We are not asking for the moon here …
—Alvin Yeung, Civic Party Leader, Hong Kong, 2019
Oracle 10 … Speak of zero-sum clash …
Sometimes, Aboriginal Sovereignty lived inside Tommyhawk’s thoughts as his smart elder brother who had disappeared one time into the ocean, and never returned. This was the Praiseworthy he remembered, an intangible unreachable place, one that could only belong in those faraway dreams. His world was about being stuck forever among hostile donkeys living in scabby, stubble grasslands covering the vast dry lake where forked lightning works the sky at night in supercell dry storms, and owls hunt rats over the stubble where wombats emerged from burrows and travelled along the mist-shrouded pathways through thickets of saltbush, and where the big waves could be heard pounding on hundreds of kilometres of coastline to the south. It’s a good country in which to hide a fascist, and a country that had remained a mystery to him since the day, long ago, when he had been dumped there by his father and the screaming platinum donkey spread over his seat in the car.
The only voices he spoke to were in the wind speaking in these parts—whether it sang, or howled, as it travelled over the dead grass and saltbushes on the floor of the lake, and whistled through the she-oaks, or whether it was silent, and all you heard was the growing intensity of donkeys braying in starvation and thirst. He lived on his own now. The old man whom his father had left him with had quietly disappeared a long time ago and was not seen again. Whether he had died somewhere, Tommyhawk does not know, but he thinks the donkey herder had committed suicide. Not long after he realised the old man would not return, the boy had let the donkeys loose to fend for themselves, but they stayed, and frightened him. He had tried to shoo them off but they would always return, and stand and stare at him as though willing him to follow them further away on the lake bed, and when he followed them into the vast sameness of the flat featureless lake spread over a hundred kilometres, he would become disoriented, or lost in the haze or a sudden heavy mist. It was too dangerous, so he stopped following them out on the lake. There were times when he believed the donkeys were not only trying to lure him to follow them, but tempting him to go so far from the edge that he would not easily escape from their control, and they would one day trample him to death. But, if he was to escape, he must set off on the lake each day to pull bits of grass out of the hardened earth around its roots to stuff in a canvas bag to bring back to the donkeys. He has to feed himself too. He cannot live on nothing. Sometimes, he eats a donkey if one dies. He will not kill a donkey, tackle it to death and stab it with his knife. He constantly watches the ground, but rarely sees anything happening in the dry earth. Nothing grows higher than a few inches, yet he feels the wind blowing through the low-lying grasses and picking up the whirly dust, the uprooted clumps of dried grass rolling away over the ground, and leaving behind wider gaps of bare earth.
But sometimes, Aboriginal Sovereignty turns up in the constant haze, moist-laden by humidity, moving across the lake—a phenomenon that continues to come and go at the most unexpected moments. This happened when Tommyhawk felt someone was standing close behind him while breathing in his ear, staring at the dry lake with him, and even without turning around, he knows it is his brother for he knows his presence, and knew it was no use turning around to see what was invisible, or no longer there. His brother now stares into the back of his head, but does not speak, and he continues to stand there. It suits Tommyhawk’s state of mind to know his brother looks exactly the same, has never aged, never grown older as he had himself in a land that barely alters in the way it looks, and where he had lost track of the time spent living by himself. Maybe he had become an old man in all this time, but he knows that Aboriginal Sovereignty was doing the same thing he had always done, just looking out for his little brother, coming by to see what he was doing, making sure he was okay, and looking back over his shoulder, the same as his spirit did that night when he had last seen him standing alone in the sea, for them both to see the same view. There was a sudden wonder of agelessness endlessly running with possibility in this isolated place, for in this infinite permanency days were lost in time, and Tommyhawk never knew for sure how much time had passed, or whether he and the lake had been welded together forever, and thousands of years had already passed.
Nobody found him, but occasionally, in the mirage shimmering just above the lake, or in the spooky travelling haze of the heat, or the fog in the mist, he can see the outline of a golden-hair angel swivelling in her throne in the sky, and occasionally, she appeared in a hole in the clouds, and he was almost blinded by the rays of sunlight shining off her immaculacy. Mostly, there was too much aura radiating from her being, so that he could not see her face clearly enough, though in time, she did not appear clearly at all, and had become just a vagueness, a slight tint of what she might have been, and in the end, a phenomenon, a weird shape formed and broken by winds travelling with fog, or mist, or a twist of how you might momentarily see the spiritus sanctus in a mirage while watching the same sky with Aboriginal Sovereignty, and considering the vision another fleeting spiritual visitation, something Tommyhawk should bring up in his conversation with the spiritual of the ancestral lake, which he claimed was not the same thing as having someone like Aboriginal Sovereignty suddenly turning up when he was not in the least thinking of having visitors.
