A Minor Thesis Presented by

SHARI KOCHER

318288

to

The School of Culture and Communication The University of Melbourne

in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS IN CREATIVE WRITING

in the field of

Creative Writing 760-553

Supervisor: Associate Professor Kevin Brophy

Due Date: 9 November 2009

This thesis consists of two parts.

Part One: Critical Component

Modes and Codes of Silence in Indigenous Women’s Poetry: exploring radical notions of listening in some examples of cross-cultural poetic dialogue

Part Two: Creative Component

Silence and its Thinking Thoughts: Selected Poems

I declare that this thesis is my own work, and that due acknowledgement has been made to all other material used.

Signature:______

Date:______

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS ______

PART ONE

Modes and Codes of Silence in Indigenous Women’s Poetry: exploring radical notions of listening in some examples of cross-cultural poetic dialogue………………. …………………5-46

Bibliography……………………………………………………...47-49

PART TWO Silence and its Thinking Thoughts: Selected Poems

The Steady Circle of Silence with its Outer Rim on Fire………52 Dreaming in Auslan: a Study in Yellow and Grey………………53 Suburban Song Cycle………………………………………………..55 Forms of Consent…………………………………………………….59 4am at the Mercy……………………………………………………...61 Switch-On………………………………………………………………62 Inside the Toorak Flower Shop…………………………………….64 Daisy…………………………………………………………………….65 The Poem……………………………………………………………....66 True and/or False……………………………………………………..68 Bloodlines……………………………………………………………...71 Spoons………………………………………………………………….74 Phyllis and Doris……………………………………………………...75 Snapshots of an Irish Immigrant in Reverse…………………….77 Paintings by Arthur Boyd…………………………………………...81 Horse Skull Dreaming………………………………………………..86

3

PART ONE

Modes and Codes of Silence in Indigenous Women’s Poetry: exploring radical notions of listening in some examples of cross-cultural poetic dialogue

by

Shari Kocher

4

In relation to the 1996 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission inquiry into the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities, Aboriginal writer and historian, Tony Birch, writes: When I both heard and read the stories presented to the inquiry I was struck by a truly haunting silence— literal in meaning and effect— that pervaded many of the stories that were presented. So, even though some stories were told others were also not told— with words unable to express the depth of loss. I also thought of the absence of particular sounds, voices and movement that leave our homes each time that one of our loved ones walks out the front door. If for whatever reason they do not return, be it as a result of their death, or perhaps insensitive government policies, we are left with both the absence of the sounds they created and carried with them, and the memory of them (2007:31). This is a thesis about those sounds, and how they have been expressed in a number of poems by Aboriginal women poets Lisa Bellear, Elizabeth Hodgson, Yvette Holt, Eva Johnson and Romaine Moreton. This is a thesis about silence and its hauntings, its textures and tendencies, its polyvalent production of both pain and possibility in the witness and the making of verbal art across a body of Indigenous women’s poetry. This is also a thesis about meeting Indigenous women’s poetry as a white reader and fellow poet who sees her task as learning how to interpret these sounds through a textual practice of learning how to listen.

Writing in the wake of the Mabo case, about the trope of the ‘Great Australian Silence’ in the same collection of essays in which Tony Birch’s work appears, Jane Belfrage writes: Indigenous people’s voices and knowledges, and immigrant women’s voices and knowledges, were banished into the Great Australian Silence. To break it is also to bring those knowledges out of silence and into hearing. In order to recognise black subjectivities and knowledge practices we need to embody the knowledge practice of listening. By this I mean hearing indigenous peoples’ voices teaching native Australian

5 philosophies, sciences, cultures and knowledges in Australian educational institutions and on the land; just as “white” women’s voices are beginning to be heard, teaching in those institutions. It is to listen contextually and historically, to listen in relationship, to listen with imagination and heart. In Australian communities of knowers, it is to discursively affirm and consolidate Indigenous people’s knowledges— just as feminist struggles continue to create new knowledges and social practices in the body politic (2007:52-53). From this perspective, Belfrage recognises the generative aspects of a listening silence, and links this with her central project of analysing dialogic space. She writes: Silence is a necessary part of dialogue. It can signify attentive listening; it provides room for recognition of difference and intersubjectivity… Silence is an acoustic space in which voices— sounds— can be heard. Without silence, the identities— the whatness— of sounds cannot be distinguished (53). For Belfrage, dialogic spaces require the primary act of listening. Listening itself requires a dynamics of silence through which the speaking of others may be heard. In the term ‘dynamics’ I suggest the ‘particular state of social or personal interaction’ that the Macquarie dictionary applies to the word, as well as its musical sense of variation in volume and tone to convey emotion. The particular ‘dynamics of silence’ I refer to in relation to listening conjures the generative aspects of a silence that is both open and attentive to what is being shared.

