As the water ripples and the birds chatter and sing
She collects slippery shells, kelp and tendrils of rope
These fragments of Country humming deep in her bag
Mud and shell and seaweed stuck to cold fingertips
Weaving and threading pieces of time together
Breath and paper and the sound of home – all around
Mixing piment, brushing ink and smearing ochre
Peeling back layers of paint to get to the unknown
Collecting the forgotten and giving it back its name
Country never forgets never forgets never
Mud and shell and seaweed stuck to cold fingertips
At the centre are the waterways and how we hold them
How we represent them and let them lead us home
Mixing together pigment and the waterways
Melting together into an old song made anew
Into lines on paper which bloom and spread;
A reflection of Ancestral knowledge and memory
Mud and shell and seaweed stuck to cold fingertips
Bare feet upon swift-moving sand and inland to the wetlands
Bare feet upon soft mushy muddy landscapes
Drawing new landscapes with bare feet upon Country
What is it to print storytelling into paper?
What is it to press hands into ink?
Into the the surface of what is unseen?
Mud and shell and seaweed stuck to cold fingertips
Carrying into the world your Old Peoples language
Within your body the knowings lay resting
Lay waiting to trace into the bare tapa
Patterns of cultural memory unfurl like new shoots
The paper looped above us shifts in the breeze
Intricately weaving our inheritances over and over
We don't create for arts sake
We have stories we must tell
Stories of this place – of our bloodlines and spirit
Mud and shell and seaweed stuck to cold fingertips
How do we adorn ourselves?
Thread the rope, the feathers and material
Dipped into the body of Country we radiate
To be a mother, to be a daughter, to be an aunty
Is like a deep-dusky-dirt-red-sunset love
We adorn to love, to remember, to honour
Twisting shapes with the hands of your mother
Passed down through long generations
Hear the way the material shifts against itself
Mud and shell and seaweed stuck to cold fingertips
Hard drought gives way to devastating flood
Gumtrees would bend in the hot wind
Blowing in sand from the car window
Country bows in the pressure of new water
Colossal colonial structures have done this
What if we were to pick the weirs up like –
Mud and shell and seaweed stuck to cold fingertips
We press our designs of these stories into the present
So they don’t forget and we don’t forget
The shape of Country and the lines that connect us
The hundreds of thousands of years of story
Embossed into the tapestry of our existence
The kin, language, culture, ceremony, lore, law, knowing, being
The ways our mob trace into the fabric of our people
The impressions of the reflections of the beating heart of Country
The way our making is a means of survival
We continue to storytell, to paint, to dance, to draw and sing out to Country and our waterways with –
mud and shell and seaweed stuck to cold fingertips.
