for millad Miller & Raggett mob
I drove out bush with family
again to Jayipa
a catfish hole lined
with paperbark and river gum
and those gleaming quartzite outcrops
like a silver and zinc plinth encompassing
dark sheet water:
we hopped, stinging, across the baked
earth, a tessellated black
soil with small sand drifts gathering
to the decaying stone-boiled edges:
and while nana fired
a billy, weaving
pandunus frond sieves
we all crashed, energised
in the brown water’s warm wash:
in the late afternoon
cool relief as pop arrived to dig
a bush-turkey ground-oven
we all set to work:
the boys
took a castnet and handlines
for barra
while the girls hunted
in water, feeling
in the mud
for waterlily bulbs, onions and yams:
later they tap-danced the mud
sweetening our outlook –
a seismic detection service reading
for hibernating turtles –
a shelled familial finery:
at nightfall
our guts tight
with their fill we fired
the billy and traced
stars as pop smoked us
in quandong, picking us up:
and nana sang country, rousing
the scrub
and a rainbow’s payback on this mine’s seepage,
and another’s foreshadowed hole in our burial grounds,
mucking us up
making us sick.