A Message in a Bottle
Beata Stasak
Half buried in the sand dunes
near my beach house,
lies a green, corked wine bottle.
I had to smash it
to get the letter out.
Who was the mysterious
message-bottler?
An odd fantasy
of a tall, dark and handsome
billionaire,
bored on his luxury cruiser,
crossed my mind.
'Please help us
and save our lives,'
it's author,
a nine-year-old girl
named Brindah.
a Sri Lankan asylum seeker,
thwarted from reaching Australia's shores,
her dreamland, her only aim.
Leaning over the rail
of a small rickety cargo boat
amongst three hundred desperate people,
Brindah put the message
in a bottle
and threw it overboard.
I know,
you'd prefer
a romantic billionaire,
but the ethnic Tamil child,
lost and scared,
is the only one I have.
I found a treasure.
A message in a bottle.
Now I have to find that child.
Asked about Brindah's plea,
the Australian Immigration Minister said
that she was just one of a million refugees
seeking a better life.
She's now in Merak,
an Indonesian detention centre,
for probably the next ten or twenty
years of her life.
'Please, think of us. Please,'
I finish reading her message in a bottle:
'We've lived in the forest for a month.
Please sir, take us to your country.
There must be a place somewhere for us...'
Brindah will get old and wrinkly,
locked behind an Indonesian wall,
dreaming about our Australian shores.
I'm sorry, my dear Brindah.
I'm just a writer.
I'll keep your bottle and write a poem...
about YOU.
About YOUR PEOPLE.
And what would happen
if you managed to reach our shores.
BOAT PEOPLE
Boat people are coming.
Struggling to reach the shores
of a 'Promised land',
like others
before them,
for a hundred years -
following the Dream Time people
and British settlement.
Another day is starting
with a kookaburra laughing.
The newcomers are sitting
in the shadow of a Eucalyptus tree,
studying English grammar
and how to feel free -
behind a barbed wire fence.
Another year is ending
in the summer at midnight.
Listening to the Aussie sounds
as they look at the southern sky.
Having sewn their lips together,
they think about their roots
and the children for which
they sacrifice...
And their children
are running
happily on the sand
leaving their footprints
hopefully
forever on the red land.
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Beata Stasak is an Art and Eastern European Languages Teacher from Eastern Europe with upgraded teaching degrees in Early Childhood and Education Support Education. She teaches in the South Perth Metropolitan area. After further study in Counselling for Drug and Alcohol Addiction, she has used her skills in Perth Counselling Services. Beata has been a farm caretaker on the organic olive farm in the South Perth Metropolitan area for the past twenty years. Beata is a migrant from post-communist Eastern Europe, who settled in Perth, Western Australia in 1994. She came with her husband and children to meet her father, who she never knew. He was a dissident and refugee from Czechoslovakia, after his country was taken over by Russian communists after the unsuccessful uprising against the communists in 1968.
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