I. Departure

In Royal Park the morning was a swarm of wagons,
the empire counting itself in camels and salt beef,
a piano and other accoutrements of culture
in this age of white certainty,
of European knowledge.

Nineteen men,
and a continent folded like a map
that lied by being blank.

They walked into the fire of hubris,
believing the inland was a question they
had been sent to close,
like going to the promised land.

II. The creek that was a sentence

But Cooper Creek was already a language
read for sixty thousand years by people who
carried the desert lightly,
who named it Yandruwandha,
Yawarrawarrka,
who knew the fern that floats like a small green word,
nardoo, and how to grind the poison from it,
how to coax bread out of the toxic clover.

They held out fish.
They held out the Country the way you offer a hand,
the palm open,
the face turned toward the stranger,
asking to be met.

This is the oldest way:
hospitality,
the ethics that arrives before the law,
before the word for law.

III. Illiterate in abundance

The men could not read it, though.
Suspicion sat in them like ship ballast.

Burke fired his pistol at the gift,
mistook the offer for a threat,
and so, they starved inside a pantry,
perished in this plenty they were unwilling to taste.

The body keeps its own dark accounting here:
thiamine subtracted from the blood,
the raw nardoo eating them from the inside,
beriberi, the slow unshelling of a man.

At Cooper Creek they died for not being right
about a country that was never empty,
only unread.
Gray first, then Burke, then Wills,
who waved the last ones on to find the people
who would have kept them living.

IV. King

Him they did save.
The Yandruwandha.
Took him in the way rain takes a seed,
And gave him nardoo and fish for ninety days.
A Welcome to Country,
a literacy unrecognised.

Howitt arrived too late.
stamped his conscience for the Humanity shewn,
as though humanity were the explorers’ medal to confer
for the very grace the givers never received.

V. The bronze

Then Melbourne wept its forty thousand tears
and cast the failure into permanence,
as the legend that’s a fractured dream.

Charles Summers poured them whole,
recast the leader in one piece because the first attempt,
like the mission,
had come out broken:
Burke upright and cloaked,
his forearm on the shoulder of a seated Wills
who reads a book without a page,
the two of them forever leaving,
forever on the verge of never learning
what the country had always been teaching.

First public bronze the city ever raised,
its earliest high art a monument to men undone
by their refusal to be taught.

They moved it five times, six.
Once stood it over a fountain
so the explorers who died of thirst dripped
nightly in the square,
the green skin of them dissolving
like a joke nobody owned.

It waits in storage now,
a hero in a crate,
the council voting not to bring him home.

Heroes of Melbourne, the Lord Mayor says,
as if the word could outrun its own forensics.

VI. What the statue does not say

There is no bronze cast eternal for Minpidli,
no granite for the women grinding safety out of poison,
no plinth for the knowledge offered freely and waved away.

The relief panels show the camels,
show the men,
render the failure as a frieze of courage,
and leave the Country’s truth
out at the margins of the empire’s grief.

Our treasured icons must erase.
The folklore wants a martyr,
not a fool,
wants vastness conquered,
not the open hand extended
and not taken
in this colonial haze.

But the creek remembers in its own slow tongue,
fern by patient fern,
the lesson the bronze can’t hold:
that to be saved you first must let yourself be met.

They would not.
And we cast them whole anyway.
But still the nation, unbegrudging,
holds its statue still
and searches for a place
to lay its shame
in something like reckoning,
its meaning as unsettled
as the nation itself.

 

27/6/2026