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This book is concerned with the complexities of defining 'place', of observing and 'seeing' place, and how we might write a poetics of place. From Kathy Acker to indigenous Australian poet Jack Davis, the book touches on other writers and theorists, but in essence is a hands-on book of poetic practice. The work extends John Kinsella's theory of 'international regionalism' and posits new ways of reading the relationship between place and individual, between individual and the natural environment, and how place occupies the person as much as the person occupies place. It provides alternative readings of writers through place and space, especially Australian writers, but also non-Australian. Further, close consideration is given to being of 'famine-migrant' Irish heritage and the complexities of 'returning'. A close-up examination of 'belonging' and exclusion is made on a day-to-day basis. The book offers an approach to creating poems and literary texts constituted by experiencing multiple places, developing a model of polyvalent belonging known as 'polysituatedness'. It works as a companion volume to Kinsella's earlier Manchester University Press critical work, Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape to Lyricism.
how Indigenous Australians used them as food. 2 This example typifies Atkinson’s immersive and experiential interest in plant-life: she once sent a jar of ‘native cranberry’ jam to the Sydney Horticultural Society to allow its members to taste a fruit about which she had written. 3 She celebrated native plants and wildlife, learning about them from the Indigenous men and women she knew. She even attempted to introduce a ‘Native Arts’ column to the Illustrated Sydney News in the early 1850s that would deal with Indigenous Australian culture. The feature ran
Empire. In Australia, James Cook’s Endeavour journals provide the first hundred or so Indigenous words collected, in the Guugu Yimidhirr language of Cape York Peninsula. Early attempts to learn Australian Indigenous languages tended to be undertaken by individuals marked by a personal curiosity and, often, close relationships with particular Indigenous individuals or groups. Yet because of the vast array and complexity of Indigenous Australian languages – estimated to be over 300 in the precolonial period – the task was difficult; the work was local and inchoate
of poetic narrative. He took the first steps in this direction in 1966 with the composition of the long poem the man with seven toes. The poem was inspired by the Australian artist Sidney Nolan’s series of paintings recreating the story of Eliza Fraser, who was shipwrecked off the coast of Queensland in 1836 and compelled to live for several months in an indigenous Australian community. Mrs Fraser was eventually accosted by Bracefell, an escaped convict, who led her to safety through the bush, only to be betrayed back into custody by his companion at the
Aboriginal prophecies and curses affecting an invasive European culture. In the former an Aboriginal tribe warns of an apocalyptic great wave that will destroy the modern city of Sydney, whilst in Kadaicha (as with the film Poltergeist ) ruthless property developers build over a sacred Aboriginal burial site. Both films demonstrate the distance that exists between cultures, with non-Indigenous Australians
, along with the shriek, or squawk, or call. The parrot – ostensibly non-threatening – is loud, bright, defiant. The still moment is lit up by the colour alone. A reminder of presence in landscape, a vestigial consciousness of dreamtime agency haunts non-indigenous parrot poetry. Skrzynecki was once termed a ‘migrant’ poet, a strange liminal term that owes its origins to shifts in population following the Second World 26 Pastoral, landscape, place War, but is obviously applicable to non-indigenous Australians generally. Consciousness of newness in a place is
father as his dream of an indigenous Australian motor industry come true, the whole enterprise is a dream based on American money. Another emblem is formed by the thread of images about prisons already noticed. Herbert’s period in prison is one of a number of gaol images, including the house he builds for Phoebe and the cages in the emporium for the pets and for the Badgery family members (536–7). With the implicit link back to the convict past of Australia, made explicit in episodes like the finding of convict thumb-prints on the bricks of the emporium (542), the gaol
, the southern subtropical zone Coetzee appears to outline in actuality forms the most inhabited part of the hemisphere.) We notice, however, the extent to which this ‘one south’ defies expression, even for a writer as magisterially fluent as Coetzee. It can only be designated in so many unspecific phrases: ‘in a certain way … in a certain way … in a certain way’. For Indigenous Australian writer Alexis Wright in her phantasmagoric epic Carpentaria (2006), set in the Gulf country of north-western Queensland, the south is at times the place from which corrupt and
creatures, human and otherkind’ (1996: 9). More recently, Anne Elvey has defined this term more inclusively to include ‘both those we understand as living (e.g., fleas, whales, and eucalypts) and those we understand otherwise (e.g., glaciers, sand, and air)’ (2014: 36). 4 ‘Caring for country’ should not be confused with Western ecofeminist ‘ethics of care’. It has a foundation in traditional ecological knowledge (‘Law’), rather Deep sustainability 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 71 than sentiment (although Indigenous Australians do evince a high degree of affective
Wellington, Mitchell made it a practice to name colonial sites after battle sites in Spain. 45 He also had a problematic relationship with Indigenous Australians, which is commemorated in a controversial portrait, a silhouette lithograph by William Fernyhough ( Figure 3.6 ). 46 Figure 3.6 William Fernyhough, ‘Portrait of Sir Thomas Mitchell’, in Album of Portraits, Mainly of New South Wales Officials , lithograph, 1836 In this portrait, which echoes a famous silhouette of the Duke of Wellington, Mitchell is presented with a riding crop and spurs. Most