Ahh, fluff. I’ll get howled down for this one as well, as usual. What is the go with the aboriginal people and rubbish? Why, wherever I go, beautiful or ugly places, city & country, mountain & beach, why do they teach their children to chuck their discarded fluff out of the car windows? I’ve watched a few lovely kids playing in the trees today – mum and dad sitting about having a smoke – then just as we’re all ready to go .. TRASH, everything, just thrown out the windows! Bins five metres from the car. I’ve seen this all over Australia. It’s common and it’s purposeful!. A sudden empty car space with a silhouette of trash around it. Why? Let me tell you, this trash is no longer fluff. It has significance!

Once in Kempsey, I sat down with a bunch of older youths .. who had just taught me how to fish, sort of, and I attempted to discuss just this question with them … After a while one of them said, “Well, it’s white fellas trash .. you take our world, our land, so why should we should we care” – this wasn’t a question it was a statement. I put my point of view forward; us white fellas, were not all the same, we didn’t all take your land. Some of us want to learn to learn to live with the land like you once did .. this doesn’t set us a good example .. your children? This is not good for the future, it won’t give life back to the land.

Well, they don’t see it this way .. it’s hard to really understand just in what way these aboriginal brothers see our land. I mean Our Land, together. I’ve asked about their history. Our history .. Pemulway etc … No answer. An older man in Menindee once told me, that we – us white folk – cannot understand their history. I say, Please, I want to know your history because it is mine too. Why can you not find a way to join your history with mine? For our children. For Australia.

Because I cannot know, I am told. I say, I Can know but You need to tell it to me. Tell it to me in a way that I can understand. Dead men tell no tales but there is no reason that the living cannot tell their tales for them – for us, all of us. I want to know, so I can understand, so I can start to feel the land like you say you do .. my aboriginal brothers, my Australian brothers.

Show me! Teach me by what I see.

*Ive been afraid to write on this before – why? Why, I have no idea. It will be buried, dismissed .. like all my concerns. Like so much fluff. This little exercise in the freedom to speak my mind, to act as my conscience wills … Well, it could get me killed but I’m just another voice wailing in the wilderness – in this morally vacant pitiful modern Australia!

“White trash is the same as Black trash, whether it’s wearing a crown or whether its having it’s soul dragged through the dirt” – mjw