Out There Where The Bones Of The Black Hunter Lay Poem by Francis Duggan

Out there where the bones of the black hunters lay
Through the flat and brown paddocks the creek babbles it's way
On towards the big river that flows to the sea
This old Land has such a brief white history.

Out in the brown paddock by an old gum tree
The children of the Dreamtime danced their Corroboree
Many centuries ago before white people came
And wrongs to black fellows is white fellows shame.

This is a very old Country as old as father time
And it has inspired wordsmiths to song and to rhyme
The calls of the aboriginal birds and animals and the caw of the indigenous crow
Are all that remain now from the long ago.

I'll always be a migrant in this Southern Land
And the ways of her Nature I will never fully understand
The Indigenous People lived here for thousands of years
But for their dispossession do we have any tears?

In this Country the laughter of the kookaburra is a familiar thing
As well as the song the white backed magpie sing
And to the old brown paddocks the Seasons come and go
And the creek towards the river babbles as it do flow.