Vale Marie

You have made your last parade. Your lake girt Island home will know you no more.

Proudly, with head erect, you have enhanced the beauties and mysteries of Bulba's Isle.

A sanctuary declared, yet a sanctuary defiled: White men, supposed cream of the human race have destroyed you and another of your race, who belong to the distant ages when man was not evolved. When I looked into your liquid brown eyes that knew no fear, I was taken to the distant past, when the earth was a steaming cauldron of mud and steam, and knew neither form nor shape. Out of this inferno, Australia was evolved long ere the West knew of her being. You have roamed her plains with the rest of the wonderful marsupials that the rest of the world knew not of for sons of time! Came the black man in his primitive form, but he was a gentle foe, and not sufficient to disturb the even tenor of your old time wanderings. It has been left to the 'civilised' white man to do his best to wipe you off the face of the earth, along with the gentle Koala, Wallabies and "Roos , so that he may bedeck himself with your pelts.

Aye, even the most ancient of you all, the duck billed Platypus is not immune from the vandalism of the white man!

Vale Marie. May the plains of verdant pasture in your Valhalla give you rest and security, when the 'white' man is no more.

With the flash that ends thy pain

Respite and oblivion blest

Come to greet thee. I in vain

Fall: I rise to fall again:

Thou hast fallen to thy rest

And thy fall is best!

Rest, old friend thy day, though rife

with its toil" hath ended soon;

We have had our share of strife

Tumblers in the mask of life,

In the pantomime of noon

Clown and pantaloon.

from "The Last Leap" by Adam Lindsay Gordon.

Thompson Noble. 10th June, 1932,

This work by Lake Macquarie City Library is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License