*extremely salamander voice* Whoever's is the soil is a good question, because my current thinking is that we belong to it, not any other way round. Catholic ways, Blackfella ways too. I’ve seen humans and their pursuits shrink, tiny and fragile at the bottom of a cliff face, becoming a drop of water in the universal ocean, they are just a small speck of dust in an enormous cave. These tiny people send a silent prayer that echoes through my cavernous realm: can we still speak? Though just a tiny salamander I have an opinion and I suggest a rephrase.. It’s the soil’s. This soil’s what? You, me, them, your idea  – to climb, explore, make – is the soil’s.Ah to burst from the urbane. Interruptions to brutal concrete. What's that sound? It could be traffic or geyser. Narrm has always had creeks running underneath. This is revenge of the old ways against the grid overlay. Country has seen all the innovations that humans are capable of. The only thing more immense than our humanity is all the secrets held in the land. Earthly rumbling fountain adds another signature to the petition, pouring water of agreement instead of more concrete or ink. Let’s see if momentum sticks. Will change get swept up in this current?



Some things can never be captured. Send a picture satellite out into space, fine. Good luck trying to take something that doesn’t belong to anyone. We belong to it. Even if we have been far away, living off Country, the DNA of land is in our veins. Believe it or not! Yet it’s possible to see something more real, sliding between coordinates of where is. Resting in the haze where blue meets orange, hue becoming something more than just the red centre. The desire is to find some direction but no clear boundaries, no certain borders emerge. The glitch was uninvasive. It gave something, it didn’t take. It became a doorway, a point to enter through.


This isn’t a game. But what if it needs to be? The trophy: we are still here. Look at this virtual map of Country, complete with bush pigs and mantarays. If only land rights weren’t a simulation. An experience made with the currency of colonisation in the current moment which is the point here. Our people are not from another time. Torres Strait Islander culture alongside boats that were brought, only, they became an enhancement: using settler technologies to level up, in the game, IRL. Existing inside and outside the dot com. Such is our power/depth of knowledge and land. There’s a controller and a headset. But that doesn’t mean you’re in control. It’s an invitation to come inside (it was always only an invitation) not to grab, remove, destroy. Then when you are done you remove the headset and go gently back to your own experience. Gently, otherwise you’ll fall over.
Then what if all maps were temporary. Instead, each footstep was a mark that others could follow in. Wait, that’s actually how it is. Fossils, or plain old layers of rock hold more memory than humans – have seen more in their lifetime than we can or will – why bother trying to make marks that will last. (A flash of panic flickered across the writer’s face) How to validate existence, when the scale of geological events annihilates the scale of human lives. Give me poetry and art, at least! to make it beautiful? Make your every footstep a lyric, trot out brushstrokes even on the most mundane of days. Stop to listen to what the cliffside, what mountain tells you. It will always speak, but you will not always be around to hear it.