River Walk

Crunch of gravel underfoot
Dust baked on a river’s track
Yellow tree spray on display
Shimmer in the river’s eddies

The wind brings a haunting rhyme
Resounding chords of a lost dreaming
When sky turned black, when rains came
it washed away the old bush track

Camped by the river, on the plain or in the scrub
Tribes still remember a great flood
As their mother earth rebounds.
Game is plentiful-they dance again
To the tune of the great hunt

Gone now like the first spring floods
Gone the nulla, the sling and the spear
Replaced by the gun
No longer,
No more.