Two Worlds

Remote Indigenous communities.

Intergenerational trauma, poverty, alcohol, drug abuse, powerlessness, despair, domestic violence, sex offending, and the Intervention.

Or

A ceremony held since the dawn of time.

Family groups gathering in their hundreds, travelling for hours in broken down wrecks across potholed tracks to be housed, fed, and loved. 

Mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmothers, and aunties,

preening, sharing, laughing, gossiping.

Fathers, sons, brothers, grandfathers, and uncles, painted proud, glistening, muscular,

singing, gliding and stomping, their spears quivering,

shaking the earth, calling their ancestors,

certain of who they are, and where they belong.

Holding at bay a fractured calling from the west.

The night as dark and silent as our imagination allows. Night owls and crickets, and the cries of the eternal.

The winds of loneliness kept at bay, placated by clap sticks, and ancient chants invocating the spirits.

All biding their time to welcome the dawn, 

when kinship elders lead the procession from ceremony ground to sea

for a ritualistic cleansing, a baptismal rebirth, re-affirming all that is eternal.

Maintaining their traditional obligations in contemporary lives,

beacons for navigating two worlds.