FORTY-TWO
artist – bundadhaany What a wonderful thing to make something. I saw a painting in a book, it’s called Dluga Street; it was painted by a bundadhaany called Bernardo Bellotto. He was an Italian fella. He painted the city of Warsaw, Poland – there were twenty-six of them, in a style called vedute. He made those paintings, detailed lives of the people and the city, and he passed away just a handful of years before Australia was invaded.
Almost two hundred years later the Nazis bombed Warsaw, killing hundreds and thousands of people, horrible annihilation. In this dark time almost the entire city of Warsaw was burned and destroyed. The people left were thinking about moving the city somewhere else, rebuilding a new Warsaw.
But then they had all these paintings of the city, these great detailed things by the bundadhaany Bernardo Bellotto, and they rebuilt the city from paintings done generations before the city was bombed to bits. I want the younger ones, the next little ones to read this book and for them to look into the riverbed, to stare up into the tops of the gums, to look and know and name the birds. To recognise that city that no-one seems to see anymore. I wouldn’t be invisible anymore, none of us would be.
ashamed, have shame – giyal-dhuray I’m done with this word. I’d leave it out completely but I can’t. It’s become part of the dictionary we think we should carry. We mustn’t anymore. See, pain travels through our family tree like a songline. We’ve been singing our pain into a solid thing.
The old ones, the young ones too, are ready to heal. We don’t have to be giyal-dhuray anymore, we don’t have to pass that down anymore.
ashes – bunhaan I want to spread everywhere I can over Prosperous, I want the body to float up to the leaves, I want to rest in the wheatfield, the last yield, before it’s dug open.
Australia – Ngurambang That’s my country, anyway. It spreads to almost the size of England, from the mountains in the north, to the boundary of Ngurambang in the south. The water once flowed through the Murrumby from the southern rivers, filling the creeks, the lagoons, the lakes, and feeding everything in its wake. Ngurambang is my country; in my mind it will always be on the waterfront. Five hundred acres where the Gondiwindi lived, live. Australia – Ngurambang! Can you hear it now? Say it – Ngu-ram-bang!