As for himself, Tommyhawk was oblivious to the fact that the ancient lake thought he really looked to be at least thirty years old now, even though he thought he had only just arrived the other day, or maybe his looks were deceptive, and he was simply a vague outline of a shadow cast over the ground, and he really was a thousand years old like the empty lake, or like country where its infinity always was, and always will be. He could only read time from when it last rained, but these occasions happened so rarely, that such out of the ordinary memories become intertwined, interlocked, left him feeling confused, then were forgotten altogether. Sometimes, for a while, he might remember seeing a million water birds fly over the lake just metres above his head, and there was a time when a bird briefly landed. He remembered threats to his life over a very long time, from when the donkey chiefs tried to mesmerise him, out-staring him for hours, or days, while standing off in the distance, as though they were challenging him, and luring him to walk far into the interior of the dry lake where there was little hope of ever finding his way in any direction, and he would die. He did not think that the world was searching to find him, and if he thought for one moment of such a possibility in the darkness as he tried to sleep, his mind would become beset by the hell of swishing sounds of a swirling cyclone ripping land apart inside his head, which became a force so tremendous, the lake uprooted itself, and flew, scattering all the country for miles around—dirt, dead stubby grasses, saltbush, birds, insects, moths, rabbits and rats—and he would know this was how frantically country searched, when it went looking for something.
Tommyhawk always hid at night in this place, tried to curl up into a ball, hiding amongst some spooked donkeys that assembled around him after having come off the intemperate ghostly lake in the middle darkness when the wind reached its height. He would live in fear if he thought any spirit lake was searching to find where he slept, and there were times when even the spirit of Aboriginal Sovereignty arrived out of the blue and stood like a lamp behind him and the glow lit the donkeys, when Tommyhawk sensed the fullness of his brother’s presence as being the total world of Praiseworthy reaching through the sky as a spectre for all to see, and he felt as though country itself was pinpointing him, and saying, there he is, here is the murderer of Aboriginal Sovereignty. It was these visitations of the night that really frightened Tommyhawk, and he curled tighter on the ground, embracing the infinite time of the Earth to hide himself.
A moth once took Dance on a big spirit journey into the world of butterflies and moths … And, this was what it ended up looking like in those long days when there was still plenty of daylight left for the humidity waltzing through the haze over the flatlands of Praiseworthy and the rabble plague of white cabbage butterflies, those Pieris rapae climbing the thermals with lazy wings barely afloat, began filtering down around the dust-stained cabbage leaves, and fussing about where to lay eggs, on a green Brassica oleracea leaf here, or there, for the caterpillars that ended up spoiling this un-belonging vegetation. It’s a cycle, and they move on again, in another generation of snow clouds of streamers floating in wave after wave through the long mesmerising dance joining the caper white butterflies migrating through the country on hot December days in the arid-zone dryness where millions drabble through the swirling dust-storm winds along with plastic bags, cardboard cartons, chip packets, twigs and leaves, emotions, the wheezing of supermen and superwomen types pumping the engine house, fuelling up for something great, and stuff like that, all the rubbish, like a dappling panic jungle of brightness throughout the reddened haze, until falling into the sea and becoming the wrecked wash on the beach.
In this time of never-ending madness, this dizzying sight of rolling lines of leisurely floating ribbons of whiteness flying in the sky, the people of Praiseworthy suffered constantly from bouts of vertigo. Then, from out of these floating waves, from the here and there, single butterflies dropped from the sky. A butterfly briefly perching on a stem in dried-up patches of tough-rooted, impossible to eradicate exotic buffel grass, the cherished drought-resistant, teeth-breaking Brahman cattle Cenchrus ciliaris lawn—or else, butterflies were alighting on the cyclone-proof fencing, on or from a camp dog’s bone left in the middle of the street, or were massing to sip from vile bacterial festering in open drains left there by the government bent on creating third-world conditions on traditional lands that had owned the people of its story since times ancient, or the butterflies rested on the pretty pink, orange and yellow zinnia flowers growing next to the open sewerage, or were landing on pieces of sludge from the mosquito-infested grey water pouring from old communal laundries, or rested on the wilting leaves on the top of frangipani trees that had been struggling to grow in this dry earth for years.
