The Past - Analysis

The poem’s claim: the present is a thin layer over an older self

Oodgeroo Noonuccal builds the poem around a firm insistence: the past is not behind the speaker but inside her. The opening line, The past is all about us and within, refuses the usual idea of history as something you visit like a museum. Instead, it is bodily and intimate, reinforced by the speaker’s admission that she is Haunted by tribal memories. Even the phrase This little now shrinks the present into something small and temporary, an accidental present compared to the long making of identity across time. From the start, the tone is both steady and slightly wounded: steady because she speaks with certainty, wounded because she has to argue against a world that treats her past as irrelevant or finished.

Suburbia as a scene of containment

The poem places the speaker in a recognizably modern, domesticated space: Tonight here in suburbia, in an easy chair before an electric heater. These details matter because they are not neutral comforts; they are signs of a life arranged by walls, furniture, and technology. The warmth is manufactured—Warmed by the red glow—and the scene is quiet enough that her mind slips elsewhere. Suburbia, in this poem, carries a faint feeling of enclosure and disconnection, as if the speaker’s body is present but her deeper self is not fully housed there.

The hinge into dream: returning to a world without walls

The poem’s emotional turn arrives with I fall into dream: / I am away. What follows is not just nostalgia but a sudden expansion of space and belonging. She is At the camp fire in the bush, among / My own people, and crucially, No walls about me. The repeated over/around language—The stars over me, the tall surrounding trees—replaces suburban architecture with a living shelter. The bush is not presented as empty wilderness but as a community of presences: trees that stir in the wind / Making their own music and Soft cries of the night that arrive like messages. The tone here becomes reverent and calm, as if the speaker is breathing more easily in a world that recognizes her.

Belonging that includes the unknown

One of the poem’s strongest assertions is that this older world offers a form of connection broader than the personal. In the bush, the speaker says, we are one with all old Nature’s lives / Known and unknown. That phrase Known and unknown matters: it suggests a relationship that does not require ownership or full understanding, only participation. This sense of belonging is sharpened by the ache in the last clause of the dream: In scenes where we belong but have now forsaken. The verb forsaken is heavy—it implies abandonment, not merely change. A tension opens up here: the speaker experiences the bush as home, yet her current life is elsewhere, implying displacement that is both social and spiritual.

Blood-memory versus yesterday’s comfort

When the poem returns to the present, it does not treat the dream as escapism; it treats it as evidence. The speaker sets the Deep chair and electric radiator against a thousand thousand camp fires in the forest. The modern objects are dismissed as recent—since yesterday—while the camp fires multiply into something almost unimaginable in scale, carried in my blood. This contrast is the poem’s central contradiction: the speaker lives in the present, but she is shaped by a past so vast that the present looks flimsy. The poem does not reject comfort outright; it rejects the idea that comfort can replace ancestry.

A final refusal: time cannot erase what made you

The closing lines turn outward, as if answering an argument she has heard before: Let none tell me the past is wholly gone. The speaker insists that Now is so small a part of time, and she widens the lens to all the race years that have moulded me. The word moulded makes history tactile, like hands shaping clay: not abstract influence but formation. The ending is resolute, almost defiant, and it leaves us with the poem’s moral pressure: if the past lives in the body and in memory, then to deny it is not just an intellectual mistake—it is a kind of violence against the self.

If the camp fire is in my blood, then the speaker’s dream is not a private fantasy but a claim of inheritance. The poem quietly asks: who gets to decide what counts as real—an electric heater you can touch, or a belonging so deep it returns uninvited in the night?