Bila Yinaa-galang
by Jeanine Leane
An ode to ‘Birrung Billabong’ by Tony Birch.
Guest-edited by Mykaela Saunders, the Odes series invites six First Nations poets to write an Ode to another’s poem.
… Murumbidya bila is a story
the geomorphology of this river
is the story of my people
the story of my people
is the geomorphology of this river
… a river is a family…
streams entwine like lovers to
arc and flow and meld together as one
they weave and braid tributaries that spread
like veins across land
sky-water and earth-water deep in the
throes of passionate embrace in the bed
of county is the fresh-water love story
that conceives a river
my grandmother
wanted to flow deep down
into the ancient waters of the Murumbidya
the ones no longer spoken about except
in the old stories
whispered
sometimes
by bila yinaa-galang
who know the words for the telling stitched
into the layers of the earth and the plot etched
into the strata of rock
… a river breaks away
my mother
flows in different directions
grandmother says sometimes a river
swings so far away you don’t even know
for a long while if
it’s
still
part of the same river
when a channel splits off from the
mother stream it can only connect again
when the land lets it
… obstacles form in a river
my aunties
flow with tides and swells
they say sometimes deposits of earth or sand
or rubbish rise above the water
then a river forks in
separate
directions
to flow around obstacles
aunties say that it is possible for these forks
to continue alone or to reconnect again
with the mother river
…rivers should not be still
my sisters
swell in deep billabongs
aunty says when a river pools it is pent up
and seething and you don’t see what is happening
beneath the surface until
it
releases
a flood of fast water that will
roar downstream dredging the riverbed
as it goes before it pauses to build up
energy for what’s to come
…a river remembers everything…
my memory
flows fast and long
grandmother says moving water
is shaped by deep undertows
and does not filter sand or soil or stones
because it wants to
carry
everything
along in its flow
to fall in layers of sediment in the archive
of the riverbed below to gather like
the debris of intergenerational trauma
…a river can heal…
a river changes all it carries
over time boulders wear to stones
to pebbles to gravel sometimes
a
river
purges itself of all it
does not need and holds on
to all it does then a river
runs fresh with a new story
a river can transcend and
rise above decaying colonial detritus
that threatens to stop its flow
a river can forgive and give again
…the story of Murumbidya bila…
is the story of Wiradjuri yinaa-galang
Dr Jeanine Leane belongs to the Wiradjuri peoples from the Murrumbidgee River. She is a poet, essayist, author and activist. Jeanine has published widely in the area of Aboriginal literature, writing otherness and creative non-fiction. In 2020, she edited a collection of First Nations Poetry, Guwayu—For All Times. Jeanine has received three ARC Discovery Grants for Aboriginal Literature and until recently taught Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. Gawimarra Gathering, Jeanine's second poetry collection was released in 2024 with UQP.