Who Knows Where: Netherspace

Where there is space, there is netherspace.

1971 to 1974. The Gove Land Rights Case is fought and lost before Justice Richard Blackburn of the Northern Territory Supreme Court. The Aboriginal Land Rights Royal Commission is adjudicated and absorbed before Justice Edward Woodward. Each man separately sat with mob and climbed into a riverbed to hear ‘em out.

Eyes clasped. Thinking big, listening deep. They returned to Darwin and separately they wrote their judgments. As I read through their reasoning I imagine the  judges scrunching their eyes closed to recall the dry riverbed and hot wind. Here were their respective answers: terra nullius, land grants from the Crown.

1990. The Mabo Land Rights Case is fought; hard to tell who won.

In his judgment, Justice Gerard Brennan made his famous quip about being reluctant to fracture the skeleton of the law. Terra nullius was not a lie about the land that Australia needed – there were plenty of others to draw on. Native title existed, some hovering set of not-entirely-usable rights existing outside of freehold title. We could use the land in certain ways if no one else was. If what we claimed was netherspace – what was left over, what was, and what wasn’t physically here in the same way that my feet were here.

In 2003, I am a ten-year old Gomeroi girl. My feet were ‘here’, somewhere.

A Gomeroi girl on Gomeroi country on which a red-brick house, industrial highway and Anglican schools  landed. Diasporic, but firmly on the earth I never left. Not exactly located, but not exactly dislocated either. Not, really, exactly anything or anywhere, conceptually or culturally speaking. Gomeroi country never left, but I left my relationship with it trapped in my peripheral vision. All those things I was told about – ceremony, Language, culture, kin – must have lived so far away from girl child me, even as I stood on their foundational spring as one of their people.

I became part of the Indigenous diaspora – blackfullas living off country, blackfullas living disconnected under colonialism. The disaspora has a lot of blackfullas.

I couldn’t get into the adjoining Gomeroi shadow in which I was sure that stuff waited for me. Although I was locked out of it, I thought about it, hard. What happens in there? What did people do in that place? Suspended, enlivened, going on furtively without me?

I yearned for the impossible – to see space without the touch of my gaze – to see that netherspace outside of me, in the skin that I was stuck to.

Netherspace was a shaky ground, but it was, and remains, my home.

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2016. David Page, the crucial ventricle and powerful sinew of Bangarra Dance Theatre, passed away. A Royal Commission into the treatment of young Aboriginal boys in the Northern Territory is announced. The Waterloo Tent Embassy is established. Treaty talks, treaty denials, treaty talks.

Huddled in compressed, safe pockets, Indigenous diasporas  in search of work, escaping violence, looking for education and opportunity, find their way to Redfern. Soft-lit streets aghast against concrete and steel jutting from the coast like mangroves. When in Redfern, these diasporas write and think of netherspaces shut off to them – deep dream imaginings of not-here, sleepy nooks of not-there. It’s not exactly a place, but an imaginary made through longing and liminality and deprivations hard and soft. For all the not-hereness, not-thereness of Aboriginality under colonisation, Redfern is the best place in Sydney to find what it means to be neither here nor there.

This only makes it all the more ghastly that Redfern is itself being driven into abstraction by gentrification, that Indigenous communities are being scattered into sparse pockets of barely affordable housing. Who now will host the netherspace – another displacement? Or are we stuck now with finding a host for imagining the imaginary – the longing for the place that held netherspace, which in turn, held longing for the very first bits of place that got cut off?

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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and intellectuals have possessed their works with space at the edge of contested terrain between Indigenous and settler.

We enjoy less clarity around the relationship that Indigenous people have between ourselves as infringing dwellers on the land of other Indigenous peoples. That is, of course, a convenient exaggeration. Indigenous peoples on this continent have a diverse and complex system of diasporic land relationships – processes and law that convey permission, protection and caution between Indigenous peoples over land. These systems were brutally compromised by the early frontier wars and by ongoing displacement. Still operational now, they less frequently govern with comparable enforceability who goes where. They can, however, govern who knows where. These are intra-Indigenous relationships that continue to be fraught.

I feel netherspace accompanying me on Gadigal lands in Sydney as keenly as it does when I journey overseas. I ask: how do I enforce my obligations to country when away from it? What makes Redfern such a potent off-country place? And what is my relationship to wherever my feet land off country? Whenever I articulate these questions as a poet, author and Indigenous legal scholar they, and my role within them, grow ever more complicated. In conversations with other Indigenous writers and thinkers, we name these same tensions. The conversation drifts back to that diasporic hub.

