AustLit

'In 1948, after many years living with the Wonguri-Mandjigai people, Ronald M. Berndt published an English language translation of a non sacred song of the Sand-fly Clan: the Song Cycle of The Moon-Bone. In 1977 Les Murray wrote his own version based on the Berndt translation The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle, a white man's revision. 2016: Murray’s revision gets a revision, a homosemantic emulation (a translation from English into English retaining the cadence, mood and sound). Aboriginal To Nowhere transgresses Murray’s vision of city folk holidaying on grandma’s farm and signals a contemporary poetry of dispossession and anti-sentiment, ventures into transliminal territory and explores those in-between places of perpetual generational change; it is a text hyperaware of incremental shifts in the semiotic simulation humans call reality.'

Source: Abstract.