Environmental Degradation
The Australian landscape was forever altered by colonization. Beginning with the arrival of the British in 1788, invaders claimed the land based on the premise of terra nullius, meaning that the land was legally deemed to be unoccupied and uninhabited. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics,
Australia’s landscape has been highly modified since European settlement. Native vegetation, which provides a protective cover for the land, has been removed or degraded in many areas due to urbanisation, agriculture, mining, pastoralism and infrastructure development. Altering land from its natural state inevitably results in changes to soil health and landscape functionality. If persistent, these changes can lead to environmental problems and rapid deterioration of both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, which can also have economic and social impacts.
In "We Are Going," the impacts of colonization on the land are apparent. A sign allowing trash disposal hangs before the traces of an old bora ring (an Aboriginal ceremonial site). That the bora ring is only a trace of what it once was is also significant. Gone are the scrubs, the eagle, the emu, and the kangaroo. The term "environmental degradation" encompasses the disrespect that colonizers had for the land and that modern society continues to perpetrate. "Degradation" is in direct contrast to the mutual and sustainable relationship between Aboriginal communities and the land.
Aboriginal Identity
The speaker gives voice to the Aboriginal community by collectively identifying with nature and old cultural ways: "We are nature and the past, all the old ways / Gone now and scattered" (Lines 19-20). Aboriginal displacement and environmental degradation are intertwined in the logic of colonization. The earlier identifications that the speaker makes weave Aboriginal ways of life with the natural surrounding. The bora ground is the site for the corroboree (ceremonies and gatherings). The scrub is where the hunts and the laughing games once took place.
By using the present tense "We are...," the poet articulates the past as a living force in the present. This sense of collective identity is reaffirmed throughout the poem, creating a continuity despite the genocide that took place. As professor and researcher Francesca Di Blasio writes, the final line "may...refer to the progressive ending of a culture and of a community...but it may also refer to the sense of a movement onwards: 'we are moving further, we keep on moving towards the future against all odds.'" In any sense, Noonuccal offers an opportunity for Aboriginal healing with her poetry.
The Cyclical Nature of Time
In various Indigenous worldviews, time means something different than it does from a Western perspective. In Noonuccal's poem, the past becomes a living and generative force in the present. The tenses used in the poem reflect this as the speaker gives voice to the Aboriginal community and connects them to the old cultural ways of life, saying "We are the past" (Line 13). The corroboree and the bora ground (sacred Aboriginal ceremonies and the places where they occurred) are embodied by the living descendants who continue to suffer the consequences of displacement, genocide, and cultural uprooting. The old ways are "Gone now and scattered," but that does not lessen this embodiment and connection between modern Aboriginal people and their ancestral ways (Line 20).
While the entire poem works to simultaneously evoke and layer different time periods, the mention of Dream Time focuses this point. The translated term does not fully encompass its meaning; other words used to describe the concept in English include Everywhen, eternal beginning, and uncreated. Warlpiri teacher and artist Jeannie Herbert Nungarrayi (whose people refer to the concept as the Jukurrpa) has defined the Jukurrpa as "an all-embracing concept that provides rules for living, a moral code, as well as rules for interacting with the natural environment...a lived daily reality" (Nicholls). In "We Are Going," the speaker states, "We are the wonder tales of Dream Time, the tribal legends told" (Line 12). This complex unfurling of different times and planes of reality serves as a healing force in the poem for Aboriginal people.
