First Nations literatures

In a colony where blatant police brutality against Indigenous people is the norm, where we suffer the continued desecration of sacred land, live within a health and mortality gap, and a government that seeks to undermine sovereignty in all its forms, we need poets that can see all this – and still celebrate the joy, resilience and love of our community.

‘A testament to love and joy in the face of ongoing dispossession, continued violence and lack of recognition of the rights of First Nations peoples in Canada and abroad.’

Tony Birch tells incredibly important stories incredibly well and Dark as Last Night is both an antidote and a lullaby in pandemic times.

Story by story, what emerges is a belonging to Country, one which is grounded in knowing and in knowledge.

Today, Indigenous people are asserting their rights to their cultural inheritances, and are reclaiming their cultures. They have continued to practise culture, and the fact that they have had their land stolen makes it even more of a treasure – a gift, a legacy, a heritage that is precious and passed on to the next generations.

In Araluen’s work spirits and ghosts speak from beyond, above and below the layers of colonial time to remind us of past in present and present in past intertwined and unresolved.

In Nardi Simpson’s impressive debut novel Song of the Crocodile the fictional colonial town Darnmoor ‘itself is nothing’. It is a construction to begin with and for the sovereign Billymil family it doesn’t exist; they are Yuwaalaraay people, removed from their custodial lands and relegated to the Campgrounds on the edge of the town when Darnmoor was built over their Country.

Right from its opening line: ‘The white boys stare at us from the pub’, this story brings its readers into the First Nations community of south coast of NSW and into the realm of Aboriginal protagonist Jackson on the cusp of adulthood.

Since the invasion the settler diaspora has demonstrated its fascination with and obsession for bigness – the vast, the immense, the wide. This preoccupation manifests itself on the physical landscape in all sorts of crass shapes and forms. There is the Big Banana, the Big Prawn, the Big Potato, the Big Pineapple, just to name a few. These scars of the physical environment cross the settler psyche as well through the repeated discourse of ‘nation’, the ‘national anthem’, ‘ordinary Australians’ and the ‘wide brown land’. Kwaymullina asks: ‘What is bigness other than a network of small places? What is this nation other than an interconnected network of Indigenous locales invaded and now occupied by different settler diasporas?’

‘Blak anthologies unsettle Australian literary whiteness, which has often marginalised, and categorised First Nations work through stereotypes, assuming it falls into narratives of protest or disadvantage. Guwayu pushes against this, creating what Leane terms ‘a radical intervention in Aboriginal publishing for its breadth of representation, diversity of language, and drafting and editing protocols’. And while a groundswell of Blak anthologies are emerging, there’s a continued need to push Blak practice further, evident in the uneven way this work is often perceived by the industry.’