Yet silence is also ‘the language of complicity’ (Robertson 2000:unpaginated). For dialogue to work in non-coercive spaces of listening, silence must also be analysed through a dialectic of power. In Australian cultural terms, silence intersects with postcolonial representations and cultural productions of whiteness and power in the areas of law, bureaucracy, governance, policy and the institutions that educate and disseminate the knowledge practices of reading publics (see Brewster 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008). In coming to terms with the cultural inheritance of white Australia as a nation built on the fundamental figure of race, I take up Brewster’s proposition that the responsive reader/listener must actively engage with the affects of whiteness in Indigenous literatures. I apply Anne Brewster’s use of the term ‘affects of

6 whiteness’ by which I understand it to mean the emotional impact on human bodies of the construct of whiteness as a dialectic of power built on assumptions of universal entitlement and marked by its operative mode of invisibility. I further suggest that one of the effects of this engagement is the experience of silence in a number of simultaneous and indeterminate ways. Part of the experience of entering silence as it is deployed, in this thesis, across a number of poems, lies in the primary recognition of the human cost, the grief and the weight of suffering borne by Indigenous people, whose trauma continues under policies and institutions for whom speaking does not necessarily mean being heard. Tony Birch reflects: Silence may or may not be golden. It can be both respectful and destructive. Too many older indigenous people in Australia carry the collective memory of colonial violence in the face of non-indigenous amnesia and a cruel silence of irresponsibility. They have been both witness to and the custodians of this past for too long. They have been forced to speak of their loss and grief when they would sometimes prefer the solitude and comfort of silent meditation. But they know if they do not speak, others will not. And they know they must continue to speak until they are listened to. As a nation we owe them this (2007:33-34). To be Indigenous in a nation such as Australia means that the act of speech and the act of silence are both inevitably political. As Romaine Moreton says in her poem ‘Don’t let it make you over’: ‘it ain’t easy bein’ black / this kinda livin’ is always political’ (2004:111).

In her numerous writings on the subject, Anne Brewster shows the many intersecting ways in which the Australian nation is contracted on the figure of race (2006:87, 2007:210, 2008:58). She draws on the work of Charles W. Mills, who suggests that ‘whiteness did not precede the social contract of the nation; it came into existence through it’ (Mills 2000:451) and that ‘race is not anomalous to western liberal democracies but fundamental to them; the political production of race and that of nationhood are intimately linked’ (2006:87). In an article focusing on the poetry of Romaine Moreton, Brewster shows in detail how ‘Indigenous people’s positioning as colonial subalterns in a late modern postcolonial state system of dominance without hegemony, [means that] they have limited ability to participate in a contractual system’,

7 with the consequence that, in Australia, ‘Indigenous protest can be seen as constituting an intervention into the contractual system of the nation’ (2008:59). Building on this idea of intervention, in which Indigenous speech acts intervene in the public narrative of nation, Brewster positions Indigenous activism and writing as ‘important gestures of decolonisation and instantiations of subaltern knowledge’(59). Drawing on the work of Michael Lipsky to define and extrapolate protest activity, and Ghassan Hage to explore how Indigenous protest in its many forms becomes an instrument of hope for marginalised people, as well as a tool that works to counter the paranoia and narcissism of white nation building, Brewster examines how Indigenous poetry, ‘in its “objection” to cultural and political domination and disenfranchisement by white Australia, mobilises the rhetorical strategies of argument and critique on the one hand and poetic effects on the other’(59). In this thesis, I examine the ways in which I see Indigenous poets Lisa Bellear, Elizabeth Hodgson, Yvette Holt, Eva Johnson and Romaine Moreton using silence in some of their work to negotiate the poetic and political effects of the unspoken. Further, I delineate the ways I sense silence working as a rhetorical strategy to amplify and communicate the affects of whiteness on both Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences.

In the socio-political contexts of Indigenous protest poetry, it is often necessary to call the non-Indigenous reader’s attention to what Kevin Gilbert describes as the urgencies of ‘another reality, a reality that could find parallels in the experience of the indigenous peoples of South Africa or Bolivia, or of oppressed populations… the Jews in Nazi Germany or the Palestinians in Israel’ (Gilbert 1988: xviii). The urgency of the message is undoubtedly an important aspect of the social function and political reception of Indigenous poetries and, as Brewster argues, there is no denying that ‘Indigenous people’s relationship with a colonial history of violence and dispossession is characterised by a political imperative for justice in the present’ (2008:59). In the case of poetry however, as Dennis McDermott points out in his article ‘In Your Face and Out Your Ear’ in Blue Dog, a poem’s power to move equals its political impact, if its message is to be as memorable, and hence as successful, as its delivery in form (2003:64-71).

