“Matilda to the Coast“
They came to break the wild in him,
to trim his accent down,
to box a bush-born timber child
inside a brick-built town.
The magistrate was civilised,
the ledger marked in ink,
but no man knows the current’s pull
until he sees it sink.
They called it transporting, then
when ships came over sea—
a sentence stamped in iron chains
to make the convict free.
Yet here stands young Andrew Dean,
his boots worn down to skin,
de-transporting back to Britain
where the old grey world begins.
Across the red-dirt solitude,
past Darling Scarp and sand,
he waltzed beside his sister
through a raw, indifferent land.
No bitterness against the scrub,
neither hatred for the sun,
just two small, fugitive shadows
on an exile’s reverse run.
To leave the infinite horizon
for a narrow cobblestone,
to trade the campfire’s quiet ash
for cold, institutional bone—
was it choice, or circumstance,
or the gravity of blood
that pulled him from the spinifex
and back across the flood?
He turns his back upon the coast,
the salt-spray in his eyes,
a boy who walked a continent
beneath the southern skies.
The ship will carry bodies back,
the ocean engine churns,
but once you’ve waltzed those red-dust hills,
no part of you returns.
.
