I was very sorry that I had to miss our first meeting but thank you all for your comments on “Mulka’s Cave”, which June kindly read for me. I’ve made some changes to the poem and hopefully I have managed to improve it!

The feelings and thoughts that gave rise to “Mulka’sCave” are not particularly original but to me they are very poignant. The cave was one of two or three places that I’ve visited in Australia where I have felt a very strong sense of the cultural and spiritual abyss that separates the traditional aboriginal world from our own.

Perhaps I am idealizing traditional aboriginal societies and their beliefs but from
what I have seen and read, however naïve their beliefs may appear to us, they
did not fall into the error of thinking that they were separate from the natural world or superior to it – let alone thinking that they were in some way ”in charge” of it!

Mulka’s Cave is near Wave Rock in South – west WA. It is named after a legendary aboriginal man who became a tribal outcast and met a violent death but I’m not sure about the authority of the legend or whether it is truly connected to the handprints. Before the local area was settled I imagine that the cave would have been screened by trees and bushes – it would have been part of the natural pattern of the landscape –significant to the local people, certainly, but not an exhibit.

I felt that not only had the real significance of the cave been lost or forgotten but also the sense of it being an integral, part of the natural world.

The exposed cave is now approached by an ugly steel ramp (no doubt for safety reasons). As is so often the case with sites like Mulka’s Cave, the “sheltering trees” have been felled to make for easier access and to make way for the complex, sophisticated - and spiritually meaningless - structures of “our” world: car parks, toilets, kitsch souvenirs and food from the other side of the world. (Though actually most of these are not at the cave but back at Wave Rock – so I’ve taken some poetic licence there!)

What has been lost – or destroyed – in this process seems to me to be irreplaceable.

MULKA'S CAVE

A once sacred place

stripped, exposed

and violated.

Gaping nakedly.

We hesitate, peering in -

embarrassed, maybe by such simplicity

seeing prints of hands – and nothing more.

What brought them to this place?

Who were the last man and child,

to fill their mouths with thick, sour ochre

And lifting up their hands

spray their presence on this rock?

Lost, the memory, and the meaning.

Lost, the joy of man and child, hand in hand,

flesh and bones breathing in the sun,

blood beating through ancient veins

as they breathed at one the with sheltering trees

and winds’ sigh.

Dingoes stripped and scattered their bones

trees drank their sap,

ants devoured their last fragments

and no trace left but the handprints,

only the handprints.

And a vacancy – an eternal absence,

a gap in nature.

Turning our backs, we return along the metal ramp,

past the felled trees and the toilet block,

to the souvenir shop, Made in China,

and the bistro, offering Mediterranean Cuisine.