It was first published in The Bulletin magazine on 7 July 1954, and later in the poet's poetry collection The Two Fires (1955).
[2] In an essay titled "Aboriginal Writers in Australia", published in Tharunka, John B. Beston notes: "Of all the white poets, Judith Wright has the deepest sense of Australia's past, before and after European settlement.
In her poem "At Cooloolah" she reminds us that: Those dark-skinned people who once named Cooloolah knew that no land is lost by wars, for earth is spirit: the invader's feet will tangle in nets there and his blood be thinned by fears.
She campaigned hard to protect the Cooloola coloured sands against mining and to defend the Great Barrier reef and Fraser Island, much to the manifest displeasure of the then reactionary, oppressive Queensland Coalition government.
She dared us not just to see the scalding truth of the dispossession and exploitation of Aboriginal land and society, but also to take political action to redress this grinding injustice.