A Buddhist monk and Zen poet named Huineng wrote a gatha, or poem, more than a thousand years ago. The poem, ‘There Was no Tree to the Bodhi’, was essentially about how the purity of enlightenment would not be corrupted by the dust particles of life. The four-line poem ends by asking, ‘Where then was the dust?’⁷

The essential truths of my people, held in our land and in the knowledge of country, have endured great storms of dust—cultural oppression, drought, fires. As I was thinking about this at the turn of the century, two questions arose: How far would we as Aboriginal people go to survive? What is the future of the planet?