There were other butterflies too that flew through the open windows and doors of the stifling hot and airless homes and once inside, watched from the wall what Praiseworthy families were getting up to with their privacy, while the dance continued. Seeing in those invading butterflies the heart of those weak-from-hunger people who used every second of life to breathe in, and breathe out, and have enough strength to go on nursing their anger problem about the feral donkey business of Praiseworthy, there was plenty to take away from those stutter-flutter frayed butterfly wings about how Widespread was preventing these hungry poor people from becoming white-styled economically independent, in what was once a good assimilating to white type of town that had no donkey problem prancing around in its shit, on what should have remained another stifling hot day where only the heat stirred, and moved.
But now, all Praiseworthy heard was the sound of the transport conglomerate, and they were sick of hearing donkey bells moving the wheels of long, high-tech, lightweight, all-terrain destroyer semitrailer drays hauling and carting stuff around all day long, and half the night. There were donkey teams carting churches with Widespread yelling Go! Go! Quicker! Faster! Go along little donkey, go along. It all began with one church needing to be moved nearer to a palm tree for Pentecost, then Cause had to haul the thing called a cathedral back on the long dray to where it should have remained in the first place, at its permanent address on the street with all of the other churches. Now every church wanted to be moved on some holy day whim or fancy, which became too much business for the transport conglomerate. Then, that was not all. Cause needed more long teams of donkeys to move whole houses when everybody wanted to relocate, to get away from certain neighbours, gossipers, relations, or from being ordered to move your house somewhere else, and so forth. The demand to relocate was becoming too much. Everyone wanted to move something. Demountable offices had to be moved. There were businesses that required a transport industry that did not cost the earth. The supermarket chains wanted to relocate, bring their whole infrastructure holus-bolus to Praiseworthy. Coffee shops. Cafés. Offices. Building materials. The mining industry wanted donkeys to cart the iron ore. Every person with an idea about establishing themselves close to the only reliable transport system that did not require fossil-fuel resources, carbon, solar, or electricity or what have you, looked to the platinum transport conglomeration. It was hard yakka for the donkeys to deliver mail three times a week, as well as the fresh fruit and vegetables, then evacuate all the sick people to the nearest hospital, and transport the babies back from the birthing centres. Then, they were always queuing up to go on a donkey cart for visiting other people who only lived a few blocks away and they could have walked there, and taking the whole shebang to interstate ceremonies on the travelling lines because the donkeys could travel through the rough country. It did not matter about having a highway anymore, and Praiseworthy people were having big ceremonies all the time now, and preferred travelling further on the ancestral roads. It was too much, as other people in the country who were not the traditional owners wanted to become part of the ancestral roads too, and to be part of the ancient laws, and they could not make treaties that recognised Aboriginal sovereignty and Aboriginal government quick enough.
You want to know who paid for all this? Country. Country coughed it up. Coughed up the money. Chucked the cash of frivolity around like it was nothing but a trifle for the great ancestral powers governing the land in the all times. You saw it happen all the time. The powerful spirits of place washing the country out with those flash floods, or how those fat cyclones sat sulky for months lingering over country, or stirred up raging fires or prolonged droughts, or took a river away, or either gave or took the seasons away, it coughed money too. What couldn’t a great ancestor of country do? So, it was exactly like what the old law people had always said would happen if you look after country, country will look after you. So, why not? The money kept pouring into Widespread’s pockets from the ancestral government which had more riches than a government developed by colonialists. Old Widespread, he had bits of cash sticking out from all over him, and falling out of his trouser pockets. The totality of his fing fang platinum donkey international transport conglomerate had finally become sensational. These days, he called his success as a hauler the result of his careful breeding program from day one, which initially came from one old platinum donkey that had given him a line of dozens of pure silver-coated donkeys from which to choose a lucky mask-head for each of his transporters. The search for the true colour of grey was a trifle to endure initially—to find the correct shade of platinum while hunting feral donkeys through the scrub from one end of the country to the other, but that was not his main concern now, for he was becoming fickle from being spoilt for choice, so that he was forever changing his mind about which platinum grey would lead the trucking business. Now, almost everyone in Praiseworthy wanted to have an integral part of the all times ancestral life in this particular age of new-world big businessman thinking sustainable and renewals while the ancestral was changing the climate. They thought you could not beat a phenomenon like this, where all you could see was money being thrown at Widespread’s conglomerate. These days it was raining cash in Praiseworthy, and the ancestral mob called that the power of country pure and simple as proof of its age-old wisdom, where country was actually integrating feral donkeys as countrymen more than some other countrymen who were not true countrymen in the seasonal calendar of all family relationships … And, remnant wisdom was what it was, for those paying close attention to these things, seeing that feral donkeys had been keeping country company for a long time, more than the recent traditional owner. It was them donkeys talking more to country, staying with country, and more or less, it was only these donkeys incorporating themselves into the song cycles of the old laws.
