In central Australia the country is sung. Ancestral beings travelled, and the ground came after them, and the account of that travelling is also the way across it. Which water, in what order, how far apart.

The song is not a description of the country. It is how the country came to be there, and how anyone crosses it. It is held by people who can be named, and taught to particular others, and where one people’s stretch meets the next the two have to agree about the ground between them. A mistake in the song is more than a failure of poetry. It is a matter of continuing to be.

The epoch it comes out of has a word. It has been written Ülchurringa, alcheringa, altyerrenge, altjeringa; the spelling never settled, because the settling was done by people who did not speak it. The root is not sleep. It is nearer uncreated: not made, and not beginning.

The address of this work is a word out of a language nobody here speaks, taken by somebody with no standing in it. What it means is filed with the sources. What it names belongs to the people who kept it, and the keeping is the part we did not take.