You’re black
Guilty
Still responsible
For our white dilemma
About your existence
How dare you claim your own land?
With vigour
As we would
Claim your land
With vigour
Sit back and enjoy
Our grog
Our diseases
Our ignorance
Our stupidity
But
Then stand up
Come again
Do not be black and guilty
Come with spirit and fight
Make us really sorry
Improbable recipe
For young blacks
A
Sad future
High as hell
Black Kids
Lying in a warm dust bed
Neither
Life
Nor
Breakfast guaranteed
No cereal
Just petrol and glue
And beside a small black body
Lies a bottle
We danced and we danced
Whiteman’s prejudice faded somewhere in the music
Somewhere in the joy
For us mob
Our love grew
Beyond apartheid
Beyond colour
Puppet police guilt ridden
Uniform sadness
We danced and we danced
For fourteen years
Then the music stopped
Little aboriginal kids walk by a supermarket door
Magic opportunity
Football flies past the cashier
Electronic doors will do that to a kid
Great kick on the run
Goal over the left shoulder
Into the pet food aisle
Then the pub
Can we kick it high enough?
No doubt
Another bloody window goes
On another boring day
Insurance nightmare for the publican
This town cries out for kids
Little black kids
Trying to have fun
Walgett heroes
I care not
That I am black
Not like you care
That I am black
I am every colour when I talk
And
You are part of my rainbow
But
You are white in your speech
And
I am left perplexed
Often
There’s pain in your heart
For being black
And
Making me conscious
I am white
There’s pain in my heart
For being white
And
Making you conscious
You are black
Is it a Whiteman’s world?
In a Blackman’s land
Maybe
A Blackman’s world
In a Whiteman’s land
Or
Has the colour of our skin
Simply confused our ability to be friends
In a Kimberly gorge I watched
“Sheer delight”
A little Aboriginal boy
Diving
From heights that scared
The perfect ten I thought, every time
And the joy “Oh the Joy”
When his beaming smile surfaced
An Olympic diver
You must represent your country
This is my country he said
My aboriginal country
I am from a black nation of champions
Forty thousand years past
Long before Mr Cook
Long before ancient Greece
And
No matter how well I dive
My nation will remain unknown
Despite any white man gold medal
Did we blacks do too much?
Back then
Did we raise opportunities?
In an unforgiving landscape
For white explorers
Waterholes
Imprints
Born in the minds of good black men
Sadly
Who knew not what they had just done
To secure a white invasion
To give up water
Over sacred aboriginal land
For foreign speculators
Proved so wrong
My skin is black
Black as
Your approach is hesitant
For you knew not
Today you would meet a Blackman
Business you said
Colour is not an issue
For you
Sadly you did not consider me
I can not open doors
Without your white keys
Knowing me as you do
Our friendship
Over years
Makes me ponder
What if
What if
I were a black man
Why do you talk ill of black men?
Their
Aboriginal life
Aboriginal strife and struggles
Why?
And
If black was gods will for me
Would you need to be black too?
For our friendship to endure