ARVOS

'The Last Redgum'
By David Campbell

We are children of the river, the meander, and the creek,
of the floodplain and the gully and the stream.
We are symbols of a landscape once abundant and unique
that now threatens to be no more than a dream.

We have known the hand of hunters as they shaped their swift canoe,
when the sap was running early in the Spring,
and we’ve watched the wiry stockmen as they’re boiling up a brew
while the pelicans greet sunrise on the wing.

We have listened in the evening to the thunder on the range
that foretells to all the coming of the rain,
with the air alive and crackling in the lull before the change…
and the flood comes down the Murray to the plain.

We have stood here by the river since before the white man came,
through the years of surging flood and searing drought,
but our lives have all been altered, they can never be the same…
with the levee-banks our future is in doubt.

It will only take a moment in the history of time
and we’ll reach that final point of no return.
We’ll be victims of a cancer, of a slow and silent crime,
of the failure of mankind to look and learn.

Take a step into the future, to a bleak and barren place,
where the floods are but a memory from the past,
and there’s nothing to be seen now but an empty, arid space
as the mighty river red gums breathe their last.

For the water has long vanished as the dry leaves turn to dust,
irrigation is the law that rules the land,
and the Murray-Darling Basin has betrayed an ancient trust
that the world of men could never understand.

At Mulwala and Chowilla there are remnants of our kind
in a place where verdant floodplains used to be.
Now a ghostly red gum graveyard is the only thing you’ll find
and a desert is the only sight you’ll see.

In the Warrego and Paroo all the waterholes are dry
and the billabongs and swamps have turned to sand,
while the sun burns ever hotter in a blue, remorseless sky,
and the drought grips all in cracked and withered hand.

It’s the same down in the Coorong where the birds once lived and bred,
for salinity keeps getting worse each year.
All the egrets and the ibis and the cormorants have fled,
while the Murray cray and blackfish disappear.

We are dying, slowly dying, as the salt begins to rise,
and erosion strips the land of all that’s green.
For the wind blasts all the topsoil in a dust storm through the skies,
and the earth is left a carcase that’s picked clean.

So we stand, me and my brothers, just the bones of ancient trees
that have lined the riverbank since time began.
In a bare and barren landscape, fed by red dust on the breeze,
we’ve been ravaged by the careless hand of man

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