A BRIEF HISTORY - by Les Murray

FOR THOSE AUSTRALIANS WHO DON'T LIVE IN MIA-MIAS, WHO NEITHER HUNT AND KILL THEIR MEAT, NOR GATHER DAILY FROM THE WILD, BUT WHO STILL HOLD TO A CONCEIT THAT THEIR LIVES & HOUSES & OCCUPATIONS OWE MORE TO AN ABORIGINAL PAST THAN TO BRITISH EUROPEAN SETTLEMENT

A BRIEF HISTORY

- by Les Murray

We are the Australians.
Our history is short
This makes pastry chefs snotty
and racehorses snort.
It makes pride a blood poppy
and work an export
and bars our trained minds
from original thought
as all that can be named
gets renamed away.

A short history gets
you imperial scorn,
maintained by hacks
after the empire is gone
which shaped and exiled us,
left men's bodies torn
with the lash, then with shrapnel,
and taught many to be
lewd in kindness,
formal in bastardry.

Some Australians would die
before they said Mate,
though hand-rolled Mate
is a high class disguise -
but to have just one culture
is well out of date:
it makes you Exotic,
i.e there to penetrate
or to ingest,
depending on size.

Our one culture paints Dreamings,
each a beautiful claim.
Far more numerous
are the unspeakable whites,
immigrant natives
without immigrant rights
Unmixed with these are Ethnics,
absolved of all blame.

All of people's Australia,
its churches and lore
are gang-raped by satire
self-righteous as war
and, from trawling fresh victims
to set on the poor,
and mandarins now,
in one more evasion
of love and themselves,
declare us Asian.

Australians are like most
who won't read this poem
or any, since literature
turned on them
and bodiless jargons
without reverie
scorn their loves as illusion
and biology,
compared with bloody History,
the opposite of home.