One of my most significant spiritual mentors, theologian Peter Adam, likes to say of my country’s history that “old sins cast long shadows”. (You can read a piece by him on this from The Gospel Coalition here.) The dark history of white settlement in the lands now called Australia, Adam contends, casts long shadows on our lives in this place. I’ve used this line as the starting point for this poem, a reflection on my experience growing up in this country and slowly learning of its past and my family’s own part in it. I share it today with a prayer that one day we’ll live in an Australia willing to properly confront these old sins and the long shadows they still cast on us.
Long Shadows
Coming of age in the shadow of a sunset clause, I
danced as a child to “Sunset Dreaming”, heard
“Mabo” and “Wik” in the news’ background buzz
sometimes as triumph, sometimes
as Shibboleth, and learnt
through years of Prime Ministerial faffing,
the grace of a humbly uttered “Sorry”. They were
sorry days, those, when we heeded
the floodgates that never opened more
than the ever-open wounds of a neighbour.
“Old sins,” the English say, “cast long shadows.”
Under a long English shadow I grew into guilt
while in public my people excused and evaded.
“Not us,” they said, pleading alibis. Nor were we
In Eden, but the same fruit still sticks in our throats.
Neither relaxed nor comfortable, I studied
the nation’s history and fancied flinging my flesh
like a quartered corpse to the four winds of
the British Isles and Western Europe, only couldn’t,
knowing that in their unique union I was undeniably
Australian. Now, living in these latter years, after
the sorry was said and no floodgates opened,
I look more peacably on eucalypts, have made
a kind of truce with the spiked bottlebrush,
yet still the Sybil of the past asks convicts
and ne’er-do-wells alike who we are, and why:
that our overflowing gaols should flow into
these bays and waterways, that we
should gouge our tales into these songlines.
My family has grown roots here like facts sunk
too deep here now to remove. Yet still I
as steward of this history must sit with a shame
carved into my country’s name. And I must sit
with the soaring silence of this ancient place
and hear its chorus of ancient, undefeated love.
The Consolations of Writing 