Cirrus@Austlit

Author's note: To the Western Desert People the word Jila encompasses the permanent springs in the Great Sandy Desert, the ancestral creative beings who dwell there and the stories told in and of the places. They tell stories of a past defined by place, while kartiya, white people, tell stories framed by time. This poem was sparked by a painting of a jila called Kiriwirri by Jan Billycan, exhibited in the National Museum of Australia’s exhibition Yiwarra Kuju, the Canning stock route. Even though I am a kartiya, I find that certain places, especially my home and the country I grew up in, are alive with story. The important distinction is that I tell those stories in the past tense while for Aboriginal people story is always in the present. However, white or black, we all create ourselves with the stories we tell.