Powerful and unsettling, this poem gives voice to the haunted history of Rottnest Island, once used as a prison for Aboriginal people. The boy’s voice becomes a guide through its layers of violence and erasure -- unmarked graves, starvation, hangings --beneath the surface of today’s tourist idyll. The repetition of “Starved, Hung, Banished" tolls like a bell, reminding readers that beneath leisure and landscape lies memory and mourning. Winnaitch, “the forbidden place," is revealed as a site of both pain and ancestral endurance.
Follow my eye said the young boy
see where the cloud hangs like a floating noose,
above the spare and dirty cold waves
that is where Rottnest Island stands!
Hoarding bones of our elders
where rich sun seekers now lay unknowingly
on the foundations of unmarked graves.
Bronze footsteps stood above our ghosts on straw beds
a hessian fence broken with the dried flesh of quokka
knots of wire with red clothe; Tanned and fresh tourists
seeking rites of passage where our ancestors were imprisoned,
__________Starved
______________________Hung
_____________________________________Banished
This is the island of spirit people
Winnaitch -- The Forbidden Isle!
Now close your eyes said the young boy
as you may hear the manacles of my forefathers,
No number sixteen on that island
one for executioner and six for the noose.
Winnaitch -- Is Aboriginal for A Forbidden Place.
Matt Duggan