Read the manifest right:
Cornish tin and Irish
hunger not yet arrived
but already rehearsing in the marrow,
still feeling oppression,
a Scot who kept the Gaelic
hidden under his tongue
like a clean silver coin,
a Jew whose sabbath followed him
as sacred time across the treacherous water,
a freed African counting stars
he could not name,
a child of no fixed parish learning
the loneliness of going there
but not back again.

We come ashore already plural,
never one but manifold,
already the argument the country
will be made to hold,
even now, especially now,
and the Country was not empty,
it was already many:
great nations across this vast land
with sixty thousand years of song
laid into the rock and the river,
firelight that was care and not conquest,
a law far older than our word for beginning,
and a face turned toward us
that we chose not to read,
and seeing it wrong,
seeing it from a world of empire,
we made the massacre
the fenced waterhole,
the child taken whole,
the silence pressed by a hand
across the mouth of a people
who had never once been strangers
on this sacred ground.

Still the boats kept coming
for we are the boat people
on this island,
Terra Australis:
Chinese diggers bent forlorn to the gold,
Afghan cameleers threading the red
interior with rope and scheduled prayer,
German vinedressers teaching
the hills a slower green,
Greek and Italian and Lebanese
and Maltese
unpacking the names of their dead,
with food and wind and community,
then Vietnamese
fleeing in the
leaking hulls of a later century,
Sudanese walking dismantled out of
one drought into another,
each arrival a syllable added to
a sentence with no full stop,
with each boat on boat on boat,
each new beginning, becoming
the strange shore that loosens into home,
each stranger the small proof that
home is only what receives,
and the oldest ones who saw
us coming, arriving,
still here,
still speaking, still the ground
on which the whole unfinished
argument must learn to stand.

 

15/7/2026