APRIL 29th 1770
I stood there on the shore, at my uncle’s side, watched as he watched, watched as my father watched, as his other brother’s and their cousins watched, all of the women and their babies back among the paperbarks, eyes big with curiosity, and fear. The Old Woman wailed, gently, seeing our future.
The first boat beached, oars went into the air, evenly and with a one-ness, a strange one-ness that we’d never seen, like eight men were one man, and I think it was that sight alone that disturbed me the most. It wasn’t a natural thing. Eight men being one man.
A First Man stepped onto the land, our land, and behind us The Old Woman wailed a little louder, and my father shifted his feet, and my uncle beside me shifted his feet, spear slowly changing hands, but still pointing down.
Out on the water their ship sat and watched, watched them, and watched us, its nose firmly tied to the water in our bay. More boats came, and more men, some in white, some in colours like parrots, but all of them had that same one-ness. Like one mind.
The First Man looked at us and we looked at him, and he raised one hand, showing us that he carried nothing, nothing in that one, then the eight men put their oars down in the boat and most of them stepped ashore and stood behind The First Man, and then the parrot ones as well, and they stood in lines, like one man.
They took a long white pole from the boat and set about digging a hole and standing the pole upright, and it had a flag at the top and it waved gently in the breeze coming in off the sea, and all these men made loud sounds, like one voice, and some of them looked up at the flag, but some of them only watched us, watching them.
And that was how they arrived, with their ships and their farming and their steel and their gunpowder and their herd immunities and their institutionalised arrogance and their single-minded willfulness and set about ending everything we ever knew, and told us how it was for our own good, told us how they would help us catch up, catch up the last 10,000 years, and better them than some of the other bastards that were hovering out there on the sea.
And they made it look so easy.
But then, they’d had a lot of practice.
© T.R.E. 2020
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