My Library; Serpent Dust; by Debra Adelaide;

Serpent Dust by Debra Adelaide

In my view a very poetic wonderfully written story.

Excerpts from this book;

Page 67
Mrs. Twineham:"...What will become of this colony, I am unable to say, and I am moved to consider how this
bustling self important little place should ever survive, let alone prosper.

Page 86
Dyirra:"...But we'd been camped on the edge of the maiyal settlement for month, watching our fishing places swallowed up. Then our water supply, then the badagarang hunting grounds. All going or gone.

....less than moments, then our homeland was transformed into something utterly unrecognizable

Page 87
Dyirra:" Meanwhile we were still stalking backwards, still retreating, creeping, silently putting one foot behind the other with our bags and stick...

Page102
Strawberries, ten bushels of India seed corn, bamboos, quinces, oak and myrtle trees...
Six bullet molds, fife hundred and eighty-nine women's petticoats...

Page 171
Cowper:"...out here you can belong. The land holds you when you submit to it. And so I have come to the bush that looks after you, if you let it.
That's what those grubbing, tree felling, gravel scraping fools back at the settlement will never understand.
...to truly look at the land they have claimed for their own, too stupid to think beyond the scope of thir own stores and provisions...

Page 181
The Reverend MR Arthur Twineham:"....we brought the seedlings with us. Yet the trees seem to me a crude punctuation in this landscape.....while the originals, the grey and drooping gums have long been felled and turned into fuel and shelter.

Within two years of the fleet's arrival, those watchers had suffered the shocking ravages of smallpox, their numbers decimated. the disease spread to aboriginal people throughout the country with devastating results. But how did smallpox arrive in Australia?

June; Food for thoughts;

There is always a dark cloud;  I know I am an optimist and look at the blue sky...cogito ergo sum.

Hopefully, even if it does not look like it, never has, "tous va pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes;" Voltaire.

'To plunder to slaughter, to steal these things they misname empire and where they make a wilderness they call it peace." Tacitus- Roman historian 55-120 AD    

 "I bear solemn witness to the fact that NATO heads of state and of government meet only to go through the tedious motions of reading speeches, drafted by others, with the principal objective of not rocking the boat." - Pierre Trudeau

"I think that NATO is itself a war criminal." - Harold Pinter



"The ruling class has the schools and press under its thumb. This enables it to sway the emotions of the masses." - -- Albert Einstein - (1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921


"After the advent of the written word, the masses who could not - or were not permitted to - read, were given sermons by the few who could." - Theodore Bike


"And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale." -Thomas Jefferson-

I believe Gandhi is the only person who knew about real democracy - not democracy as the right to go and buy what you want, but democracy as the responsibility to be accountable to everyone around you. Democracy begins with freedom from hunger, freedom from unemployment, freedom from fear, and freedom from hatred. To me, those are the real freedoms on the basis of which good human societies are based.