Call of My Country

Wambuwuny (kangaroo) on Wiradjuri Country by Josh Howlett
Published
December 12, 2023
July 9, 2024
Last Updated
December 12, 2023
Contributors
Written by
Lachlan Parkinson
he/him
Wiradjuri
Written by
he/him
Wiradjuri
Written by

A poem by Lachlan Parkinson and his mum, Shelley Thompson.

In the city's centre, where skyscrapers scratch the clouds,

I feel a disconnection with the multicultural crowds.

There’s a rattling and a hustle to the tramping of the feet,

Where the neon lights flicker in the unforgiving street. 

I find myself longing for the red dust and blue sky,

For the squawking of galahs as they beat their wings to fly.

Where rivers carve their pathways, like veins within the land,

And Dreamtime tales are written, in the rock and ochre sand.

Under the eucalyptus canopy, where stories gently sway

above ancestral footsteps imprinted deeply in the clay.

Across the vast expanses, I hear my Country as it calls,

But I’m trapped between a computer and a dirty red brick wall.

Oh, to be where Dreamtime embers still glow in sacred flame,

And ancestral shadows beckon and call to me by name.

To stand beside the ocean as waves reach out to the shore,

And to be just like the child that I used to be before.

These are the things that fill me, it’s where my heart belongs,

In the songs of our triumphs and the bloodstains of our wrongs.

In the hatreds of our history and injustices that last

The embrace of our land and Country connects us to our past.

I understand the city, it’s where I spend my days,

With the urban fauna and their earth-polluting ways

But the heart of dreaming Country, is where my soul resides,

Out somewhere in the outback where the horizon meets the skies.

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