Written piece
The Singing Ship
Jena Woodhouse
Australia
About this piece
The "Singing Ship", a semi-abstract bicentennial monument to James Cook's arrival in Keppel Bay Queensland in May 1770, incorporates pipes that "sing" in ambient air. My poem subverts that intention: its "song" is also a dirge for those colonised dispersed who have no monument.
Designed to register the subtle
breathings of the atmosphere,
the bone white vessel’s vertical
clean lines resemble mast and rigging.
Luring the ear and eye, defined against
the sea and sky, the monument is pretext
for a dialogue with genius loci,
intersecting memory threads
from dreaming sites now buried deep,
honoured since this land’s antiquity.
The "Singing Ship", as it is known,
faces islands, the horizon
whence the ominous winged sails
appeared one memorable day,
prefiguring the strangers’ bane:
disrupting timeless webs of being,
ways of nurturing the land
without imposing change.
The ship is a reminder of that rupture.
As in epic tales, it echoes phrases of the song
lines channelled by the ceaseless waves,
croons the dirges of the ones
whose totem was the humpback whale.