The following writing is inspired by a post written by Gabrielle Rahman, a beautiful djugan/yawuru/jabirr-jabirr woman living in Broome in Western Australia. I stayed with her family whilst in the area and was gifted with connection and embraced into the land via their care, sharing and walking Country together.
There are direct words from Gabrielle woven into this writing, she is on the Western Coast and I am on the Eastern Coast of Australia, I feel together we speak the truth from the sunrise to the sunset!
The System Is the Crime
They came with papers, uniforms, and flags.
Not with respect. Not with truth.
But with rules they wrote after the taking.
After the burning. After the silence they forced.
They called it law.
But it was built on lies,
Mortared with massacre,
And signed in the blood of those who had no say.
They took the land
then wrote the rules to keep it.
Declared themselves the authority,
As if justice could wear the face of invasion.
📕 “It’s in the book,” they say.
⚖️ “A judge signed it.”
👮 “The officer enforces it.”
And still, none of that makes it right.
Because what do you call a system
that criminalises ceremony?
That demands permits to gather bush tucker,
and locks gates around sacred places
with signs that say “Trespassers will be prosecuted”?
It is not justice.
It is control, dressed in paperwork.
It is oppression with a letterhead.
A lie called law.
🗣️ “Your lore doesn’t count,” they say,
“Unless it fits inside our framework.”
But how do you fit spirit into a spreadsheet?
How do you audit the dreaming?
You can’t.
So we don’t.
We speak truth.
We walk the old ways even when they say we can’t.
We stand on Country not as trespassers,
but as kin, as keepers, as the ones who never left.
We gather,
not because they gave permission,
but because no one ever had the right to take it away.
We build community
with those who remember
who know that the true law
lives in the land, in the stars, in our bones.
Never doubt it.
You are not wrong.
They are.
đźš« Their system is the crime.
🛠️ And we, we are the resistance wrapped in truth.
– Gabrielle Rahman and Rachel Shields
