Regardless of that comment either someone complained about it or it may just have been an automatic FB response but a 3 day ban was imposed across ALL of my FB sites. I have tried to appeal the decision which FB themselves ask us to do if we disagree, however FB will not accept the reason I have given - ''Try again at another time" it tells me, but that other time never seems to materialize.
Our history which has always been documented by poets across the centuries has never been squeaky clean nor politically correct ever. You cannot sanitize history by refusing to allow it to be shown, by removing statues, destroying books and documentation. That word was relevant to the era in which the poem was written there was no hate or racial discrimination whatsoever on my part by sharing it with my fellow poets all of whom are adults and totally above this politically correct nonsense when it comes to our Australian history.
This nation was forged on blood, hatred, harshness, racial discrimination, criminality - that is our history warts and all and we cannot nor should we try to sanitize it because we need to know it and share it so that future generations can learn from it to ensure it never happens again.
Just venting here, because I consider it an injustice and an unacceptable practice by FB when I see so much of the other purely disgusting things they do allow to be shown currently.
My only options now as I see it are - to alter the title of the poem with an added notation as to why. The word causing offence only appears in the title of the poem - OR - to not use the poem at all. DOES IT MATTER? I think it does. What do our readers here think.
Judith's poem was based on a true story, the rockface (cliff) itself is titled Nigger's Leap - a similar event happened at Bluff Rock near Tenterfield in NSW.in 1844. Judith Wright has been called “the conscience of the nation”, for her early, ongoing and passionate commitment to Australia’s environment and the Aboriginal people. Nevertheless, it is for her poetry that she is best remembered, poetry which has helped shape Australia’s perception of itself as much as her tireless battles have helped to save it. Judith herself said of her poem .....
Wright describes her father as one of the few people who knew something of the unwritten history of the eastern side of the New England tableland. He told her how Darkie Point, just across from Point Lookout, got its name:
Long ago, he said, the white settlers of that region of the tableland had driven the Aborigines over its cliffs as reprisal for the spearing of their cattle. That sank as deeply into my mind as did the splendour of the cliffs and forests into which that Aboriginal band had fallen. Long afterwards, I wrote a poem about it, titled 'Nigger's Leap, New England'-another local name, disused for obvious reasons.
There is another cliff face, Bluff Rock near Tenterfield in Boonoo Boonoo National Park on the northern highway, where the same summary method of disposing of the 'rural pests' had been used ... Maybe my father's oral testimony to what happened at Darkie Point is the only record of that other day of murder.
Niggers Leap, New England .. Judith Wright ©
The eastward spurs tip backward from the sun.
Nights runs an obscure tide round cape and bay
and beats with boats of cloud up from the sea
against this sheer and limelit granite head.
Swallow the spine of range; be dark. O lonely air.
Make a cold quilt across the bone and skull
that screamed falling in flesh from the lipped cliff
and then were silent, waiting for the flies.
Here is the symbol, and climbing dark
a time for synthesis. Night buoys no warning
over the rocks that wait our keels; no bells
sound for the mariners. Now must we measure
our days by nights, our tropics by their poles,
love by its end and all our speech by silence.
See in the gulfs, how small the light of home.
Did we not know their blood channelled our rivers,
and the black dust our crops ate was their dust?
O all men are one man at last. We should have known
the night that tidied up the cliffs and hid them
had the same question on its tongue for us.
And there they lie that were ourselves writ strange.
Never from earth again the coolamon
or thin black children dancing like the shadows
of saplings in the wind. Night lips the harsh
scarp of the tableland and cools its granite.
Night floods us suddenly as history
that has sunk many islands in its good time.
has suddenly deteriorated or that I am going a bit doolally in my senior senile years but be assured if you see funny squiggles { or *** in places they have no right being I am just trying to avoid FB jail 