Yep! Among the continual woo-woo-wooing, talk-talk of grey pigeons cooing everywhere, there were people wanting to talk too, when they wanted to complain as usual about how that Cause Man Steel transport business was the worst freight train conglomeration in the world by saying it was too slow, uncomfortable, and only had bare boards to sit on so it was not like air travel, or travelling with Qantas with an air hostess, and the transport system did not have any air-conditioning, nor any roof for passengers to get out of the sun on a long interstate journey. Why would anyone expect things to be like that, even if it was the modern age of renewables and sustainability? Yet there were people who wanted to remember the good times, the days of flying business class in a QF Qantas flagship over so many deserts thirty thousand feet below, while you looked down at a nice meal of fish served on a plate. Of course, you could not take memories like that away quickly, even if you were using feral donkeys for transport that were cheap as chips, cheaper even than using solar power in a worldwide energy crisis of dwindling oil supplies. Then, even Qantas got the wind up itself, of being forced into a hike war with other worldwide airlines that wanted part of the new world action, a merger with the donkey business. Poor old Planet was not a merger man, but said he supposed the big questions were: why fly, with no gas? Even in this new age, rock stars, film stars pushed sustainability on the country donkey thing, and agreed that they should be travelling like the billions of poor people across the world. Now, the big serious questions that were being put to Planet were about how donkeys could be converted into some kind of new jet fuel? Just saying, to make the thing go faster, quicker, when you know, the achieving people of the world worked in terms of terabyte speed, not taking forever trotting along like, take for instance, a rock concert on the road could not be expected to travel forever from A to B which was just a few miles down the street from one venue to another. Listen! Planet! How could you expedite these animals? It was fine enough that donkeys might be the great survivors of the global warming reality, but how could they be trained to generate a bit more oomph in themselves for the sake of humanity? Were there any other possibilities other than the slow crawl? How about having multiple donkeys with the equivalent mass weight of a semitrailer loaded with shipping containers—say, fifty tonnes hauling power, to extract residual puddles of crude oil from the Saudi Arabian deserts to fire up the fighter jets for war. Or else, imagine what it would be like not to concentrate on the magical powers of the colour platinum, and to think about breeding a swifter donkey where you do not care what colour it is, but get it to move quicker than a snail, like it was being fried by jet fuel?
Now, you name what the new world should look like, but the people of Praiseworthy regularly went down to the donkey graveyard depot turnout all dressed up in their fancy travelling clothes to travel like normal travellers in the new modern way, on Planet’s conglomerate. No one was in love with what they had become—impatient people of the new time, having to wait for hours for the donkey bus that was never punctual, and they could not help what they saw in the heat and humidity, for everywhere they saw the failure of the conglomeration—the filthy surroundings which were not first class like themselves, while they were trying to wave off all the butterflies popping down from the ribbon of waves flying around the graveyard, and landing with filthy jointed legs for a few moments, here and there on the travellers in clean travelling clothes. Or else, having to swipe the germ-loaded feet of these white caper butterflies landing on their lips busy gasbagging about putrid donkey muck stinking in the air and filling their nostrils with pestilence. Everyone knew Widespread was loaded, and could easily have built them a modern and luxurious transport lounge terminal somewhere else while using one of those perpetual government trainee labour schemes to make Aboriginal people economically independent. The lack of facilities was seen as a disgrace, for Aboriginal people had rights, and should not be forced to have to wait for their bus at a stinking donkey depot. It was a human right to expect clean air in a modern world, where you do not have packs of butterflies extending their slender tube probosces along your skin to suck the salt from your sweat and taste the worth of your soul, before rising back into a polluted airborne rubbish dump of deadly viruses.
