Dark Secrets Summary

Dark Secrets

Summary

Dark Secrets are those secrets that one doesn’t want to reveal. This poem is about the experience of Australian Aboriginals in the past. How the white women and children made fun of the aboriginals during colonization in Australia. 

It is also about the resilience/ability to recover from the hard times of these aboriginals before and after the colonization. The poet is talking about the sufferings given by the white Australians (colonizers or settlers) to her aunts and grandmother (aboriginals or natives).

She says that the white Australians sing this song every day. “God made the little… paint them white”

The aboriginals were mostly locked inside a small or large boundary. They were not given equal rights and were considered uncivilized. They were denied the right to have food at their own will. The children were forcefully taken away from the parents.

The whites say that they look like angels and the aboriginals look like apes.  God has made them only at the last moment. The whites portray themselves as savior and the natives as savages. Without them the aboriginals would have been savages forever including the poet.

Their way of civilizing the aboriginals was very rough and brutal. they always try to convert them to Christianity. They make fun of the aboriginals saying that when they die and go to heaven they will look like bats.

The aboriginals were so happy without the whites or the colonizers. They feel that if they were not discovered they would have lived happily without any regrets.