We Are Going - Analysis

A homecoming staged like an eviction

The poem’s central claim is brutally clear: colonization has turned an Indigenous homeland into a place where its people are treated as out of place. It opens not with nostalgia but with an image of forced diminishment: They came in to the little town, a semi-naked band, subdued and silent, All that remained of their tribe. The phrasing makes the group feel like a remnant displayed for inspection—survivors reduced to a remainder. And the destination sharpens the cruelty: they return to their old bora ground, not as celebrants but as witnesses to its conversion into ordinary “real estate.”

Even before the poem begins its famous litany of We are, the scene has already argued that dispossession is not only about land; it is about the ability to appear in public without being made small. The first lines carry a documentary chill, like someone recording what cannot be denied.

The bora ground under the estate agent’s sign

The poem’s anger concentrates in one almost offhand detail: Notice of the estate agent reads: ‘Rubbish May Be Tipped Here’. The flatness of the quotation is the point. It’s not shouted hate; it’s bureaucracy. A sacred site is treated as a dumping ground, and the sign’s official tone makes the insult feel socially approved. When the speaker adds that it half covers the traces of the old bora ring, the poem shows erasure happening in real time: not a dramatic destruction but a slow covering-over, an administrative blotting-out.

The image of the settlers hurry about like ants adds another sting. Ants aren’t evil; they’re numerous, industrious, oblivious. The comparison suggests a crowd that has normalized its own takeover—so busy building that it cannot (or will not) see what it is trampling.

The turn: from being looked at to speaking back

The poem pivots when the voice switches from observation to declaration: We are as strangers here now, but the white tribe are the strangers. This is the hinge moment. The speaker refuses the town’s implied story—that the Indigenous group is an intrusion—and flips the category of “stranger” back onto the colonizers. Yet the line also admits a painful fact: they feel like strangers in their own country here now. The tension is immediate and unresolved: the poem insists on belonging while naming the lived experience of unbelonging.

From this point, the repeated We are becomes more than pride. It is a counter-document, an attempt to restore a record that the sign and the ants-and-town bustle are trying to overwrite.

Identity expanded until it becomes landscape and law

What follows is a daring expansion of what “we” can mean. The speaker doesn’t only claim ancestry; they claim the whole cultural and ecological field that makes a people a people: We are the corroboree and the bora ground; We are the old ceremonies; the laws of the elders; the wonder tales of Dream Time. The “we” becomes ceremony, law, story—things that cannot be surveyed, fenced, or sold, even if they can be suppressed.

Then the poem pushes further into the natural world: We are the lightening bolt over Gaphembah Hill, Quick and terrible, and the quiet daybreak paling the dark lagoon. The range here matters. “We” is not only fierce and mythic (lightning, thunder) but also tender and ordinary (daybreak over water). The poem refuses a single stereotype: it holds terror and calm, noise and quiet, as equally native. The repeated identifications also read like an emergency act of naming—saying the names before they are lost.

The most painful contradiction: to say “We are” while listing what is gone

The poem’s grief deepens when the proud litany breaks into a devastating verdict: We are nature and the past, all the old ways / Gone now and scattered. That line is a wound in the middle of the declaration. It suggests that even as the speaker claims identity, that identity is being pushed into the past tense—treated as “history” rather than a living presence.

After that, the poem’s tone becomes plainer, almost stripped of metaphor: The scrubs are gone; The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone; The bora ring is gone; The corroboree is gone. The repetition of gone works like tolling. Importantly, what’s vanishing is both ecological and cultural: scrubland, animals, ceremonial ground, ceremony itself. The poem links environmental loss to cultural destruction as parts of the same process, not separate tragedies.

A hard question the poem forces: who gets to be “modern” at whose expense?

If the bora ground can be relabeled Rubbish, what else can be renamed until it becomes unrecognizable? The poem implies that “progress” in the town—white men hurry about—requires someone else’s world to be treated as disposable. The most chilling part is how ordinary it looks: an estate agent’s notice, a busy town, a covered trace.

The closing line as both disappearance and accusation

The final words, And we are going, land with double force. On one level, it is literal: the people are being displaced, leaving their own sacred place as if they were visitors. On another level, it is historical: languages, ceremonies, and the living continuity of the “old ways” are being driven toward extinction. Yet the line is also an accusation aimed at the reader’s present. It makes “going” feel like something done to them, not chosen—an outcome produced by the sign, the town, the ants’ indifferent activity.

That is the poem’s lasting sting: it does not ask for sympathy as a substitute for justice. It shows a people asserting We belong here at the very moment the world around them is organized to prove the opposite, and it leaves us with the sound of a culture being forced into absence while still speaking in the first-person plural.