Far more butterflies began dropping down from the migrating waves in the sky, and would land dead or alive on the backs of puppy dogs lying around and sleeping on the street. Or the butterflies would be waving their exhausted wings while resting upon the mud-caked backs of domesticated wild pigs asleep in the open sewerage, then land on the arms of the travellers, and the bare backs of the little children rushing after the butterfly streamers rolling above them through the streets. Then, while lazily turning towards the sea, the butterfly waves circling the children had them corralled while they were still running and staring into the sky and did not notice where they were heading, and off they went with the butterflies fluttering over the tidal flats, and towards the sea.
Oh! Whose fault was that? You could ask for a full description of how the children were saved, and the whole town would tell you how good Praiseworthy eyes were for total wide-angle lens surveillances twenty-four seven from the plethora of steeples along Church Street, but in that heart-attack moment, fox screams, blood-curdling yelps in toto crashed into the tsunami wave, held it back, reached straight into the brains of those kids rushing into the sea, turned them around mid-step, and the whole thing was over in a moment. The children were nearly killed, but by some strange coincidence a mighty king tide rushed in at exactly the same time as the children were running over kilometres of mudflats towards the sea and carried them back to Praiseworthy. None were injured because of those inappropriate, murderous, crossbred butterflies who knew this would happen, and were thought to have been conniving this act of terrorism for years.
All hearts of the tempest people were blown apart, again, atoms busted. Praiseworthy people were not specialists in working with the atoms of the heart, putting the thing back together. So, let it be said, a shattered heart was of no use for anything when the precedent had already been long established in the era. Who was able to stop those children of the broken-hearted from listening to the hallucinations of butterfly terrorists invading the Dreaming, the Law? All this was because of that smart-arse fascist kid, that little expert on everything in the world Tommyhawk Steel, Cause Steel’s son. That kid lulled you into believing his bullshit stories. Remember him? He even knew about classical music that no one in Praiseworthy liked because it was white music, and not the more relatable country-and-western broken-heart music. He opened a can of worms, created a cult kid following like a comic strip, the thing which continued to this day, where the school children would start to listen to the white butterflies while they were killing themselves in the sea, doing this, instead of listening to their white government schoolteachers. Opera, he called it. Butterfly Coma. Performed the thing, broke old law, in front of the white government school. The schoolteachers claimed it was brilliant. Kept the thing. Got the kids to perform it every year to the whole community. The kids narrate the whole dreadful scenario just like Tommyhawk had originally performed it with his sneaky little voice that was a strain to hear at the best of times. The whole thing was about how the influx of butterflies were singing the humming chorus from Madame Butterfly as they were joyfully ending their life while suiciding into the sea. What was brilliant about that? These kids did not want to be released from the butterfly’s magical spell, they said, and wanted to feel the watery arms of the sea wrapped around their bellies while they were humming Puccini’s Un bel dì, vedremo, levarsi un fil di fumo sull’estremo, confin del mare, and feeling beneath them the pull of the flow moving back over the sea meadows, pulling all back into the ocean, not listening to the ancestral spirits talking about the infinity of all times in the currents swiftly moving to another world, and believing somehow at the last moment, they would break into reality and run for their lives out of the water, away from a mass suicide pact, while watching until the last moment, the white ribbons like snakes dissolving into the storm clouds roaming the ocean.
Cabbage butterflies do not come out of nowhere like a miracle in the arid zone, and these insects were seen flying from Dance Steel’s cabbages, her wilting brassica, the source of plague insects after she sowed her vegetable seeds everywhere, that mostly rotted in the ground, and what germinated encouraged plagues not only of butterflies, but moths, beetles, locusts, cicadas, aphids, mice, and rats, and further diminished the pristineness of the ancestral country. She left rotten watermelon vines growing all over the ground with butterflies and donkeys feeding on the stinking flesh, and whatever else she was cultivating for aphids festering up every green stem throughout the town, and leaving the entire region looking like a war zone.