8 Much attention in recent years has been given to this debate, which takes as its framework the traditionally white Western literary binary of content and form to argue for the positioning of Indigenous poetry according to its political message, as opposed to (often pejoratively) its literary aesthetic. Brewster considers this binary to be indicative of a white western cultural foundation that would seek to ‘maintain [ ] the continuity of postcolonial humanist literary traditions and reading conventions which are understood as self-evident and raceless’ (2008:61). In her examination of a number of works, Brewster traces the ‘impact of an Indigenous politico-aesthetics on those reading conventions’ in order to ‘elaborate a post humanist critical perspective founded on a recognition of the mutually constitutive interaction of the textual and the social within the zone of reading’ (2008:61). Taking Brewster’s cue here, I wish to further enlist the framework of Frederic Jameson’s thinking in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act, when he says: [T]he convenient working distinction between cultural texts that are social and political and those that are not becomes something worse than an error: namely, a symptom and a reinforcement of the reification and privatization of contemporary life. Such a distinction reconfirms that structural, experiential and conceptual gap between the public and the private, between the social and the psychological, or the political and the poetic, between history or society and the “individual”, which— the tendential law of social life under capitalism— maims our existence as individual subjects and paralyses our thinking about time and change just as surely as it alienates us from speech itself (1981:20). In the last analysis, Jameson argues, everything is political, and more than this, that to separate the individual from the social, and the private from the political is an act of alienation. My interest lies in how each of the poets I consider have used various modes of silence to resist the limits of having their work read solely in terms of ‘protest poetry’, while enlisting at all times a politicized consciousness. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s ideas on literary community and Michael Warner’s ideas on reading publics, I seek to circumvent the political/aesthetic divide by focusing on the sounds and textures of the silence this binary is built on. In doing so, I am interested in how silence might operate both in the delivery and the survival of the poem across various textual fields of reading and resonance. Especially, my

9 concern lies with the trope and the act of listening, and how this might be approached cross-culturally in the reading, reception and making of poems.

On this last issue, I am inspired by the notion of dadirri as presented by Miriam Rose Ungunmerr-Bauman, and as discussed by Judy Atkinson in her book Trauma Trails, Recreating Songlines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia. Ungunmerr introduces her talk on dadirri in the following way: Ngangikurungkurr means “Deep Water Sounds”. Ngangikurungkurr is the name of my tribe. The word can be broken up into three parts: Ngangi means word or sound, kuri means water, and kurr means deep. So the name of my people means “The Deep Water Sounds” or “Sounds of the Deep”. This talk is about tapping into that deep spring inside us. … Dadirri recognises the deep spring that is inside us. We call on it and it calls to us… When I experience dadirri, I am made whole again… A big part of dadirri is listening. Through the years, we have listened to our stories. They are told and sung, over and over, as the seasons go by… The stories and songs sink quietly into our minds and we hold them deep inside. In the ceremonies we celebrate the awareness of our lives as sacred. The contemplative way of dadirri spreads over our whole life (1993:34). Atkinson draws on Ungunmerr’s talk when she presents dadirri as a ‘special quality, a unique gift of the Aboriginal people. It is inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness— something like what you call contemplation’ (Ungunmerr in Atkinson 2002: 16). As a culturally specific ethical, philosophical, and ontological concept, Atkinson develops the principles and functions of dadirri— listening to one another in shared dialogue— as the core component of her chosen method when coming to research the effects of ongoing trauma and violence in Indigenous communities. In particular, Atkinson focuses on how dadirri can be implemented in designing practical models for the building of community and empowerment in response to culturally specific experiences of violence. Trauma Trails is powerful reading, and its response to the acute social need in Indigenous communities for ways of meeting and dealing with trauma and violence is beyond the space of this thesis.

10 However, what I take from my reading of dadirri is a model of possibility for how poems, as verbal art and as artefacts recording lived experience, might be drawn to sit together on the ground in a circle to listen to one another. In this, I imagine a zone of encounter between reader and text, which releases a certain resonance or ‘field of emergence’ that embodies the potential for change (Massumi 2002:30-33). In this, I link my (white and therefore limited) understanding of dadirri with the philosopher Brian Massumi’s proposal of ‘an ongoing participation in an unfolding relation’ (2002:196) which, in textual terms, also reaches towards Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of literature prompting ‘a contact… a touching, the transmission of a trembling at the edge of being’ (1991: 61). Using this circle of reference, I return to its origin in Ungunmerr where she considers the potential for cross-racial dialogue in her closing comments on dadirri: We have learned to speak the white man’s language. We have listened to what he had to say. This learning and listening should go both ways. We would like people in Australia to take time to listen to us. We are hoping people will come closer. We keep on longing for the things we have always hoped for— respect and understanding (1993:36).

How might the subject position middle-class white woman imagine dadirri working to draw Indigenous and non-Indigenous reading publics closer together in a dialogic space facilitated by the sharing of poems? The poems I consider in this thesis are poems written in English by Indigenous women who are using the language of the colonising nation to resist the dominance of whiteness, while also seeking to be heard by both Indigenous and non- Indigenous audiences. I argue that the reading of this poetry offers a zone of encounter that turns on the mystery of call and response, such that the act of reading answers, in part, the invitation to listen. I further argue that learning to listen for the resonances released between poems and across cultural space involves an analysis of silence.

Dennis McDermott suggests that silence offers a particular means through which the poet circumvents the demarcation of politics from aesthetics by focusing on the function of witness, and hence avoiding Theodor Adorno’s

11 abyss. In this model, trauma always exists as a gap that must be bridged without the aestheticization of pain, yet also without the poem’s ‘message’ overriding the poem’s power to move. Building on the work of Adrienne Rich on silence and Elaine Scarry on the body in pain, McDermott gestures towards the conditions of silence in juxtaposition to speech, as one possible field through which a poem might move, in Kevin Hart’s terms, ‘from mastery to mystery’ (2003:69). This is often the moment in a poem when the private sphere of unknowable pain is rendered accessible, or embodied in a public sense, through the poem’s harnessing of silence and its affects (McDermott 2002, Rich 1979, Scarry 1985).