If conflict is productive like they say, then Redfern must be a factory.

I’m gonna walk us through this conflict and see what netherspace can be here, who makes netherspace here – and how?

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We start at the Block.

Where else could we start? Once gleefully described by non-Indigenous commentators as a hub of Indigenous poverty and crime, the rise and rise in non-Indigenous perception of the Block as a leafy and safe island in a hard city has coincided with the rise and rise of gentrification. Now, only a few hundred Indigenous people reside in Redfern.

When Redfern was at its peak as a diasporic centre in a demographic sense, the Block was its green, expansive heart. Thick with community and grass weeds clad by townhouses and the Redfern Community Centre, the land that bears the famous Aboriginal flag mural that is burned into an Indigenous collective consciousness. The flag, and the Block, are now bound by fences slightly taller than me.

2014 and 2015. The Block was the base of the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy, a protest by Aboriginal community members against the Aboriginal Housing Corporation, who had planned to construct high-cost living and commercial properties on the land that once housed community in affordable housing. The leader of the Embassy, Aunty Jenny Munro, told the Sydney Morning Herald:

I'm getting a bit old for tents but I'm prepared to do it. I'll be here for the duration. I think, as the word gets out, this is going to be a little tent city within a week.

At the height of this intra-Indigenous conflict, the community and the Aboriginal Housing Corporation were at loggerheads. There were threats to demolish the Embassy. The deadline to leave or be bulldozed came. On that glacial day early-morning trains to Redfern were packed as hundreds of protesters gathered.

The deadline came and went by midday. While we waited, we were fed with protest tales of what it took to evict some long-term diasporic residents of the Block. One of the last residents – engaged in a stand-off with a housing commission that would no longer tend to their property – had no working plumbing, no electricity, and blossoming black mould. I do not know that resident’s name. Even though their story became part of the lore around battling to remain in the home of blak netherspace offered by Redfern, I do not know where they are – or where they aren’t – now.

2016. The next netherspace protest is set up at Waterloo, an adjoining suburb into which many have fled. Waterloo, too, is becoming sleek. Gentrification works like high-grade sandpaper, stripping back the parts of Waterloo that are no longer economically aerodynamic. The punishing wind tunnel that’s set up in the place of community pushes on. It lifts people on an updraft and dumps them wherever they land. Public housing stocks are liquidated; rent surges; incomes stagnate; the wind tunnel becomes a sadistic flood. Some few hundred mob remain.

In the face of these currents, how? What’s rooted deep enough for us to cling to?

Netherspace. What’s left, what was, and what will be.

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My beloved Indigenous theorists offer their own metaphors of space that model Indigenous space on its conceptual front, with its intellectual and creative production.

Pat Dudgeon and John Fielder propose the Third Space – where conflict produces something tenuous in between ‘black’ and ‘white’ without security and outside a ‘cultural comfort zone’ that sits squarely in the corners of ‘black’ and ‘white’. The Third Space decolonises through cultural exchange, with all its resistance, fighting, fraughtness and emotion. Perhaps more accurately, it unsettles, in the plainest sense of the word.

Martin Nakata suggests the Cultural Interface, a place where Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge and concepts meet – opening up otherwise closed systems to complexity, intermingling. Turbulence. Nevertheless, in opening up to contest and chaos, the Cultural Interface is governed by the careful use of Indigenous process and protocol. At least we set the rules of engagement with lawlessness here in the Third Space Cultural Interface Badlands.

Each theory relies, to some degree, on being neither here nor there on the question of race and place. Violence, be it emotional, discursive, existential, marks and makes each theory. When do you know space better than when you’re being pushed from it?

Maybe, then, if we just withstood, and pushed back with equivalent force to that rolling in, we could retain the space or at least hold it at bay.

But metaphorical space can never be a complete model for the physical earth, for that contested, material frontier that’s at once so conceptually and resourcefully critical for stabilising colonial states.

There are more anchors, there is more force, there is simply more white mass now at the centre of Redfern than the Gadigal land that nurses it has worn, conceptually or physically. Redfern is in crisis as the home for Indigenous diaspora.

