First Nations literatures

Guwayu – a Wiradjuri word – means still and yet and for all times. Guwayu means all times are inseparable; no time is ever over; and all times are unfinished. Guwayu – For All Times releases the arrested times of the Country’s First Peoples held captive in the colonial calendar, and frees kidnapped memories held hostage to false claims of settlement, nationhood, sovereignty and justice. In all First Nations languages, there is a word for all times. And now there is a time for these words. Guwayu breaks the silence Munro’s poem speaks of to unleash the beauty of First Nations words that have been and always will be here.

It has only been four years since Mununjali Yugambeh poet Ellen van Neerven’s first volume, Comfort Food, appeared. While central to both collections are the experiences of young queer First Nations identity in settler Australia, Throat extends the work of Comfort Food from the retrospective of the four years that have passed since its writing. And, certainly much has happened.

The Yield is about the elementary miracle of rediscovering oneself; of finding, in the neon-lit recesses of lived and historical pain, a home. It is about the history of this continent as told through the history of Wiradjuri culture. And it is about the fact of this culture existing as a living, breathing work in progress.

We are the wordsmiths of the world; we spoke seven to ten languages and used long and complex words in all of them to explain long and complex philosophical statements. We should not apologise for being good with words and their use – it is our heritage.

One billion animals don’t just die without retribution. Some strong message was saying that were doing things all the way wrong and that a shelter-in-place could provide some food for thought on what we could do next.

Culture might not live off Country, in the city, but all culture will be lost if the child is taken; a child taken by the welfare system loses Country anyway, and at the same time they lose their family.

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.

While Archival-Poetics is predominantly text-based, I would not call it a book/s. Like most First Nations knowledge, it does not fit easily into Western categories. To me it felt more like a dream or a deep yarn or a walk through an exhibition –possibly all at the same time. The work is a collection, an archive in its own right, albeit a personal one.

Whittaker uses English as both an object of ridicule and a tool of empowerment. In subverting the conventional rules of usage, she makes it her own. In her hand, English does and says and tells a different story. Audre Lorde said that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. And they won’t. But Blak writers like Whittaker use these tools to carve out their own spaces to build other story – to re-story Country with the old stories, and to create new ones.

Too Much Lip is, of course, not the first novel to include family violence or to expose its colonial roots. There are, however, risks with telling stories like these. Non-Indigenous readers could fail to recognise the strength of culture to mitigate intergenerational trauma, and not understand its roots in colonial violence and systemic racism. Some readers might see the Salters through an over-used deficit model, or believe they have the solutions to ‘fix’ Indigenous families. Instead, the Salters’ story shows how ineffective governments have been in trying to patch up the wounds of colonisation through paternalistic and draconian approaches.