The poems I have chosen to discuss move through this field in various and particular ways, not necessarily in terms of poetry as therapy, or poetry as political weapon, but also as poems that invite the reader into a gestalt in which ‘the silence that is left is a silence that is shaped, charged by all that has gone before. It’s an open door with a lit “enter” sign’ (McDermott 2003:70). This is not always a comfortable space, as my discussion will show. The poems that confront these modes of silence also work in my mind to create a dialogic resonance, while bringing me to the limits of the silence marking my racialised whiteness.

Elizabeth Hodgson’s poem ‘a world without music’, as published in her book Skin Paintings (2008), witnesses the trauma of a child being removed from her family. Trauma, as Atkinson and others define it, cannot be approached with the view to healing other than through modes of witness. Poetries of witness are often read in Australia in the contexts of the Holocaust. In the case of Indigenous Australia, this is certainly an apt comparison to make. In his analysis of the Jewish experience of Holocaust in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, Dori Laub lists three levels of testimony: the level of being a witness to oneself within the experience; the level of being a witness to the testimonies of others; and the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing itself. (Laub in Felman 1992:75)

12 Brewster points to Aden Ridgeway’s chapter, ‘An Impasse or a Relationship in the Making’ when she notes that ‘the business that haunts the Australian psyche’ is ‘the “unfinished business” of the colonial past’ (Ridgeway in Brewster 2008:92). Elizabeth Hodgson’s poem ‘a world without music’ drives directly into the troubled zone of one such area of ‘unfinished business’ by giving witness to the speaker’s own experience of institutionalised kidnapping. The poem demands that the reader witness the trauma of this, and furthermore that the non-Indigenous reader give a third level of witness to their own implication in the racially constructed public aspects of this (un)shared historical inheritance.

a world without music

Mr Cage, can you imagine a life without music? Can you imagine having your acute hearing and to never hear a melody, a lullaby, a symphony? Can you imagine a life without rhythm, beat and tone?

This was the world into which I was born: a world devoid of music, a world clattering with the rhythms and beat of everyday life, the cacophony of knives, forks, spoons, the pitch in the smash of china.

The tonal variations found in the clink of beer bottles half drunk, the swish of a straw broom across wooden floors, the impatient drumming of fingers on a table, the cries of injury, the percussion of daily brawls.

Four years and thirty-three days of andante, allegro, largo espressivo. The finale— a crescendo: a black car, a new house a life without the sounds of my mother.

Elizabeth Hodgson, Skin Paintings, p.154

13 ‘A world without music’ returns the reader to the ‘truly haunting silence— literal in meaning and effect’ that Tony Birch describes in his response to the 1996 testimonials given by members of the Stolen Generation. Hodgson depicts the ‘event’ of this trauma through the mnemonic layering of a fractured soundscape filled with the simultaneous presence and absence of a literal silence. This mnemonic layering moves the reader closer to the poem’s central questioning of the validity of imagination when it comes to the gap in white institutional understandings of that which is unimaginable, since not experienced by a white readership. The speaker in the poem turns between the rhetorical questions she asks of ‘Mr Cage’ and the severance, at ‘four years and thirty-three days of andante’ of the event which has resulted in ‘a life without the sounds of my mother.’ Hauntingly, silence in this poem works in several layers: the silence of literal effect; the silencing of the affect of voice (especially the mother’s voice) in the work of memory apprehending loss; and the silence of the addressee, through the mode of the rhetorical question. This last mode of silence operates across a complex range of cultural signals regarding what constitutes music for the speaker in her strained and split reference to what cannot be imagined, and what has concurrently already been lost.

The poet/speaker does not romanticise the childhood she remembers: among softer sounds such as ‘the swish of a straw broom across wooden floors’, the soundscape she conjures, ‘clattering with the rhythms / and beat of everyday life’ also includes such sounds as ‘the pitch in the smash of china’ and ‘the percussion of daily brawls.’ Yet, for all its ‘tonal variations’, this is a world of ‘andante, / allegro, largo espressivo’, hardly a world devoid of music, and consistent in tempo and tone with what the speaker regards as rightfully hers: ‘the world into which I was born’. Hodgson does not disown the edginess of parts of this world of sound, but she does challenge the addressee to imagine (and to take responsibility for) both the conditions under which this life is lived (in its reference to poverty/violence/racial marginalisation), and the even greater violence of its sudden severance.

14

The finale – a crescendo: a black car, a new house

These lines render audible the literal effect of silence, and its contiguity with the tonal contrast between the vibrant soundscape of the child’s world in the two preceding stanzas and the aural experience of a world stunned into silence by the slamming of a black car’s irrevocable doors. The reader is drawn into witnessing the strangeness of the silence of ‘a new house’ that refuses to explain itself, and the association of its physical difference with the most literal effect of all: ‘a life without the sounds of my mother.’ No straw broom across a wooden floor, the abruptness of the ‘new house’ suggests all that is alien to the child about it, and offers the reader a profound implicit experience of the silence of dislocation and loss.

