(12,000-5,000 years bp)

 

The great melt was lapping northern beaches, sinking

twenty kilometres of coastline into a rising swell that 

inundated foreshore campsites, as human feet began 

to disappear toe by toe – subsiding into soggy sand. 

Frozen ice sheets cracked in half, as pure meltwater 

returned to the ground raising the sea levels between 

sixty to one hundred metres. Facing this loss of their

littoral lifeway, it was said the Mimi people survived

the biblical flood & chose to recreate what they saw

on the cave walls of their outposts in Arnhem Land. 

So, tiny sea creatures oddly became larger & larger in 

legend as generations echoed their touch-up to the lost 

pool-life rollcall, painting mythical chimeras out of the

selkies of the shallows – seahorses that jigged through 

bendy-straw seagrass fields: sea cucumbers & urchins

like spiky cancer cells that gave up their orange flesh 

to feed a raw future – dugongs, those divine undersea 

bovines. & yams of course, a staple food that powered 

the first people’s history; a phase recorded for posterity 

on the continent’s ancient sedimentary cycle menu.