We lived in Townsville for a number of years, just down from Dyirbal country, where we created the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at James Cook University. In those years, we traveled the vast and beautiful countries of Indigenous Australia in the problematic name of government-funded “literacy research.”¹¹⁸ We also became fellow travelers in Indigenous politics.

Eddie Koiki Mabo had been a gardener on the university grounds, and when our friend and colleague, historian Henry Reynolds, told him that in British colonial law Indigenous peoples had rights as subjects of the Crown, he began a fight for recognition of ownership of his ancestral lands in the Torres Straits. His case went all the way to the High Court of Australia, which he and with him all Indigenous Australians won in a milestone decision of 1992.¹¹⁹

By the time the judgment was handed down, Eddie had died. When his gravestone was desecrated in 1995 by racist thugs, with his widow, Bonita Mabo, we organized a rally attended by a thousand people. The Deputy Prime Minister, Brian Howe, flew from Canberra to attend.¹²⁰

A year after the last corroboree, in 1964, Dixon recorded Paddy Biran and Jack Murray singing a newly composed song about the fate of their country, the grammatical intricacy of which is such that it takes Dixon and his Dyirbal co-translators several pages to parse. Created under the full force of modernity, the song is longer than would traditionally have been the case.

In 1963 the Queensland Government granted a pastoral lease to the American-owned King Ranch Pastoral Company, covering vast swathes of Dyirbal country. The company paid $2 per acre for rainforest, $5 per acre for scrubland. A pastoral lease is a compromised form of property title which begrudgingly recognizes limited indigenous rights. Compromised or not, the company set about clearing the forest with bulldozers and flattening the contours of rock formations with dynamite. Many Dyirbal sacred sites were destroyed. Such was the simple nominative-to-accusative power of the colonizers’ transitivity. Or, to shift into the register of our grammar, such is the brutally direct relation of entities to action in colonizing transactivity.

These were places from which, in the Dyirbal people’s lived grammar, people’s spirits arose, and where they returned upon their death.¹²¹ The person is a timeless spirit, is a place – by way of seamless transposition. This is how the Dyirbal world makes sense.

One such place was called Guymaynginbi.

bungi-ŋu gumburru

wudu guymayŋinbi

ban-bu marrgal-bi-ŋu

marrgal-bi-ŋu ban-bu

balŋa-balŋa-bi-ŋu

ŋaygu-rru bulu-nya

bayal-i-ruu naja

ban-bu nyararriŋiny

Mist which lies across the country

A bulldozer nosing into Guymaynginbi

It becoming just a cleared place

The place really becoming cleared

My father’s father’s country

I had to sing about it

That which was my home¹²²

---

¹¹⁸ Bill Cope, 1998, “The Language of Forgetting: A Short History of the Word,” pp. 192–223 in Seams of Light: Best Antipodean Essays, edited by M. Fraser, Sydney, Australia: Allen and Unwin.

¹¹⁹ High Court of Australia, 1992, “Mabo and Others V Queensland (No. 2),” Vol. 175 CLR 1.

¹²⁰ Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, 2000b, A Place in the Sun: Re-Creating the Australian Way of Life, Sydney, Australia: Harper Collins, pp. 150–53.

¹²¹ R.M.W. Dixon, 1984, Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 70, 80–81.

¹²² R.M.W. Dixon and Grace Koch, 1996, Dyirbal Song Poetry: The Oral Literature of an Australian Rainforest People, Brisbane, Australia: University of Queensland Press, pp. 220–22.

---

Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 211–212. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Paddy Biran and Jack Murray "Sing Destruction of Our Country" §MS2.1.2e