Her human animals stand and stare,

Feeling her sorrow and pain.

Gulls dip and swoop overhead,

Crying their mournful cry,

The shadow of the bridge

Etched clearly in the minds of all.

Sea snipes run from wave to wave

Searching for food and calling,

'Why this! Why this!'

The gulls' calls come sadly and clearly,

'The bridge spells doom for us all!

Doom for us all!

Write it in the sands of Time!

Write it in the sands of Time.'

The Rainbow Serpent sighs,

Meditating

The folly of man.

Custodians of the Land

On 22 April 1989 Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal received an honorary doctorate from the Humanities Faculty of Griffith University. The following is the speech she gave when she received the award. It was written conjointly by Oodgeroo and Kabul.

Members of Griffith University, Honoured Guests and Friends. Allow me to begin this address by expressing my sincere gratitude to the Griffith University for bestowing such an honour upon me. It represents a milestone in the history of this land, now known as Australia, for it recognises (belatedly though it be) the value of a most ancient earth culture to modern society.

To the Aboriginal people, the modern history of this land began two hundred years ago, when the sacred shores of my people became the dumping ground for the ‘undesirable elements' from the crowded and depleted lands and social order of Old England. Some of these castaways were perpetuators of inhuman and irrational studies in the evolution of species (including the human), who merrily continued their insane traditions of racial and class discrimination here. Naturally, the first to suffer under this fascism were the traditional owners and occupiers of Australia, the Aborigines.

There were many reasons why the colonists' considered Aboriginal people to be lesser creatures than apes. There were the obvious things, like our nakedness and different standards of physical beauty, but there was also their greed-based refusal to give credence to and therefore comprehend a non European-earth-raping culture, which, through an ancient excellence in social engineering, was not only highly successful but superior to their own.

We ‘pagans', who had believed in and comfortably maintained our own strict ‘code of moral behaviour' for all of our people for many thousands of years before the white man's culture was born, were soon to learn that the equivalent order, in their brave new world, was most sadistically maintained with the rabid and obsessive use of the infamous ‘cat o' nine tails' whip.

We need not labour these things for the purpose of this event, except, perhaps, to take note and to remember that these basic living differences between the two cultures created a fundamental clash then, and the modern issue is one of diametrically opposed philosophies that continue to clash now. Blind prejudice to cultural difference is still being liberally indulged in today in this land now known as Australia.