Mod B Revision - Oodgeroo Noonuccal

"I see my people dancing, hear the click of boomerangs"

The Past — Present tense + sensory imagery — Dreamtime epistemology encoded in grammar; the past is living not archived

"smell of the smoke, taste of the 'possum"

The Past — Sensory listing + accumulation — Indigenous daily life rendered as rich, complete and fully human; challenges deficit narratives

"gone, gone"

The Past — Repetition + truncation — most devastating two words in the poem; finality of loss performed rather than explained

"let me dream the past"

The Past — Imperative mood — dreaming as active willed engagement with the spiritual world; Dreamtime as consciousness not escapism

"Perhaps, you are but one of many guardians / Of earth's peoples"

Reed Flute Cave — Fragmented tentative syntax + rhetorical question — universal spirituality arrived at through wondering not declaration; the poem's most significant philosophical idea

"My Rainbow Serpent, / My Earth Mother"

Reed Flute Cave — Apostrophe + possessive pronoun — intimate spiritual authority; Oodgeroo owns her spiritual inheritance rather than observing it from a distance

"The ghosts from the past / Push past me"

Visit to Sun Yat Sen Memorial — Personification + kinaesthetic imagery — the past is physically active not passive; presses into the present

"The past and present / Unite within my mind"

Visit to Sun Yat Sen Memorial — Thematic statement + enjambment — the mind as site of temporal reconciliation; past and present are not separate

"The spirits of the past / Are applauding my efforts"

Visit to Sun Yat Sen Memorial — Personification + present tense — ancestral affirmation immediate and real; self determination through creative expression validated by ancestry