Before the beginning
there is Moodagurra, the rainbow serpent, who creates Maiwar, the river
that story isn't ours to tell
but we pay our respects to those who were here before us, and to those still fighting for sovereignty and justice
we acknowledge the weight of unfinished business that lies heavy on this city
and we are mindful that actions speak louder than words

In the early years of the invasion,
Maiwar's waters are clean and clear
the river roils with life
enough fish to feed thousands
tree-lined banks roar with the voices of a hundred thousand birds
freshwater springs flow down through secret rainforest gullies
and the mosquitoes swarming up from the swamps of Woolloongabba are merciless
the city is not even a dream yet...

The locals know the river's moods intimately
its cycles intertwined with theirs
it speaks to them in a language older even than their own
but the invaders have a violent appetite
trees are felled
creeks are tamed
cattle tramples the delicate landscape
eroded topsoil clouds the water
worse still are the massacres
the rapes
the arsenic and the noose
false justice from the end of a rifle barrel
slavery
torture
the word ‘genocide’ hasn't been invented yet
but there's no other term that can describe such atrocities

The city is born out of this apocalypse
future generations will dream fitfully of Armageddon
unaware that they already live in the shadow of recent catastrophe
the great lizards and snakes are hunted almost to extinction
sacred sites are desecrated
once-quiet glades echo with gunshots and screams

Yet even in these early days, there are those who fight to protect the special places that will soon be eaten by the metropolis
there are those who question their people’s savagery and treachery in their dealings with Meanjin's rightful custodians
many of these small resistances go unrecorded
but already they're etching themselves into the cultural bedrock of the future city
remnant artefacts of rebellion and uprising are washed into the river
only to be dug up again and embedded in the architecture of the growing town

Down by the river's edge
where time flows slower
like tree sap
deciding whether to sink your toes into the mangrove mud
weighing the risk of water-borne bacterial infection against the glorious liberation of connecting barefoot with something more powerful than yourself
that's when all kinds of flotsam epiphanies wash up in the shallows
surfing the waves of city cats
and perhaps the greatest of these
is that some stories are too big to tell
too honeycombed and layered to fully comprehend
they defy timelines and rigid chronologies
we can only scratch the surface
hoping, perhaps, to reveal some new aspect of the greater, deeper epic that connects us all but mindful that the larger portion of the story will always remain untold
and that in fact the story is writing us
see we wanted to craft a linear tale
with a start and an end and a narrative arc
but these musings on culture and counter-culture
hegemony and counter-hegemony
are bound up inextricably in the history of our city
and time is less of a straight line and more like overlapping cycles and spider webs
so we let each note and chord serve as reference links
footnotes
to a thousand unspoken anecdotes
slotting our little pieces into the ever-mutating mosaic that is Brisbane
humbled by the knowledge that the river will still be flowing, long after we're gone

Remember this:
the city is made of the riverbed and the bay
for decades we dredged the bottom
binding the river to the sea
grinding that sand and silt into cement
to build our walls and towers
there is coral in the skyscrapers
those big glass windows are made with beach sand

Office blocks and parking lots
retaining walls and shopping malls
all that concrete came from the river
and the bay
tiny crustaceans
skeletons of ancient shellfish
fossilised leaves and branches
pulverised and reassembled
do they remember their past forms?
do we remember where it all came from?

fragments of Stradbroke Island now hang in bridges
suspended above the river
and when the heavy storms batter Minjerribah
rolling in from the sea
the buildings of the CBD
vibrate in sympathy

the old windmill
the commissariat store
all that stone from the quarries of Kangaroo Point
mortar lime was oyster shells from Amity

The concrete dreams of the river
those apartments yearn to rejoin the ocean
this longing infects the occupants
who themselves begin to dream of the sea

One day, years from now
perhaps the concrete will get its wish
dust to dust
the river will claim back its scattered essence
towers will erode and disintegrate
bridges will commit suicide
and still the water keeps flowing

There is coral in the skyscrapers
those big glass windows are made with beach sand