Through her poetry and activism, Wright challenged dominant narratives and encouraged Australians to engage with the country’s true history. She co-founded the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland and was a member of the Aboriginal Treaty Committee. Some refer to her as the “conscience of the nation.”

Wright’s reflections

Poem: Bora Ring

Bora Ring reflects on the erasure of Aboriginal ceremony and connection to land through colonisation. Nature plays a dual role in the poem, both mourning and mirroring the loss of culture.

Wright describes how the landscape remembers the dancers and their traditions, but also how it has been overtaken. Words like “gone”, “lost”, and “broken” convey the devastation left by colonisation. The poem ends with a reference to Cain, symbolising guilt and the burden of a violent past.

Learning activities

These activities introduce students to Bora Ring and encourage them to reflect on the poet’s perspective.

Poem analysis 

The poem Bora Ring, like many of Wright's works, is concerned with the impact of European settlement on Aboriginal culture. Wright uses nature's perspective to tell the story and mourn the loss of the Aboriginal people, 'the dancers', to European settlers, the 'alien'.

Nature echoes and mimics the dancers in the swaying of branches and the leaves whispering the forgotten 'chant'. At the same time, nature also mimics the devastation caused by the colonists. The traditional 'dancing-rings' have been overgrown until 'Only the grass stands up', leaving little behind to show that the Aboriginal people were ever there. The Aboriginal culture has been 'broken' and only the trees are left to remember the 'chant'.

Wright emphasises the destruction of the traditional Aboriginal way of life by using words like 'gone', 'lost', 'useless', 'broken', 'forgot', 'splintered' and 'still', highlighting devastation to the original people by those Wright calls 'conquerors' and leaving no-one to transmit their 'song', 'dance' and 'ritual' to a new generation. Instead, all we are left with is the colonists' 'alien tale' of events, a one-sided story.

In the third stanza, Wright touches upon the religion and long history of the Indigenous population that was 'splintered' by the arrival of European colonists. The 'dream' refers to the Dreamtime, the ancient era of creation—'the world breathed sleeping'. The 'dream' was occurring in Australia well before there was written history in other parts of the world (a time that is labelled by historians as prehistory), while the rest of the world was still 'sleeping'. The colonisation of Australia by Europeans has caused this ancient 'dream' to be 'forgot' because the Indigenous 'hunters', 'painted bodies' and 'nomad feet' have been 'splintered' by settlers.

In the final stanza, Wright alludes to the crimes perpetrated against Indigenous Australians by European settlers by mentioning the biblical story of Cain, an ancient tale of brother killing brother for senseless reasons. The simile invokes the image of Aboriginal people, now living, forgotten by their conquerors in the 'shadow' of Western civilisation, which bears the mark of a murderer. It is possible that Cain could be an avenging spirit in the 'sightless shadow', seeking retribution for the crimes committed and causing 'the rider's heart' to 'halt' in fear. However, it could be that the rider is Wright, and others like her, expressing the shared guilt that we as a nation should feel about the treatment of the Indigenous population and the loss of their traditional ways of life. Consequently, we have turned Indigenous inhabitants into 'sightless shadows' in their own country, making Australia's history haunted by 'shadows' and 'unsaid words' of acknowledgement and apology.

Concluding activities