Dakota Feirer
The place on Brooklyn Bridge where two boomerangs sing

Memoir

Time and date, unknown

many years before the Walk

As kids we are taught by our old ones that there are two worlds we are born into. Two paths which we must walk. “There will be moments when you will be torn” – so we are told – “and those moments you must listen to the old voices that guide you along the way.” I wondered then, as I still wonder now, how is it possible to live in two worlds? Or to walk two paths at once? Why were we born, only to be torn apart?

09:38, Saturday, 16 Sept 2023 AEST / 19:38, Friday, 15 Sept 2023 EDT

the evening before the Walk

My dorm room window faces a southern view of downtown Manahatta*, which makes it an invitation to ruminate, or a stage for resurfacing some important questions that linger somewhere deep in my body and its memories. Other times I just sit and witness.

Tonight I see the horizon, a smoke-like haze mixed with city lights, sunset, and corporate fluorescence. I see geometric silhouettes, helicopters, and other artificial orbs distantly pulsing. This all mixed with the questions, all the torment, the everyday minutiae of another million anonymous bodies in windows scattered across this island. All of us are brushed into one ordinary cosmopolitan glow.

Impulsively, I do that Indigenous thing and imagine the time before. I watch from my window as the city dissolves. Crackling fires hum below a flickering blanket of stars, heavy with story. By the East River, stoic towers of smoke are gently rising, reaching for the celestial waters above.

I can hear owl song and moose calls, and the wind whispering to the trees the twelve laws of the Lenape.

Then, all of a sudden, the screech of rubber and passing sirens. And just like that, time and space are redesignated. Returning my window to its rightful place: another orb amongst the opaque palette of distorted cityscape, back to a blended spillage of everythingness. Amongst it all, our two bodies entangled over crumpled cardboard and glue sticks and the smell of permanent ink.

We met on Tinder. Neither of us expected we’d be making protest signs by the second date. On the first date we discussed things like Patricia Hill Collins and the management of compostable waste in New York, so this rapid transition felt kind of natural. Despite the fullness this night and our bodies held, the evening was emptied by an unsettling anticipation of what was to come tomorrow. One thing was for certain, the cardboard we chose would be red, black, and yellow.

03:28, Sunday, 17 Sept 2023, AEST / 13.28, Saturday, 16 Sept 2023, EDT

thirty-two minutes before the Walk

Hayden (Yuin) and I planned to meet at the usual platform at Union Square. It wasn’t the first time we’d both repped loud-as-fuck-Koori colours in New York, but today seemed to summon an extra injection of blak pride (more than the usual amount, if you could believe). It rose up beneath our feet and culminated in an especially intense clap when our hands connected for that brotherly palm to palm handshake.

We check in on one another, then together check how far away the rest of the crew are. Nick (Anaiwan), one of the organisers, was laid up in bed beside a positive Covid test. Karri (Nyiyaparli), another organiser, who we were sure would be waiting for us. Mi-Kaisha (Darumbal), the most seasoned local, was on her way and she was never late. Bronte (Wiradjuri), on the other hand, we were most concerned for. Let’s just say if one day the city rebranded Times Square and named it Koori-Time Square, Bronte would be the main attraction.

“She’ll make it,” we reassured each other, and both pointed our chins at our train pulling into the platform. Shuffling past a group of elementary students, I clocked several perplexed expressions gawking at the pair of boomerangs spilling from the end of my tote bag. She’ll make it.

“Oh!” while reaching for the protest sign now rolled up in my tote, I quickly remembered, “J …”

“Tinder ‘J’?” Hayden always knew what I was gonna say before I said it.

“Yea, she’s meeting us there too …” I searched his eyes for approval.

“... Deadly,” he winked and a mixture of laughs and butterflies accompanied us for the entire train ride.

04:04, Sunday, 17 Sept 2023, AEST / 14:04, Saturday, 16 Sept 2023, EDT

seven minutes before the Walk

We gathered at Town Hall and observed the growing crowd greet and study one another’s signage. At this moment I recall a statistic that was recently brought to my attention: 30,000 Australians live in New York. Before I can start counting the crowd Hayden gestures toward the Brooklyn Bridge, pointing out a fork in the road where the opposing lanes of traffic split in a north and south direction. He’s pointing to a light pole with a large kind of electricity box covered in an assortment of stickers, posters, and markings left by visitors from across the world. Hayden swears there’s a Clothing the Gaps sticker here somewhere, but we run out of time before we can find it.

We search the crowd for Karri and quickly spot her shuffling toward us with pressing news. “Did you mob see?! We made it on the Today show!” We smile, hug, fist bump, and I glance around at the growing crowd, doing maths in my head. Mi-Kaisha appears, fanning her smile. We hug and fist bump, and I show off my sign. I resume my population assessment, and the numbers aren’t adding up. J emerges from a subway entrance and once again I’m distracted from my independent crowd survey. We greet with hugs and some introductions. Finally we settle and take a few pics whilst I unpack the 30,000 statistic, concluding that if this crowd was representative of all the Yes votes from the New York diaspora, then we were in for a steep walk.

12:14, Sunday, 10 Sept 2023, AEST / 22:14, Saturday, 9 Sept 2023, EDT

seven days before the Walk

Admittedly, it’s always attractive when you’re explaining blakness without the ‘c’ and they simply just get it. J understood it in the same way as if I was explaining the night sky: that even though on the surface the stars might be invisible due to the pollution in the lower atmosphere thwarting our vision from below, this doesn’t change the fact that the same sky always was and always will be there.

Such a task was simply too hard back home.

Read more in Issue 3

Dakota Feirer is a Bundjalung and Gumbaynggirr storyteller with his work published in Kill Your Darlings, Overland literary journal, Australian Poetry, and more. His newly released, Arsenic Flower (2025), is a collection of poems and prose that engage with Country, culture, resurgence, and manhood.

*Manahatta – the Lenape word for the area that is now Manhattan / Manhattan Island.

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