What we need to meet the current is near impossible to envisage. Even if it were possible, could that much force of any kind be mustered, be sustainable, be ethical? The force to be met is not:

Dei Cota has good rental return and convenient location. The Aboriginals have already moved out, now Redfern is the last virgin suburb close to city, it will have great potential for the capital growth in the near future.

Aileen Moreton-Robinson dissects that pathological tendency that besets colonial Australia to acquire, to put buildings up like roots go down. The desire to possess Aboriginal land possesses them in turn. Trees eager for potential growth get roots, get thirst, get rot.

In the face of that force, what meaningful stuff is made at the border of Redfern/Waterloo and this zombie-like push to possess? Maybe the conflict between Indigenous and non-Indigenous will be unproductive. But what of the porous intermingling that happens within Redfern/Waterloo diaspora, and those in Indigenous NSW who turn to it as a model hub of community?

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Redfern’s got a name for itself.

Several artistic projects have emerged from or about Redfern/Waterloo’s physical location as a hub for the off-country Indigenous self. The most obvious of these are vignettes of an imaginary hub which Aboriginal NSW needs if it’s to present a productive, resistant force to colonisation and racism.

Of these, the most obviously Redfern is Redfern Now, a two-season television series (plus telemovie) following the inter-woven lives of Aboriginal residents of Redfern. Notable episodes include: ‘Where the Heart Is’ – depicting an Aboriginal man, his daughter, and the death of his male partner; ‘Raymond’ – an Aboriginal man and his wife become entangled in their own imaginary lateral dispute within the community, and in the welfare system; and ‘Stand Up’ – where a young Aboriginal man in an elite private school leads an Indigenous strike against singing Australia’s national anthem.

In Redfern Now, Redfern acts more than as a mere proxy or convenient contextual hub within which tales of generic Indigenous issues are played out. The visual frame reveals in Redfern a lush density and richness of populace. For this the real Redfern has become the target of governments and property developers; for this it has earned its place as the nub of Aboriginal NSW. But the Redfern Now Redfern buzzes on, comparatively unfazed.

There is something else that’s speculative in this imaginary Redfern. It’s a place to explore the elastic potential of Aboriginality as ethnicity or race or multicultural frame of reference – rather than the perhaps more precise position as The Indigenous, with all that reference to land and country and placed-ness that that denotes. In the real Redfern, there is little about Aboriginality that can be explained solely by treating us a racial minority in a migrant nation, regardless of how the glowing multicultural discourse that has blossomed in other parts of Sydney might pitch it.

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I remember 2013, when the first season of Redfern Now was broadcast, and the seeding hope I had in building some common community. I was a student then at the University of Technology Sydney, adjacent to Redfern in Ultimo. The episode ‘Stand Up’ in particular, tenderly primed the ground for that seedling. I, like, Joel the protagonist, had attended a majority white private high school on a scholarship and found those hairline conflicts and throat-clenching guilt wherever I turned.

Third Spaces? Cultural Interfaces? Badlands?

They weren’t unproductive, but they did produce Indigenous responses predominately in their favour. But Redfern had that bustling, scalding activism that made the conflict between Indigenous and non-Indigenous either totally unproductive on settler stakes, or at least productive on Indigenous stakes.

When I found myself living next to Redfern after high school, I felt the power that radiated out of it. It radiated even as it became apparent that some vague something was trying to dislodge and scatter it.

Redfern never displayed the ‘eat our food and be tolerant’ multiculturalism for which white Australia had such relish, and with which many minorities were yoked. It was literally grounded, and it had a clear metaphor for itself as a representative place. Aboriginal, here, in place, with right, withstanding. Settler colonialism, cold wind coming in from the furthest possible place to pathologically disperse. When I watched ‘Stand Up’, I saw that scalding hot upsurge and resistance – and it did not have the steadfastness of place and colonial opposition that I had anticipated.

I watched it in my Ultimo student studio called ‘gumal ngurang’, about a kilometre from the Block. My then-girlfriend, a Wiradjuri woman from Parramatta, and I traded looks as two parents discussed their son’s abstention from the national anthem:

Nic: ‘I want you to tell our son that there's no shame in standing up and singing the national anthem. Can you do that?’

Eddie: ‘I could, but, Joely, what do you reckon? Should a whitefella stand up and do a blackfella corroboree? Well, should a blackfella stand up and sing a whitefella's anthem - their corroboree? I don't know. It just doesn't feel right.’

