Live Encounters Poetry & Writing June 2026
Turrunburra Middens, poems by Nigel Spence.
Turrunburra Middens
Bank-embedded, trail speckle litter
diffuses in casuarina-rooted Turrunburra alluvium.
Fragmented badanyi, gadyan, hairy mussel,
in a long line mosaic stretching back before Byzantium.
Quiet antiquity without monument,
form and place same same,
as country ingests feast fragments.
Maugro bones, crab shell, daringyan cartilage,
absorbed in a second consumption.
Wallumai and wallumil, badiwa and burra are long gone.
Hardier porcelainate remains remind of millennia
interrupted, yet unsilenced Wallemudegal
stories seep from tidal soil
conjuring figures along the sandy marrang.
Splash and spear, small smoke, oyster cut
by sparse yarn and birdsong, djanaba bilya.
This valley I thought I knew,
tracing its lines a mere three generations,
child’s play beneath overhangs,
fishing for eel with bread on a bent pin,
never knowing the words:
gibba, yerung, ngurra, yura.
Driving roads based with shell grit,
historic homes mortared
by the limeburner’s midden-stacked fire,
never knowing the words:
bembul, guwarra, gwianga, badu.
Sounds in the shells, stories in the sand.
Dharug translations
badanyi – Sydney rock oyster; badiwa – flathead; badu – water; bara –
fish hook made from shell; bembul (bemal) – earth; burra – eel; daringyan –
stingray; djanaba bilya – laughter; gadyan – Sydney cockle; gibba – rock; guwarra
(guwayana) – wind; gwianga (guwiyang) – earth; maugro – fish; ngurra –
environment; Turrunburra – Lane Cove River; wallumai – snapper fish;
Wallumedegal (Wallumettagal) – traditional custodians of the Ryde / Hunters Hill
area; wallumil – bull head shark; yerung – trees; yura (iyora) – people.
(Attenborough, V. 2002, Sydney’s Aboriginal past, UNSW;
https://dharug.dalang.com.au/language/ accessed August 2021 and November 2025)
Citriodora
© Nigel Spence
Nigel Spence is an emerging poet who lives on Wallemudegal land (Hunters Hill), in Sydney. He worked for many years as a child and family social worker, child rights advocate, and CEO with overseas aid agency ChildFund before completing a PhD and working as a research fellow and associate lecturer at the University of New South Wales and University of Wollongong. His lifelong hankering for poetry has found time for expression in recent years, and the poems are coming. His poetry has been longlisted for the Lane Cove Poetry Prize, and he is a regular contributor in Mark Tredinnick’s Poetry Studio.