AustLit

'Noongar and Yawuru poet and academic Elfie Shiosaki writes in the introduction to her new poetry collection, Homecoming, that it is the story of four generations of Noongar women of which she is the sixth. The poems are ‘fragments of many stars’ in her ‘grandmothers’ constellations’. Shiosaki ‘tracks her grandmothers’ stars’ to find her ‘bidi home’. The introduction reads as a beautifully crafted prose poem that contextualises the works that follow.'  (Introduction)

'Since the invasion of Australia in 1788, First Nations Peoples have been forced into the literary images of the colonisers. We have been described as noble savages, vermin, half-castes, temptresses, and problems, just to name a few. Our entrapment in the literary canon of the invading settlers is what constructed and maintained the colonial mythscape of the modern nation of Australia.' (Introduction)

'A callout for a poetry of consciousness ‘that enacts and is responsible for what it considers’, that has been written with an awareness of ‘crises, brinks and redress’, was always going to bring some powerful and confronting work. We also hoped for poetry with contiguous capacity for social justice, community awareness and social and emotional wellbeing, and we feel that we have been able to select and collate such poems here. There are many different causes, convictions and concerns addressed in these poems, but the act of showing concern and suggesting a wish for positive change – for asserting a sense of justice and seeking that justice – is inherent in different ways in most if not all of the poems in this issue.' (John Kinsella and Jeanine Leane, Editorial introduction)

'Within the white imagination there is an invisible charter of rights that I hear frequently quoted, touted, lauded: It is my right to imagine whatever I want! My imagination is free! So encoded is this invisible charter of rights that insists that the white imagination has no limits that all peoples and places deemed as 'other' become carte blanche - a blank white page for their imaginations to write.' (Introduction)

'I chose to read this work through the poet’s chosen vessel, the throat. Finishing it left me with my heart right there – beating at the back of my throat; in awe of what I had just read, and in suspenseful anticipation of what is to come.' (Introduction)

'I travel Country, like my Old People done. I see the Country, like my Old People done I burn Country, like my Old People done. I sing Country, like my Old People done
- Jacob Morris, Ban Maganindadjyang (My Old People Done)

'Guwayu, For All Times is a collection of First Nations poems commissioned by Red Room Poetry over the past 16 years, and is a radical literary intervention for its breadth of representation, temporal depth and diversity of language.

'This fiercely uncensored collection features 61 poems from First Nations poets in 12 First Nations languages, and together they are an exquisite expression of living First Nations culture.

'Journey through a range of poetic forms from lyric, confessional, protest, narrative and song, showcasing new voices and established poets.

'Guwayu is edited by Wiradjuri poet, Dr Jeanine Leane, produced by Red Room Poetry, a leading arts organisation committed to making poetry in meaningful ways, and published by Magabala Books, Australia's leading Indigenous publisher.' (Publication summary)

'False Claims of Colonial Thieves is the founding myth of colonial Australia. Yamaji poet Charmaine Papertalk Green and settler poet John Kinsella launch into the long overdue conversation Australia needs to have between the Country’s First Peoples and the settler-invaders. Australia needs this radical intervention in publishing to move forward in dialogue with First Nations people.' (Introduction)

'On 13 July 2019, in the middle of Canberra’s notoriously hard winter, Australia lost a literary treasure and lifelong activist whose work and writing was, in her own lifetime at least, largely unsung. Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert (1956 – 2019) was an Elder of the Wiradjuri nation whose journey in this life began on the banks of the Kalari river in Condobolin, central-western New South Wales, as the youngest of eight children in what she described as a ‘blended family, sixty years before the term became fashionable’. All eight children were raised by Mummy, Aunty Joyce Hutchings, who was the elder sister of Kerry’s father, the poet and activist Kevin Gilbert. Aunty Kerry’s memoir The Cherry Picker’s Daughter is above all a tribute to the home-front activism of Aboriginal women, which all too often goes unnoticed.' (Introduction)

'‘You’re not Australian…are you?’ asks the Professor from White-Sands when she overhears me introducing myself to Roberto in the breakfast room in Guangzhou, on my first morning in China.' (Introduction)

'It was a grey Canberra morning, mid-winter that she passed. A big mob of kuracca flew in over the suburb where we were neighbours for nearly two decades. Booming across the sky, they swept in low over the backyard where she used to scatter seeds. Always big mobs came.' (Introduction(

'BlakWork by Alison Whittaker is a unique hybrid of poetry, memoir, reportage, legal documentation, fiction, non-fiction, satire, and social commentary. But to label it – to assign it a genre among the vast array of western categories that exist, would I think, risk oversimplification. It is a work that defies both genre and gender categorisations and the restrictions imposed by colonialism to situate itself at the centre of many intersections; and it both embraces and interrogates these spaces from within. At the core of all these intersections is Whittaker’s Aboriginality – her Gomeroi Country and culture.' (Introduction)