Eddie: ‘No matter what, I don't care who asks you to sing it, you don't sing it, okay?’

To this exchange, the woman from Parramatta just said: ‘Whitefulla corroboree?’ We turned back to watch the rest of the episode. But her quip imprints a little more significance on me now. We both baulked at the national anthem because it represented an unrepentant nation state that came upon us without much regard for us – not some divide over whether singing it would be appropriate or appropriation. That exchange keeps bringing me back to a discomfort with dialogues that skim around race and participation and permission in Aboriginal affairs, dialogues without confrontation, dialogues that don’t touch the ‘colonial problem’ that plagues us beyond interpersonal racism.

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It’s no coincidence that we gravitate to Redfern.

Redfern isn’t to Aboriginal diaspora as Melbourne is to Greek diaspora. Redfern is at once place and race; therein lies its significance to Aboriginal NSW. Therein also lies its burden as a netherspace. By virtue of our Aboriginality, we will never be more than a diaspora in Redfern, except those of us who are Gadigal. It can never just be race or nation alone.

Redfern is bound to be netherspace forever because of this. But Redfern, as an aspirational netherspace for our writing and our hoping, and those within it must always agitate for us. The Block is the home of rally after rally. Redfern’s community are made a case study for Aboriginal affairs in much the same way a canary is made a case study for mineshaft safety. Redfern makes momentum and the energy to keep it going for all Indigenous persons in NSW and Australia, almost like a parliament for our interests. It didn’t ask for this responsibility, but it got it and now off-country aspirants like me burden it with our own desires for it to constitute us, some hundreds of nations with some common, some divergent interests. Without funding, with right. Without state recognition, but withstanding.

10 December 1992. I was in the womb of my mother in golden Gunnedah. I gave her bladder problems and she ate liquorice and chocolate Paddle Pops in between working at a dentist and languishing on a couch, keen to have me out.

I imagine her on the couch doing a bit of pregnant languishing when the Redfern Address made it onto the television. The Redfern Address resonated around Redfern, is still resonating around the continent even though the message might be fading. This was never a literary text that grew out of Redfern, but it did rely on Redfern’s quasi-parliamentary status in contemporary Indigenous Australia. It was delivered by a white Prime Minister, Paul Keating. It was undoubtedly one of the most mature white-delivered addresses on Indigenous affairs before or since – a low standard – but it too became trapped by the perilous race/place dynamic. The Redfern Address needed Redfern because of its significance as place to Aboriginality but got stuck in a multicultural discourse that clung to ethnic constructions of Aboriginality for stability. It needed a simple pitch that treated Redfern like a racial, not a spatial, proxy. Inter-racial conflict, inter-racial reconciliation.

Keating said:

[This] is a test of our self-knowledge…Of how well we know the land we live in…
In Redfern it might be tempting to think that the reality Aboriginal Australians face is somehow contained here, and that the rest of us are insulated from it…

…We non-Aboriginal Australians should perhaps remind ourselves that Australia once reached out for us.

And then, those famed confessions that have echoed into this century:

We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice.

To which that old girlfriend would probably say: ‘Which Australia once reached out to you?’.

But if there was a hidden text to the Redfern Address, one that revealed what the speechwriter had not meant to convey, it was that wrapping up the symbolic Redfern problem was a profoundly white investment into a sanitised national conscience. Not one that cared too much about the acquisition of place and at what cost that came to Aboriginal people, but that cared about racial harmony. A quiet, rent-paying Redfern.

Redfern is a sentimental space for white Australia – not a reminder of what it had done, but what it, the noble egalitarian society was charged to ‘fix’: us and our curiously causeless shortcomings. Redfern was our netherspace because we were diasporic. We were diasporic because white Australia had etched that land out for itself – attempted to make it their space.

Netherspace is a place not just for us, but we are its netherpeople.

Despite Keating’s confidence ‘that we will succeed in this decade’, he didn’t. The Indigenous and non-Indigenous border conflict produced nothing for us – a conflict-guilt factory for a conflict-guilt nation.

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I was born in 1993 to see the actual, lingering, near-permanent success of Redfern when I moved a few suburbs over some seventeen years later – its resilience. Go to the netherspace in Redfern and its surrounds now. See its deft cut and stitch of the race/place seam. Sometimes in protests, sometimes as acts of survival at dawn, at lunch, at three am, protest poems stream from its streets and into your shoes like Sydney’s storm drains failed to hold it in.

