And where is your wine? There is only the river.

Integration – Yes!

Gratefully we learn from you,

The advanced race,

You with long centuries of lore behind you.

We who were Australians long before

You who came yesterday,

Eagerly we must learn to change,

Learn new needs we never wanted,

New compulsions never needed,

The price of survival.

Much that we loved is gone and had to go,

But not the deep indigenous things.

The past is still so much a part of us,

Still about us, still within us.

We are happiest

Among our own people. We would like to see

Our own customs kept, our old

Dances and songs, crafts and corroborees.

Why change our sacred myths for your sacred myths?

No, not assimilation but integration,

Not submergence but our uplifting,

So black and white may go forward together

In harmony and brotherhood.

The Teachers

For Mother, who was never

taught to read or write

Holy men, you came to preach:

‘Poor black heathen, we will teach

Sense of sin and fear of hell,

Fear of God and boss as well;

We will teach you work for play,

We will teach you to obey

Laws of God and laws of Mammon …’

And we answered, ‘No more gammon,

If you have to teach the light,

Teach us first to read and write.’

Ballad of Totems

My father was Noonuccal man and kept old tribal way,

His totem was the Carpet Snake, whom none must every slay;

But mother was of Peewee clan, and loudly she expressed

The daring view that carpet snakes were nothing but a pest.

Now one lived right inside with us in full immunity,

For no one dared to interfere with father's stern decree:

A mighty fellow ten feet long, and as we lay in bed

We kids could watch him round a beam not far above our head.

Only the dog was scared of him, we'd hear its whines and growls,

But mother fiercely hated him because he took her fowls.

You should have heard her diatribes that flowed in angry torrents

With words you never see in print, except in D. H. Lawrence.

‘I kill that robber,’ she would scream, fierce as a spotted cat;

‘You see that bulge inside him? My speckly hen made that!’

But father's loud and strict command made even mother quake;

I think he'd sooner kill a man than a carpet snake.

That reptile was a greedy-guts, and as each bulge digested

He'd come down on the hunt at night as appetite suggested.

We heard his stealthy slithering sound across the earthen floor,

While the dog gave a startled yelp and bolted out the door.

Then over in the chicken-yard hysterical fowls gave tongue,

Loud frantic squawks accompanied by the barking of the mung,

Until at last the racket passed, and then to solve the riddle,

Next morning he was back up there with a new bulge in his middle.