In this time, the great spirit haze dome sitting over the pristine essence of Praiseworthy became a spectacle of colourful butterflies and iridescent winged insects in flight, which were chased by birds of great numbers like seagulls and starlings. It was another miracle with possible cultural tourism potential. Then, the haze became polluted. The whole thing turned sour. The dome transformed into an aerial cemetery when it became a slow-moving dust tomb that could not free itself from the sheer weight of dead, broken insects. This monstrous thing glistened from the sun shining on the floating dust-like scales from millions of dead butterfly wings suffocating the good dust of country.
Cause Steel’s donkeys trampling cabbages was not right at all. It was the principle of the thing, in a place flowering with proper first-class Aboriginal Australians in a buggered-up swampland in the time of drought, becalmed oceans, stilled country. Where were the puppy dogs and the pleasant feral pussycats in these times, where had they rolled up into tight balls asleep at night, and were dreaming of a massive Hercules-like ancestral warrior carrying sixty thousand thunder and lightning storms on his back, and where were the billowing rising seas loaded with fish, and what of the days when clouds came down from the skies and sat on the ground and left lizards and frogs to hold up the atmosphere of dust, and the other days of being too frightened to go out in a fishing boat on the ocean of ancestral stories beneath, and then too, of having to carry the days as they grew sweeter? These thoughts were for the future traditional owner living on country-governed land, as it was and will always be from and to infinity, when poor eyesight in the era of global warming had become a highly prized asset, that had to be saved, and protected from what was seen too brightly, too fakery, like the polluted haze glistening brightly, where you had to wear fake Cartier square-framed sunglasses glued to your eyes to lessen the glare.
Sitting around on old plastic milk crates and so on while believing their imaginary churches were like all those churches that were once the pride of Praiseworthy, the old sophisticates of the all times laws of country said they were really more like political God fellas now, though they were not God hacks. That was very good. And having become more God than God, they used God words for renovating their Dreamtime cathedrals, which they claimed, was about being literate in government affirmative action jargon talk for arguing about where a true saviour might choose to live once Praiseworthy moved up on the global liveability index as being one of the most desirable places in the world to live through the era right now.
Well! Heck! Hacks! And that was that then. Who knows what could have been different for Cause Man Steel in life, if he could not help seeing nothing in what the rules were in the progression of things, or if he had become a masterful stooge sitting on life’s fence—juggling the eventualities in the pantomime bouncing with impossibilities, intrigues, stuff-ups, of not being eaten alive by sharks and crocodiles massing in the local sea, or of not being bowled off the fence guarding the house full of moths that the moon lit up like heaven amidst the darkness, where Dance was waiting for the story people to come with their stories about moths on the cyber tribe, if he had not been left outside with the hazy fog spirit, grass plains ghost feral cats walking on the back road, where he could not bring himself to bring Tommyhawk home to run the business, not in this neck of the woods, for he knows the so-called dead brother keeps following the fascist around, and he was not having fascism in the platinum transport conglomerate, not until Aboriginal Sovereignty returned to head the business, he needed him in the donkey fields instead of seeing him as a puppet master of adversity in the conglomeration … Or, if he were elsewhere, where he watches his son working with pieces of wood, kindling, sticks he has found, making a collection of puppets spread over the ground, some he cannot bear to be parted from, while others he leaves in the bush, as he performs with these puppets that wobble around on top of a kerosene drum—ding, ding—where even Widespread loves hearing the monosyllable beat, hip-hop rap about life lived through puppets in a tidy town memory that Aboriginal Sovereignty performs to his night-time audience, where the nightjars sitting on the side of the road suddenly fly up to the light to catch insects attracted to the drying climate bushfires—starlings, swallows on the wind, grasses, wasteland. Odd, but sometimes Aboriginal Sovereignty likes being on a Chinese roller-coaster ride and wishes that Dance could go too, although Widespread noticed that Aboriginal Sovereignty always missed the lonely streaming banners of butterflies screaming we want him back, and of course he knows that Aboriginal Sovereignty is not dead, and could never die—just sometimes, seen differently, as though having sprouted from the ground, grown out of a multi-consciousness, wearing multiple ancestries with the same religiousness of country, atmosphere, cosmos, stars, heavens, lands, seas, flora and fauna, deep inside, where the law of silence in the bush reigned, or sometimes, storms rose with hazes of butterflies. Finished up? Fancy thinking it could be like that! Of course, the spirit of Aboriginal Sovereignty never dies, for you cannot destroy what was infinitely existing in the law of country that always is, and always will be governing itself.