Truth-and-Darkness                                                            Page 44

The point of intersection where clarity and darkness, presence and absence

meet is apprehended not only in personal inner or mystical experience but

communally and politically in the open wounds of history. Judith Wright's

lament for the loss of an entire people and culture is sung in "Bora Ring" (C.P. p.8).

She has long been outspoken about crimes committed against the original

people of Australia whose presence in absence surrounds us:

Britain's tributary colonies, which contributed so much to her wealth,

were generally a scene of merciless dispossession, exploitation, outright

murder and contempt for indigenous peoples, and Australia was

certainly no exception. For obvious reasons, the methods by which the

Aboriginal resistance was overcome and the ways in which they were

expelled from their land were seldom recorded.... The silence of

Australian historians on the subject until very recently is testimony

enough to the more general silence which surrounded the process of

occupation.⁵²

In "Bora Ring" the dispossession is inscribed on the usurped land itself and the

people's presence haunts the place:

The song is gone; the dance

is secret with the dancers in the earth,

the ritual useless, and the tribal story

lost in an alien tale.

Only the grass stands up

to mark the dancing-ring: the apple-gums

posture and mime a past corroboree,

murmur a broken chant.

The trace of what has been is left stamped on the trees and grass of the place.

Nature takes into itself the presence of the lost people and assumes their stance

and movement and song. The power of this lament is in what is absent, in the

“unsaid word", the "sightless shadow".  Everything is evoked by what is

"gone", "secret", "lost", "past" in a "dream":

The hunter is gone: the spear

is splinted underground; the painted bodies

a dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot.

The nomad feet are still.

Only the rider's heart

halts at a sightless shadow, an unsaid word

that fastens in the blood the ancient curse,

the fear as old as Cain.

⁵² Judith Wright. The Cry For The Dead, (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1981) p.5.