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Where can I find netherspace?

We’re looming large now, out from Redfern and into the bigger netherspaces of the First Nations.

As a poet, I’m preoccupied with the way poetry peels itself from place, or sticks itself on. Poetry in particular seems to feature, but not exactly suffer, from a drifting that could be categorised as netherspace. Not just at Redfern. Indigenous poets memorialise, reify, deify, tenderly embrace, put their backs to netherspace as redress for coloniality.

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Netherspace moves.

Close to the centre of Sam Wagan Watson’s Love Poems and Death Threats lies a two-page, seven-stanza poem: ‘El Diablo Highway’. It opens:

El Diablo Highway is not a songline like those trails of yesterday, before the land’s fabric was restitched with veins both barbed and trip-wired.

What else remains to be said? Imprecise, brute colonial force tries to write over songlines, but they endure, woven in place. New borders establish themselves, enforceable against Indigenous and brown outsider alike. Memory of the land that holds the highway remains; the highway remains a vector for coloniality. Netherspace, somewhere based in being and remembering at once, is the home of Aboriginality – in transit on El Diablo Highway. Never stopping netherspace, where ‘no-one should ever come to a full-halt on this stretch’;‘carjacking’ and the ‘crossroads’ threaten life and limb.

Natalie Harkin’s Dirty Words too, is in motion and restless. The collection commands the naked vulnerability of the reader’s feet to the earth where healing might take place. Harkin threads the race/place seam with activism. In ‘Sovereignty’, Harkin writes of walking and walk-offs, moving from physical places to actions of resistance and resilience – always in motion against the frontier and forging its own metaphorical space within which hope and some rolling momentum might bloom. Until then, we retain the netherspace of transience; the reconciliation walk across a harbour bridge; the Wave Hill Walk Off; the long walk that respects women’s business right way. Harkin issues a decree to:

keep walking           remember more
take off your shoes
let the land speak      heal     your feet
feel the earth find your stride...

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In transit or on the highway, netherspace remembers and haunts where it lands.

Occasionally, in our writing, netherspace bends itself across time like a bridge. The pathological white belongings of which Moreton-Robinson writes take space in its present form, and its potential – exploitable, habitable capital of all kinds. Indigenous netherspace has time as its fourth dimension – what land and its people always were, always are and always will be. The race/place divide here makes netherspace real, so close to be tangible – a racialised ability emanating from Indigenous knowledges of space to inhabit the potential and the definite of a world that we see.

Ellen van Neerven peels verse from that netherspace in ‘Pelicans’, from her recent release Comfort Food. When I first heard this poem, Ellen and I were both at in a Marrickville warehouse – one bus ride away from Redfern. The room was silent.

the pelicans are leaving us…
fly
fly away
something happened here.

Without much of an indication of where (we’re shown a coastal jetty, describing many blue-grey sky, brown pebble places), this netherspace spreads out. Ephemeral – everywhere is haunted by ‘bad air’ and the probably-certainly violence of colonial frontiers old and young.

That bad air felt especially heavy in another sparse Indigenous community who’d already fled Redfern, driven out by gentrification. Indigenous services in Marrickville are shifting out west. The Aboriginal Medical Service is losing its Western Sydney branch because of funding constraints, but retaining its first, famous Redfern base. Out to the west of Sydney it is for these tiny pockets caught in the wind. Disintegrated, but strong, Western Sydney contains the greatest number of Aboriginal people in Australia. Time gave another dimension to space – took it out of the observable and into the possible, the known and the speculated. That’s where the bad air is.

Two suburbs over from The Block, sparse and running with the bad air and the exclusion from housing and services. Where can van Neerven’s pelicans escape to?

As Ali Cobby Eckerman’s work ‘Killing Fields’ in Love Dreaming and Other Poems might suggest, nowhere is altogether safe. It follows a conversation between the speaker and the guide:

did they kill ‘em here?...
why? do you
feel something?...
nah! I say
it’s just that
they got killed
every other place
I been to.
not here.

The potentiality of colonial slaughter follows an Aboriginal visitor on another’s country. In Redfern, where many Aboriginal visitors are physically present, and others are present in the Redfern imaginary, it’s made explicit.

Did they kill them here? A source of triumph where they didn’t.

