A journal of art + literature engaging with nature, culture, the environment & ecology

Juukan Gorge: if the lost could speak

Gabrielle de Gray, San Francisco bay area, USA

 

continually occupied 

            by aboriginal people since the last ice age 

46,000 years of culture 

            contained inside a cave of dreamers 

a braid excavated

            4,000 years old— its woven strands bound loosely    a direct ancestor

archeologists found 

            7000 artifacts in a terroir full of bone

to include 

            a 28,000-year-old kangaroo femur sharpened into a pointed tool

generations of living memory

            held inside the land   

blown up 

            for Rio Tinto to mine 8 million tons of ore 

executives chose

to go straight through the site and not around      

an additional 

            $135 million in company profit 

the colonial narrative 

            has been replaced   

by the narrative 

            of corporations

the ripple of history continues

            until one day

we will arrive 

            at a place beyond the language of words    

that cannot be found on a map  

            but inside the interiority of human experience   

between the spoken and silent places  

            inside the sound of memory    which holds the loss of forgotten things

 

                                                

 *Juukan Gorge was destroyed in Australia by the Rio Tinto Mining Corporation— May 24th, 2020.

 

Gabrielle de Gray is a writer who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has been published in the New York Times, Chesapeake Review, The Mindful Word, and Yellow Arrow Literary Magazine. She holds an MA from the University of Toronto and is currently at work on a memoir.

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