Inevitably, the last line of the poem circles back to its opening address. The silence of ‘a life without the sounds of my mother’ invokes the silence of ‘Mr Cage’, who is famous for his 1952 masterpiece 4’33’’: the score for a performance of silence using gesture and the presence of the physical instrument without playing a single note. In the case of John Cage, silence was a deliberate aesthetic space opened by a modernist sensibility in Western art that sought to draw attention to the incidental and ambient sounds surrounding each performance. Whereas he first proposed in a lecture in 1947 to call this piece ‘Silent Prayer’, subsequent experiments in an anechoic chamber, in which he found he could still hear certain notes attributed later to the sounds of his own body, led John Cage to the realisation of the impossibility of silence. This influenced his ideas on the tension between ‘desirable’ sound, as in properly played musical notes, and undesirable ‘noise’, thus contributing to his ideas on ‘noise music’ (Wikipedia:4’33’’). By naming him, Hodgson suggests a sinister aspect to Cage’s ‘statement’ on silence.

The mode of the rhetorical question highlights the tension between the silence of the addressee and his implicit cultural power to define what constitutes

15 ‘undesirable’ noise as music. Here the poem turns on a silence of refusal. Rhetorically, Hodgson implies that ‘Mr Cage’ cannot begin to imagine a life without music, even though his work has led him to believe that ‘until I die, there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music’ (Cage, 1961: Wikipedia).

What I hear in ‘a world without music’ is the silence of the mother’s voice falling through the poem. For the mother’s voice is missing in the child’s memory: the closest she comes to describing it is through associated sounds. Perhaps the child’s mother is present in the ‘cacophony of knives, forks, spoons’, perhaps again in the ominous lines ‘the impatient drumming of fingers on a table, / the cries of injury’, yet the fullness of the mother’s presence in the child’s life is amplified by the silence accompanying her corporeal absence. ‘To never hear a melody, a lullaby, a symphony’— this is the life without music the speaker challenges Mr Cage to imagine, and this is what I understand as the music of that which has been lost: the loss of the voice of the mother, and with it, all the implied soundscapes dwelling on the edges of the poem, including the screams of the child’s distress, and the keening of the mother’s anguish, which continue through and beyond the moment of crescendo with the arrival of the black car. I take the absence of the mother in ‘a world without music’ to inform the anger and the grief in the tones of the speaker’s rhetorical question, and it is the unanswered tension of this loss that ruptures the poem’s central metaphor: This was the world into which I was born: a world devoid of music

Logically, these lines contradict the poem’s sense, since music, as a metaphor, is not what the speaker was born without, but that which was stolen from her through her forced removal. Yet this contradiction also signals the challenging fragmentation of the speaker’s subjectivity as she confronts the cultural damage done to her, and to her people, by the eugenic values informing the white Australian policy of Indigenous child removal. Hence, the contradiction in the speaker’s splitting of terms between a world devoid of music and the mode of the rhetorical question, signals an important attempt to

16 claim a speaking voice against the monolithic violence of a silence imposed. Since Cage’s ‘noise music’ rests on the tension between desirable and undesirable sounds, Hodgson employs irony to confront the modernist aspects of her metaphoric parallel: ‘Four years and thirty-three days of andante, / allegro, largo espressivo’ parody the influence of 4’33” in order to highlight the dominant culture’s unspoken desire for the silencing of marginalised people. The unconscious language of loss slips into the wording of what the speaker now feels she never had in the first place, since it was taken from her so early in life and replaced by the cage of white conditioning. This entanglement is yet another layer of silence working to differentiate the racial conditions of the profound separation between self and memory. This slippage is an important signal for how whiteness constructs itself as a cultural trope.

On the one hand, the silence of the addressee in ‘a world without music’ highlights the implicit accusation of the speaker’s despair at not being heard. On the other, the silence of the addressee also supplies the white reader with the chance to witness the bafflement the Indigenous speaking subject faces when trying to register the impact of racism on the body of an audience for whom its effects are not a daily occurrence. This level of witness draws the reader’s attention to the implications of their own subject position. Since I am reading these poems at the imaginary level of a white reader approaching a notion of dadirri, in that I am taking up the invitation, through the act of reading, to sit with and listen to the resonances of a collective ‘narrative’ or shared story over time, I wish to reflect at this point on some further aspects of dadirri in order to garner a sense of the dynamics of the relationship between speakers and listeners in this field.

The ‘circle of meaning’ (Stockton 1995:104) that comprises dadirri is informed, as Atkinson’s suggests, by a concept of community (2002:17). ‘There is intersubjectivity within this sense of community, with a view that all parts are connected and informed by each other’ (2002:17), as well as a sense of reciprocity: ‘in dadirri— we call on it and it calls on us’ (Ungunmerr

17 1993:36). These principles of reciprocity are informed by the responsibilities that come with knowing and living dadirri and are suggestive of a highly conscious space of dialogue (Atkinson 2002:19). I cannot claim to have knowledge of, or access to, dadirri simply by having read about it, since it is culturally specific to the communities that live and practice it. I do wish, however, to take responsibility for daring to call on it. Even my proposal for imagining it as a potential model for textual dialogue may well be interpreted by some as yet another example of white cultural appropriation. I own that I feel anxiety over this, and do not know how to proceed. In my desire to render witness to these poems, and to speak from a space of listening, I recognise the need to reciprocate by witnessing the act of what Michelle Fine calls witnessing whiteness, and the ‘chaos of feelings’ (Atkinson 2002: 18) this evokes.

