Survival Day

Written by Cathoel Jorss, published 11 years ago

Survival Day gleanings. This is what I cleaned out of my bag after we got home. Started out to hear the speeches and to march, ended up with our hearts broken and opened up all over again, robust in anger and delicately rejoicing, heart flooded like mangrove roots with a myriad various Indigenous faces including people I’d had warm contact with in the past and hadn’t thought of as Indigenous until we met again in this context, fringes of greenery shaping the old wood lace under the eaves of beautiful Jagera Hall every time I looked up to give my mind a digestion break from John Pilger’s movie, bellyful of sweet crumbling smooth bunya nuts and lilipillies, whole handsful of intensely beautiful gleanings from overhead and underfoot. The ones that caught my eye today were the colours of blood, resistance, kidney, heart, lung, fury. Oh and we brought home a bird. Just a tiny baby wattle bird, who fell down out of the overhanging tree onto a lane of the road as we passed and was kept alive in a sun hat filled with grasses and fed on pulped lilipilly and coaxed to take little beaky sips of water fed to it on a stalk of grass. He seemed to bond instantly with my companion and rode home serenely – we walked, under starlight and bursts of fireworks – on an outstretched finger. By the time we had reached the river he was asleep, with his scrappy head tucked into his fledging feathers, bobbing gently as we went along. Yesterday he rode around the house on his new, male, mum’s shoulder and began to let out lovely peeps. Today he is feeling more adventurous and is being given flying lessons, in German, by a man with no feathers, no beak, and no wings.