1788. We know what happened at Botany Bay just down the road. We know what happened to countless in Redfern before it was called Redfern. It remembers, too. It’s got murals, signs; it’s got oral histories and oral rememberings of the frontier.

2004 til now. Plaques continually attempted to be erected for TJ Hickey, a young man killed in police pursuit, are taken down. One, made in 2005, read:

On the 14th February, 2004, TJ Hickey, aged 17, was impaled upon the metal fence above, arising from a police pursuit. The young man died as a result of his wounds the next day. In our hearts you will stay TJ.

It was refused its place on the wall, but perhaps its absence tells its own story – remembering with great precision and remembering so as to not forget. Uprisings in Redfern following his death too marked the violence of it – netherspace rememberings made hard, made very present, made very very compelling. Even Redfern Now’s ‘Little Boy Blue’ broadcast a fiction of that very real event; youth rioting after a death in custody. It remains a shared remembering throughout Indigenous NSW, whether there or in the Redfern that sits in our imaginary.

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2012. I am walking home from Redfern train station. The words of Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s ‘Municipal Gum’ fill the streets with a breath. Surrounded by native trees, entrapped in concrete pathways, just the sound of my feet dodging the ridges in the concrete made by their roots growing out in search. Rarely do Aboriginal writers romanticise the ‘bush’ as the sole proper way of being Indigenous; the tender love of Redfern in Aboriginal society at least indicates that the romance is cliché. It is perhaps more common to think of Redfern a representing not the dislocation of Aboriginal people , who by the grace of colonisation have ended up in the city it made. How empty these streets would be without us.

Gumtree in the city street
hard bitumen around your feet…
O fellow citizen
What have they done to us?

The violence that forces us into netherspace is clear, especially as a populace made of hundreds of nations. This lament for the tree stings. I remember it walking home as the tree’s roots tripped me up; refusing the concrete and me. The trees are there. The trees are growing out. Municipal gums are resisting containment, big in space and empowered by that inherent, unthinking knowledge that trees hold – of netherspace. Where to be, what to seek and what to need. And to those concrete-splitting, path-complicating roots, I flee in my person and in my mind like many Aboriginal thinkers and writers before me.

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2016. No, the Aboriginal people aren’t moving out.

Like the municipal gum, white Australia likes Aboriginal Australia in its space as decoration.

What better decoration than a monument to what was? Except, ten-year-old girl child me was wrong about netherspace – it was never about what was, but what is. We continue to live. We continue to culture.

The force coming in to Redfern is crushing, but Aboriginal people are stronger still. Redfern is its most potent when it is unashamedly a haven for Indigenous NSW – not just physically, but as a stalwart for what can remain and what we share. And where this takes place is not always on The Block, but in its knotty psychogeography.

Its roots extend out and sustain – what was once self-nourished terrain will be again.

Netherspace, the race/place divide, the frontier, journeying and remembering all have their seams in Redfern. While Redfern resists colonisation and produces through intra-racial conflict, a greater mandate for it still is what it can create out of the Indigenous diaspora. Lateral terrain, lateral sustenance.

Parallel worlds that sit somewhere outside of the eye’s view, but that startle like sudden shadows. Remembering what haunts on-country and off-country blaks alike. Slipping in and out of peripheral vision.

What happens when it is there without me? I thought about it, hard.
2017.

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References

Pat Dudgeon, and John Fielder. Third spaces within tertiary places: Indigenous Australian studies. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 16(5) (2006): 396-409.
Ali Cobby Eckermann, Love dreaming and other poems (Vagabond Press, 2012)
Natalie Harkin, Dirty Words (Cordite, 2015)
Patricia Karvelas and Gina Rishton, Redfern apartment marketer spruiks ‘Aboriginal exit’, The Australian (December 10, 2014).
Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015), ‘I still call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging and Place in a Postcolonising Society’, in The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty, pp 3-18.
Martin Nakata, (1997). The Cultural interface: An exploration of the intersection of Western knowledge systems and Torres Strait Islander positions and experiences. Unpublished doctoral thesis. James Cook University, Townsville.
Oodgeroo Noonuccal, ‘Municipal Gum’ in The Dawn is at Hand (Jacaranda Press, 1966)
Ellen Van Neerven, Comfort Food (UQP, 2016)
Sam Wagan Watson, Love Poems and Death Threats (UQP, 2014)