I wish to do this by calling on some of Anne Brewster’s insights in her reading of Lisa Bellear’s poem, ‘Feelings’, as set out in her paper ‘Brokering Cross- Racial Feminism: Reading Indigenous Australian Poet Lisa Bellear’ in Feminist Theory, 2007. Brewster suggests Lisa Bellear’s poem makes whiteness visible to white people by defamiliarising it. In this poem, Bellear confronts the fact that whiteness habitually passes unmarked and yet operates in relation to its compulsive naming of racially constructed ‘others’, which in itself enacts a position of presumption while retaining the privileges of invisibility. Brewster quotes Richard Dyer’s observation that ‘white power secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular’ (Dyer 1997, quoted in Brewster 2007:211). She then goes on to discuss how Bellear foregrounds the strangeness of this position, its effect on the colonised body, and the anxiety this provokes.

Feelings

Like Douwe Edberts [sic] Freeze dry coffee I stand motionless But full of feelings Gin, native, abo, coon

18 An inquisitive academic Then asks “are you Aboriginal?”

Do I punch Do I scream Do I raise my arms To ward off The venomous hatred Which institutionalised Racism leaves unchallenged As they collect their evidence To reinforce their “superiority” And our “inferiority”

Am I Aboriginal Am I Torres Strait Islander Am I South Sea Islander

I laugh inside, at her ignorance I shake my head, But how can I pity A person who is identified As the expert exponent on Indigenous Australians

Eh Professor, big shot, Big cheese, or whoever You claim to be You’ve really no idea Love to chat sister, But there’s faxes to send And protest letters to write

I turn and walk away Preserving my dignity Without humiliating hers.

Lisa Bellear, Dreaming in Urban Areas, p.14

19 My main interest in Brewster’s reading of ‘Feelings’ lies in her analysis of the moment during which the speaker turns away. Brewster identifies the encounter between the first-person speaker and the academic as an ‘evacuation of dialogue’ yet also notes how aspects of belatedness, non- alignment, disjuncture and ‘gaps’ in fractured or different temporalities might necessarily prefigure white people’s ‘silence/listening’ in dialogic space. The white academic’s inability to listen and her aggressive ‘inquisitiveness’ leave the Indigenous speaker no other option but to ‘walk away’. Ironically, the moment of the Indigenous speaker’s ‘turning away’ from the encounter within the poem, however, reconvenes that failed dialogue through the poem’s opening out into another audience, that of the poem’s reader. Indeed the academic’s question and the Indigenous speaker’s response appear to take place in parallel temporal/psychic zones (they are talking ‘past’ one another). They are brought together in the poem only as a virtual dialogue. The academic’s question apparently meets with silence; the Indigenous poet’s response is formulated privately, as interior monologue. It may be that conflicted cross-racial dialogues in real time are also often marked by this kind of belatedness (2007:217). Brewster goes on to suggest that ‘the Indigenous and non-Indigenous speakers in a cross-racial encounter are weighed down by history; there is simultaneously too much or too little to say’ and that ‘virtual conversations (figured in memory or literary texts) can be seen as one instance of the instability (yet persistence) of the concept of cross-racial ‘community’ for Indigenous and non-Indigenous women’ (218).

Bellear’s use of the first person address positions the reader in alignment with the academic in the poem ‘Feelings’. The aspect of silence I am interested in here is the uncomfortable silence of mutual dismay. White anxiety rises to the surface in this poem and the discomfort for the reader lies in how to accommodate it. Brewster’s reading of ‘Feelings’ is quite useful to me when she remarks that ‘in the dramatic space of relationality and response-ability opened up in this poem, Bellear shapes a zone of co-habitation in which the reader can inhabit the anxiety of whiteness without capitulating to it’(214). I link this with what I imagine Atkinson means when she suggests that another aspect of dadirri is its ability to accommodate:

20 the chaos of feelings and action as pain-anger-grief [ ] articulated in the processes of relating to the group which is in stillness and listening… the observers understand that the actions have meaning, and that the body is saying something that the tongue cannot— and this shared knowledge becomes the growing awareness of the community (2002:18-19).

Recognising the bond of gender, if not of race or class, this moment of turning away in silence concurrently produces, as Brewster argues, ‘a moment of cross-racial feminist civility, brokered by the Indigenous speaker’ (215). In refusing to take part in a coercive dialogue, and in giving witness to the gap that exists between them, the Indigenous speaker manages to extract a recognition of relationality in the fraught exchange, and her silence is the tool she uses to express this. As Brewster describes it, ‘before turning away to the tasks awaiting her… the Indigenous speaker reaches out to the white academic and folds her back into a feminist ethics of relationality’ (216). Silence expands in this folding, then, to include anxiety, dismay, anger-pain, irony, as well as the courtesy implicit in the wish to preserve dignity and avoid humiliation. I argue that this is a highly resonant silence characterised by a polyvalent and inclusive emotional intelligence. Despite the density of its affects, I read an opening, or a reaching towards, a sense of felt possibility in the silence that pulses across ‘Feelings’ for the reason that the poem itself inhabits this dynamic without turning away from its readers. It is even likely that the academic to whom this poem is addressed has read the poem, with the result that the speaker’s gesture of turning away in silence has entered a field of emergence through the poem, whereby the gesture returns in full circle to face ‘the evacuation of dialogue’ Brewster describes. In a curious turn, then, the negative moment of inquisition has been absorbed through a dynamics of silence that both neutralises the aggression and transforms its charge to that of possibility, the offering of a receptive space.

