hearth 

Featured in

  • Published 20250204
  • ISBN: 978-1-923213-04-3
  • Extent: 196 pp
  • Paperback, ebook. PDF

yes, one day, finally, it will all fall away 

like all dead things 

we will sit again by the campfire 

story illuminating the fall of empire 


one day 

again 

we will choose enough 

lean away from more 

pull our hands from its heat 

lean 

wandunban nguliindu

always 

into the earth 

quickening its molten heart

we will draw from there

unflinching

our song 

carry it 

on feathered feet 

to deepest country 

cast it toward the shore


one day again

mudhunda

you will thrum  

and our song 

will bear witness 

wandhandja wandhanja mardin-yimba 

blak witness of all time 


One day one day one day.


*******

wandunban nguliindu– our customary/spiritual way of being 

mudhunda – the name I have given to so called Australia, meaning the song Country

wandhanja wandhanja – everywhen

mardin – the people

yiimba – hear listen and think 

‘One day one day one day.’ – With permission from A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle 

Share article

About the author

Cheryl Leavy

Cheryl Leavy writes non-fiction, poetry and children’s literature. Her first children’s book, Yanga Mother, was published by UQP in 2024. She has been awarded...

More from this edition

No secret passageway

Non-fictionIn 2001 I read an article in The Guardian newspaper about a man who fell from the sky, landing in a superstore car park not far from where I live in London. The article, by journalists Esther Addley and Rory McCarthy, detailed how the Metropolitan Police discovered the dead man’s identity through a combination of luck, Interpol and British-Pakistani community workers. Muhammad Ayaz had managed to slip through security at Bahrain airport, run across the tarmac and, according to witnesses on the plane, disappear beneath the wing of the British Airways Boeing 777. The article quotes a spokesman from the International Air Transport Association: a myth circulates that there is a ‘secret hatch from the wheel bay into the cargo bay, and then into the passenger cabin, as if it were a castle with a dungeon and a series of secret passageways’. No such passageway exists and Muhammad would have found himself trapped in the wheel bay with no oxygen, no heating and no air pressure as well as no way out. If he wasn’t crushed or burned by the retracting wheels, he may have frozen to death once the flight reached 30,000 feet, finally falling out hours later when the plane lowered its landing gear as it prepared to touch down at Heathrow.

More than maternity

Non-fictionPrinciple among art-history instances of breastfeeding are paintings, sculptures, tapestries and stained-glass art in churches that relay key Biblical moments of the Virgin Mary nursing the baby Jesus. Should you find yourself in the corridors of the Louvre, in the same halls where kings and princes are eternalised, one singular image of breastfeeding will make its way towards you time and time again: that of the Virgin Mary nursing the baby Jesus, which emerged in the twelfth century and proliferated in full bloom from the fourteenth as her cult of worship grew. In art, the nursing Virgin is called the Madonna Lactans, and she is a sanctity. Most of all, as the Church’s model of maternity, she is silent.

One language among many

Non-fiction Wyperfeld National Park, Wotjobaluk Country, October 2019 I PASS A defunct railway siding, the remnant mound like a sleeping animal. Pull up beside a mallee...

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.