The Seed-planter is reading a book on the verandah by the light of a torch. It tells the story of the Little Desert and how the people fought to protect it, the environmental movement a forerunner of many to come. There are maps of rainfall, vegetation types, minerals and soils. An Ode to a Buloke. Questions to ask a Honeyeater. An article titled ‘Native Grass and the Gross National Happiness’. Many of the images are taken from above, the border between cultivated and native abundantly clear, and the tracks between and through them, ancient and new.

The land is written and overwritten.

By the rivers that once ran, their trajectories marked by remnant Black Box and River Red-gums, and lunettes that were banks and shores but are now shaped by prevailing winds.

The calligraphy of branches, ventifacts, charcoaled ends scribbling in the sand with the aid of the Northwind.

An explorer’s wheel ruts that last a generation and become known as the ‘Major’s Line’.

Roads that replace traditional pathways and lead to the felling of sacred trees.

Land overwritten by the word, stakes driven into the ground with scripture burned into them in many languages: penance and song and prayer.

Seid fruchtbar und mehrt euch und füllt die Erde und macht sie euch untertan.
Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.

Names chiselled into headstones and monuments, immortalised on street signs and in the retitling of sites.

Once there was a town with a Royal Mail office and a railway and two hotels, where children were born and children died, their half-grown bodies buried deep enough that a gale would not unearth them, even when the ones who cared for them found their own resting place in the loam. Then it was no more. Every building was dismantled or loaded whole onto drays and rail carriages, freighted away to other places where a living was to be made. All that remained was a ghost ichnography, where voices had pleaded and sighed and bargained with a future that was not to be had.

And before that, not far away, the foundations of earlier dwellings were removed, stone by stone. Networks of eel traps turned into fences or scattered. Scar trees ringbarked and torched. Artefacts, disturbed by plough and harvester, hidden away in boxes in sheds or darkened rooms. A myth in need of proof.

To tread in another’s footsteps is to know them or else to deny that they exist.

The Seed-planter traces her finger around the map of the desert, so small. Then a thought rises, like an air bubble trapped in mud, and she speaks it out loud.

What if I leave my land to the desert when I die? She bounces the torch beam over the uneven ground in front of her. Or is there another, better way?

The land is written and overwritten, now, then, to come.

Listen deeply now, if you remember how and why.