It is the cover image of our joint book, Unsettling the Land by Suzanne Bellamy and Susan Hawthorne.
I saw three emus close to the water, disturbed 10 wild turkeys and put to flight any number of swans and native companions. In every little bay were pelicans by the score, singly, in pairs and by the hundred, mountain ducks in small bands, wood ducks, teal, blue cranes, black and white cranes by the hundred, white cranes by the thousand; ibises, both the ordinary kind and the all-white, in immense flocks, feeding in the long water-covered grass; great black shags. –George Ernest Morrison, 1881
What we have lost–
I grew beside the Murrumbidgee
its great highway of water
rumbling with us through each day
we played discovery–my brother
and I–imagining different lives
in which we were the first to name
certain corners, small islands
to memorialise ourselves–taking
no account in our teens of those
who’d been here so many thousands
of years. It is Wiradjuri
country, and on its banks sits the
town named for its crows.
Birds and water–a pair that indicates
vitality, a dynamic system, a system
that changes season by season. But
in our unsettling of the land we have
removed the seasons and the birds–
water flow is constant in the irrigating
rivers–who ever heard of this before
the gouging out of dams, the displacement
of earth to block water, to release it
at our want and whim and will.
Who will join with me to recall the
birds–the wetland birds back to
country–dancing brolgas, jabiru,
pelican and ibis–and the crow to
welcome back its dispossessed cousins–
a kind of Native Title for the birds.
Published in Unsettling the Land, Spinifex Press, 2008
Note: In 2008, Lella Cariddi, approached me to ask if I would participate in a project she was curating called The Drought Project. She was asking poets and artists to collaborate on a joint work for a touring exhibition beginning in Melbourne, Australia in 2008.
I asked my friend, the artist Suzanne Bellamy, if she was interested. I had a poem sequence and from that Suzanne created this marvellous canvas. She also sent photos of previous artworks to go with the poems. We the decided it would be a great chapbook and I asked designer, Deb Snibson, if she would design the chapbook.
The poems cover colonization of the land near where I was born and grew up, the city of Wagga Wagga through which the majestic river, the Murrumbidgee, flows.
I also recall the devastating drought of 1967 which left the land almost bladeless and the flood seven years later in 1974 when a great lake of water surrounded our house. Two more poems round out the collection.
I have felt and seen the consequences of climate change up close, including drought, flood and cyclones. I have friends who have survived devastating fires. I was honoured to be a part of this project. It is also a reminder of the very close friendship between Suzanne and me. Sadly, Suzanne died in July 2022. You can read more about her art and life here: https://www.spinifexpress.com.au/blog/vale-suzanne-bellamy