This Earth Keeps the Memory of Gadigal Footsteps Through Fire, Silence, Survival, and Unbroken Song Across Two Centuries of Dispossession and Resistance – 27th December 2025

Warrane’s children watched the tall ships come; now towers rise where the songlines hum, unbroken
This scarred earth breathes beneath the city’s beat: a heart they couldn’t silence, slow, deep and true
This earth remembers every footfall: songs of Gadigal sorrow and steel unspoken
Lasting months or more, a communal, visible crying, the place always bound by grief

Two centuries of silence could not bury their song; they still sing their harbour home
Images and names, kept memories – unseen, unsaid – the spirit safely travels through
All these years of bleeding, the harbour knows; the rocks remember the cry of every stone
Unresolved collective and intergenerational mourning, still seeking relief

Grief continues because the causes have never been fully acknowledged or repaired
Death manifests through mass dispossession, disease, violence, and murder malevolent
All the sorries are never finished, the deeper losses are continuously shared
Peoples excluded from decision-making about their culture, heritage and land

Deep historical culture, reduced to plaques, acknowledgements, and museum displays
Bulldozed by infrastructure and development; damaged or erased without consent
The least I owe is attention, some respect; The least I owe is to not look away
Protection laws weaker than commercial interests; consultation, a token hand

What my ancestors named discovery, the land remembers as interruption still
I inherit the language of arrival without having paid the cost of entry
I stand here in admiration, aware that the ground knows more than I ever will
Just two centuries is but a heartbeat to a people who measure time undeclared
Grief, which demands absolution, is only another way of asking to be spared

This poem has broken my brain! This challenging form was created by Catherin J Pascal Dunk with insane rules, that my insane brain chose to follow and even expand on slightly.

For a longette:
The theme is social commentary (usually critical of the status quo and reaching towards a better/longer future)
The title of a longette is long; 40 syllables
The poem consists of 21 long lines—of 20 syllables each
A longette has an ACAB rhyme scheme, with a final rhyming couplet:
ACAB/acab/a’c’a’b’/A-C-A-B-/A’C’A’B’B’
The poem can be separated into 4 stanzas of 4 lines each, with a final stanza of 5 lines, or set without stanza breaks, at the poet’s discretion.
Use of emojis is encouraged. The same emoji may be repeated throughout the poem, but if you want to use more than one emoji or symbol, you must conform to a 1312 scheme
Emojis and other symbols are not counted as syllables.
Collaboration is encouraged.

I couldn’t comprehend using emojis in a poem, though Catherin’s sample poem uses them well. And on re-reading the rules, I see that I actually used 21-syllable lines instead of 20! Perhaps I can claim to be the creator of this form now! Either way, I don’t think that I will be attempting it again soon!

I initially struggled to find a topic but as I discovered that Catherin is based near Sydney, a place I became very familiar with for 20 years, my mind kept coming back to Gadigal country. The Gadigal people being part of the Aboriginal owners of the land on which Sydney is built. The only problem? I knew next to nothing about the topic beyond the fact that my ancestors have completely fucked them over time and time again.

So I turned to AI for help. Here is the process I went through:

Prompt (Deepseek): I want to write a poem about the struggle of the Aboriginal people in Gadigal over time and need a 40-syllable title for it. What can you come up with?

I was hoping that a title would help trigger further ideas, which it did.
I haven’t had much luck with syllable counts with Deepseek but it did come up with a set of phrases that I noted down before switching to Chat-GPT5 from here on out. I soon discovered that Chat-GPT could identify syllables per word correctly but then couldn’t add up the simple math totals correctly. Don’t trust AI with your maths!

Prompt: Can you give me information on how the Gadigal people mourn and also how they still struggle to be recognised?

Prompt: Can you suggest language that avoids appropriation while remaining powerful?

Prompt: What about some ideas around ‘white guilt’ for the deeds of our ancestors and how to think about that in the context of the Aboriginal people?

Prompt: I need to find some more poetic lines that deal with this perspective and issue – they need to be fairly long sentences. Ideas?

Prompt: Tell me more about this: “Many Gadigal people speak of ‘sorry that never finished’ “?

This poem is my selection of phrases taken from the various outputs of these prompts and then manipulated (by myself, not AI) to meet the form requirements. When I had finished, I asked AI to give me feedback on rhythm and flow and did a little more tweaking. At this point, though, I had been working on this poem for more than 5 hours and I know that I could improve it more with another 5 hours but….that’s enough. 5 hours is often 4 hours and 59 minutes longer than it takes me to write some poems!

I learned a lot through doing this exercise but tomorrow I’ll be aiming for something a little simpler!