‘Feelings’ is the ninth poem in part one of Lisa Bellear’s Dreaming in Urban Areas (1996). ‘Women’s Liberation’ is the fourth poem in Dreaming in Urban Areas, and has also recently appeared in Nicholas Jose’s Macquarie Pen Anthology of Australian Literature, 2009. ‘Women’s Liberation’ is among one of Lisa Bellear’s longest poems, and could be read as a multi-voiced

21 monologue. This poem covers similar terrain to that of ‘Feelings’, yet, whereas the irony in her use of the appellative ‘sister’ when addressing the white academic in ‘Feelings’ operates in the charged silence of an interior virtual dialogue, in ‘Women’s Liberation’ this interior is subject to more explicit exposure. In ‘Women’s Liberation’, Bellear foregrounds dynamics between voice and silence through the mode of mimicry. The reader shares Bellear’s sense of farce as she highlights the absurdities of Indigenous women’s experience in the explicitly white contexts of the feminist movement, yet the lightness of suppressed laughter exists in relation to the silence of a sharply executed irony. Bellear opens the poem with an Indigenous voice that quickly moves to impersonate a ‘gubba middle class / hetero sexual’ white woman’s voice, which then switches back and forth in a blurring of subjectivity, thus also foregrounding the relationality of identities constructed on grounds of race, gender and class. This technique achieves a blurring of subjectivity as sharply funny as it is acute. ‘Women’s Liberation’ further evidences Bellear’s fine ear for voice, and the acuity and subtlety of her poetics as much as her politics.

Women’s Liberation

Talk to me about the feminist movement, the gubba middle class hetero sexual revolution way back in the seventies when men wore tweed jackets with leather elbows, and the women, well I don’t remember or maybe I just don’t care or can’t relate. Now what were those white women on about? What type of neurosis was fashionable back then? So maybe I was only a schoolkid; and kids, like women, have got one thing that joins their schemata, like we’re not worth listening to, and who wants to liberate women and children what will happen in an egalitarian society if the women and the kids start becoming complacent in that they believe they should have rights

22 and economic independence, and what would these middle class kids and white women do with liberation, with freedom, with choices of do I stay with my man, do I fall in love with other white middle class women, and it wouldn’t matter if my new woman had kids or maybe even kids and dogs Yes I’m for the women’s movement I want to be free and wear dunlop tennis shoes. And indigenous women, well surely, the liberation of white women includes all women regardless… It doesn’t, well that’s not for me to deal with I mean how could I, a white middle class woman, who is deciding how I can budget when my man won’t pay the school fees and the diner’s club card simply won’t extend credit. I don’t even know if I’m capable of understanding Aborigines, in Victoria? Aboriginal women, here, I’ve never seen one, and if I did, what would I say, damned if I’m going to feel guilty, for wanting something better for me, for women in general, not just white middle class volvo driving, part time women’s studies students Maybe I didn’t think, maybe I thought women in general meant, Aboriginal women, the Koori women in Victoria Should I apologise should I feel guilty Maybe the solution is to sponsor a child through world vision. Yes that’s probably best, I feel like I could cope with that. Look, I’d like to do something for our Aborigines but I haven’t even met one, and if I did I would say all this business about land right, maybe I’m a bit scared, what’s it mean, that some day I’ll wake up and there will be this flag, what is it, you know red, black and that yellow circle, staked out front and then what, Okay I’m sorry, I feel guilt

23 is that what I should be shouting from the top of the rialto building The women’s movement saved me maybe the 90s will be different. I’m not sure what I mean, but I know that although it’s not just a women’s liberation that will free us it’s a beginning September 1991 Lisa Bellear, Dreaming in Urban Areas, p 6-7

The Indigenous first-person speaker in ‘Feelings’ accuses the white academic of having ‘really no idea’, hence the line ‘Love to chat, sister’ remains ironic until such time as the addressee comes to political consciousness. In ‘Women’s Liberation’, Bellear satirises the cross-racial disjunctions that inform the gap between private and public experience of this political consciousness and the white liberal sympathy it ironically evokes. In a wry reversal of the academic’s urge to name the speaker according to racial category in ‘Feelings’, Bellear, in ‘Women’s Liberation’, racialises a hypothetical white woman by associating her speaking voice with the brand names that reveal her access to a typically white disregard for the racial aspects of her economic privilege. This disregard is obliquely referenced throughout the poem by linking women and children’s liberation with the brand names that are known to typically exploit third world women and children’s labour: ‘Yes I’m for the women’s movement / I want to be free and wear dunlop tennis shoes’. The implication, of course, is that this Dunlop-wearing-Diner’s-Club-card-bearing- school-fee-paying-Volvo-driving-world-vision-sponsoring-white-woman really doesn’t have any idea regarding the socio-political urgencies of her Indigenous ‘sisters’ who, in effect, remain invisible to her. The poem succinctly satirises the terms of a feminist movement preoccupied with predominantly white middle class concerns, thus driving home the gap in ‘universalist’ modes of representation that exclude the intersections of race, class and gender, and the politicised connections between labour in a ‘free’ market and women under patriarchy, in determining subjectivity and ‘communal’ identities.

