One day when we were traveling in the Northern Territory in the East Alligator Region of Kakadu, I visited the Ubirr Art Gallery. It is not an ordinary Art Gallery. It consists of a group of rock outcrops on the Nadab Floodplain where there are several natural rock shelters that have a collection of Aboriginal rock paintings some of which are several thousands of years old.
It was there I met Wayne, a young aboriginal boy, who was guiding a party of tourists through the park. Wayne talked so exuberantly about the art that I couldn’t resist asking if I could join the party and offered to pay. He was only too happy for me to come along but wouldn’t accept any payment. I wrote this poem for Wayne.
We did not invent the wheel
We had to be content to travel by foot
But still managed to cover long distances
Through rugged lands in scorching temperatures
By walking in the early mornings and avoiding the heat of the day
We did not invent the telephone
But we know how to communicate with nature, the earth, the sky, the wind, the sun and the moon
And we can express ourselves in community with each other
And send messages to faraway places
We did not invent the aeroplane
But in our minds we often fly to other places and times
When we are walking along collecting our food for the day, fishing and hunting
Sometimes we can look down at ourselves from the sky
We did not invent the computer
But we have our ways of storing knowledge and passing it on through the generations
By the stories that our art communicates on rock faces
And the explanation of our laws which old men tell by the campfire
Or when they show the young boys how to fish and hunt
We did not invent the watch
Because for us time does not exist
And has no relevance to how we live
For it is the season that dictates what eat, where we sleep
And whether we stay or move on
And the sun and the moon who tell us when it is time to wake or sleep
We did not invent money
Because in our culture we share what we have with each other
With our family and our tribe
So we have no need for it
We did not know about a lot of things
But we have always known how to think outside the square
And look at things in other ways
We often see a different picture of how things are