a golden corpse while the one hit is alive with his famine. 

True justice. The justice of truth, the truth of justice because the truth is that there is just us and just truth for us to use.

I am Troy Davis. You are Troy Davis. And the haze of hopeless hope haunted us to make haste as Obama presided over a state sanctioned lynching where there was no evidence, no legitimate testimony at all. Executed on 21st September 2011 at 11:08pm. The mask falls. I am Troy Davis. You are Troy Davis. And just before the breath was stolen  from his body, he asked us “to seek true justice”.

True justice. The justice of truth, the truth of justice because the truth is that there is just us and just truth for us to use.

The Science Fiction of Racism feat. Si Fixion

A huge thank you to Stephen Dobson and Laurence Williams for such a beautiful soundscape to work with. The soundscape was recorded as part of a very interesting project designed by Stephen involving two-way improvisation between guitar and effects.

Thank you to Gem Rapscallion, the Radioactive show and 3CR Community Radio (Melbourne) who aired this piece on the 24th November 2012. Please find podcast here: http://www.3cr.org.au/aggregator/sources/778

React-or despair?

How can silence scream louder than a call to action?

I stare into the distance as I remember the things I have learn't, 
from that heartland, 
that red dirt, 
dry volcanic blood, 
scattered green ash scrub
along tectonic songlines humming wind chimes of sacred times passed over, 
like night. 

How can silence scream louder than a call to action?

The irony shovels unborn children
out of city sights and out of 'too busy' minds, 
'too busy'
to hear the frightened voices of the future stamped nuclear. 

Here,
suited men, 
cuffed with golden BHP wristwatches and hollow eyes rich with profits, 
try to persuade whole families clutching at bread crumb threads
as they hold each other's horrors tight, 
that all will be alright
as choking anthropologists cringe with the dread 
that science will apologise when it is too late.

Hear the suited men,
voiced with metal claws and an exponential stock market of lies
tell them again 
how safe placing nuclear waste upon the promise of graves is. 

The gathering wind prays desperately to be still
as particles of death are literally scattered like confetti
along the vast terrains of closed mouths
trying not to swallow the dark pills of propaganda 
and then unexpectedly,
a nuclear reactor spills,
thousands of innocent years turn into toxic killers with invisible hands,
the pillars of reason stand burnt alive. 

History has testified enough. 

Maralinga, Hiroshima. Chernobyl. Fukushima. 

The earth quakes with these dates, 
a sky grieving for full moon light-ening, 
as the soft blue desert afternoon holds migrating clouds still,
    and fills them with thunder clapping whispers of ancient ancestors open. 

The wisdom of time spills
                             from the hoarse throat of the exhausted horizon,
 a coarse creased into the gathered bones of eternity
toned crimson
by a sunset settling stories of forgotten frontlines. 

The dark skin of soil lays thin over plutonium desert memories scarred with bombs. 

We know the weaponry well. 

How many times will we let them spell despair?

A cancer cell prison expands unhindered, 
expanses of barren land 
laden with broken fingers raised in peace signs as
depleted uranium was forced into the mouths of foetus'. 
Our naked eyes are cindered in the 
cool breeze by the undetectable graveyard
swept silently into forever. 

This horror story is ours 
to burn 
as we watch mines turn to reactors 
turn to weapons turn to threats
turn to more war torn deaths 
dumped into the laps of the dispossessed.

The last chapter is not written yet so place your pen here. 

Upon this steepening road, 
where midnight oil spelt hypocrisy
where Labour party policies u-turned around
and NSW let 26 years 
                          slip 
                          through dirty liberal fingers pointing at the weeping ground. 

History has testified enough. 

I stare into the distance again
as I remember the things I have learnt
from that heartland,
from that red dirt
scribed with the stories 
of Jabiluka, 
Irati Wanti,
those battles fought hard and won. 

Where the call to action shattered silence
where frontlines were breathing
and mapping people like stars
into constellations of determination raising fists
to twist back the prison bars with the full force of history. 

The resistance is still alive as this generation gathers troops to testify once more. 
