This Earth Keeps the Memory of Gadigal Footsteps Through Fire, Silence, Survival, and Unbroken Song Across Two Centuries of Dispossession and Resistance – 27th December 2025

by guest poet Shaun Tenzenmen1
[the world’s second ever longette!!]

Warrane’s children watched the tall ships come; now towers rise where the songlines hum, unbroken
This scarred earth breathes beneath the city’s beat: a heart they couldn’t silence, slow, deep and true
This earth remembers every footfall: songs of Gadigal sorrow and steel unspoken
Lasting months or more, a communal, visible crying, the place always bound by grief

Two centuries of silence could not bury their song; they still sing their harbour home
Images and names, kept memories – unseen, unsaid – the spirit safely travels through
All these years of bleeding, the harbour knows; the rocks remember the cry of every stone
Unresolved collective and intergenerational mourning, still seeking relief

Grief continues because the causes have never been fully acknowledged or repaired
Death manifests through mass dispossession, disease, violence, and murder malevolent
All the sorries are never finished, the deeper losses are continuously shared
Peoples excluded from decision-making about their culture, heritage and land

Deep historical culture, reduced to plaques, acknowledgements, and museum displays
Bulldozed by infrastructure and development; damaged or erased without consent
The least I owe is attention, some respect; The least I owe is to not look away
Protection laws weaker than commercial interests; consultation, a token hand

What my ancestors named discovery, the land remembers as interruption still
I inherit the language of arrival without having paid the cost of entry
I stand here in admiration, aware that the ground knows more than I ever will
Just two centuries is but a heartbeat to a people who measure time undeclared
Grief, which demands absolution, is only another way of asking to be spared

1. With AI research assistance from ChatGPT5 and Deepseek. First published here: https://1994ever.com/2025/12/27/this-earth-keeps-the-memory-of-gadigal-footsteps-through-fire-silence-survival-and-unbroken-song-across-two-centuries-of-dispossession-and-resistance-27th-december-2025/#respond. ↩︎