AustLit

'It licks at the edges of the colonisers' language. It hems it into a workable, imperfect shape. It tears through the settlers' plantations, their arrangements of the trees and their form. It takes its restorative heat to the right flora, which release their seeds and bear down hard for the burn. It loosens and enriches nutrients from the top of the ecology. It brings them down to bring other things up. Fire Front, a thin and precise incision into the colonial Australian imagination, is ready when the wind changes. When the wind changes, everything that is burning becomes the front. Big. Bigger and more powerful than we could have ever envisioned.' (Introduction) 
 

'Hey ancestor, you talking to me?

'Country time everyday.

'I know, I know, but wouldn’t you know it, it’s the 26th of January again, old Whitefella Day.

'Party time for some, sad day for others.' 

'Although not the first song about the enforced separation of Indigenous children from their families, Archie Roach’s song, based on his own life and experience, was released at a time when there was increasing public focus on the Stolen Generations. The significance of the song also resonated outside the Indigenous community with Roach winning ARIA Awards for Best Indigenous Release and Best New Talent in 1991. Took the Children Away received an international Human Rights Achievement Award, the first time that the award had been bestowed on a songwriter.'

Source: NFSA (https://www.nfsa.gov.au/collection/curated/took-children-away-archie-roach). Sighted: 21/02/2019)

'Aboriginal poetics have always existed. Or, at least, they fulfil every sense of always that we have access to: yaburuhma, the kind of eternal that spirals out a constant across time and space; forever, the kind of promise we make to spread between every time. Since the land, since the land made us shape, since the land gave us voice, since we had learned enough to inscribe it back, since we took up tools tossed here by the uninvited. We sing it back as it is sung back to us in every bird song, every branch ache, every wave heave. The form has changed, as have we, but the songlines still hum in the soil while we read and write upon it.' (Introduction)
 

Judges Report : In Alison Whittaker’s ‘MANY GIRLS WHITE LINEN’, which placed equal first, the plight of First Nations peoples is front and centre. Through its torsional rhymes and rhythms, the poem eviscerates the iconic whiteness of Picnic at Hanging Rock and stuns with its own iconic imagery: ‘amongst gums collecting grit / where blak girls hang / nails’. The poem is, to quote Whittaker, ‘raw rousing horrifying’.