24 The shifting subject position of the speaker in ‘Women’s Liberation’ is as comic as it is strategic to Bellear’s project of formulating Indigenous literary subjectivities. For laughter to erupt in this poem, the non-Indigenous reader must accept the grounds for critique. Hence, the comic springs from a silence of irony as the white reader meets the critical gaze of the Indigenous speaker and accedes to the astuteness of the reflection. I believe that this exemplifies the poem’s engagement with the third level of witness Dori Laub lists, since Bellear’s blurring of subjectivity draws attention to the reader’s simultaneous position of both distance from, and complicity with, the virtual dialogue taking place, as the speaker/(s) speak past one another.

While Bellear’s poem speaks of a black woman’s bemusement in the face of a feminism whose preoccupations seem trivial in relation to the consequences of race relations, its mode of delivery also highlights the social gap between the poem’s speaker and her intended audience. As Aileen Moreton- Robertson writes in Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism: What is evident from the relations between white feminists and Indigenous women is that our respective subject positions speak out of different cultures, epistemologies, experiences, histories and material conditions which separate our politics and analyses. The subject position middle class white woman has functioned in Australian culture as the embodiment of true womanhood. ... White women come to feminism with already formed subjectivities linked to different histories, privileges, power and oppression. They are socially situated subjects who are located in power relations where whiteness remains invisible, natural, normal and unmarked (2000:182-183). So far, my discussion has been focused on how each of the speakers in the poems above have used silence in different ways to bring to visibility the power relations that Indigenous speaking subjects daily negotiate in their dealings with white audiences. The performativity of this subject position calls attention to the whiteness of the audience to which these poems are directed. Keeping Moreton-Robinson’s words in mind, I turn now to briefly discussing another cluster of three poems whose mode of address follows that of a lyric tradition, whereby the Indigenous first person speaker occupies the centred subject position of the poem without necessarily calling on an explicitly white

25 audience. In the following three poems, ‘Trails’ by Eva Johnson, ‘Chops ‘n’ Things’ by Lisa Bellear, and ‘Woman’ by Yvette Holt, I am listening for alternate renderings of the motif of ‘womanhood’ as Moreton-Robinson employs it above. The aspects of silence that converge in these three poems are nuanced enough to keep this motif fluid and undefined in my mind, even as I accept my reading to be indicative of my own socially situated subject position and the ‘gap’ this entails.

Trails

I once walked along the trails of my ancestors through deserts, mountains, rivers and sands where food was plenty, where goanna tracks lead to waterholes where the bandicoot whistled its name. I gathered nuts from the kurrajong tree and suckled wild honey. I swam with catfish in billabongs of waterlilies and tasted cooked food from ovens underground. I smelled the promise of the winds along trails of the dreaming and traced my mother’s footsteps embedded in the sand.

I once walked the trails of my ancestors that now have blown away with the winds of time. Only in memory will I walk along the trails Only in memory will they remain.

Eva Johnson, Spirit Song, p.39

Chops ‘n’ Things (for Eva Johnson)

I can’t wait to curl around a lemon scented gum tree light a fire and watch it burn down to

26 the embers as the sun floats away, far away our ancestors are yarning and laughing at this Koori woman and through the flames, the embers and the burnt chops and charcoaled potatoes wrapped in foil they’re saying, tidda girl you’re okay, keep on dreaming keep on believing September 1991 Lisa Bellear, Dreaming in Urban Areas, p.8

Woman

Carrying shadows over shoulders A backpack of drawings and time Painting the nylon sky with bare hands And listening with my eyes I read books Too many books My cup runneth over Between too many pages In heels I walk 5 foot 10 inches of decoration I tolerate ignorance And respect resilience Bruising like sweetly peach Yet somehow always recover Growing like music and skin I am shaped by the women in my life Closing all the windows and cupboards I hear babies rattling at night Crossing the corners of my speechless bedroom

27 They follow me as if I have the answers I don’t have any answers Only too many questions I mourn for the children Who were taken away I weep for the grandmothers who will never know I freeze, I break and I cry Woman, sometimes I am too afraid Of putting the little girl to rest Yvettte Holt, Anonymous Premonition, p.13

Reading these poems, I am reminded of Michelle Duffy’s account of listening to the Gumatj or crying-song, of senior Yolungu women as part of an early morning women’s ceremony, which took place during the Garma Festival in 2006 at Gove Peninsular, Arnhem Land, to celebrate the teaching and sharing of Yolngu culture (see Duffy’s essay ‘The Possibilities of Music: To learn from and to listen to one another...' in Hearing Places: Sound, Place, Time and Culture, 319-332). As a Balanda (or white / non-Yolngu) woman, Duffy reflects on the experience of listening to music and song from a position of not-understanding the meaning of the words and sounds being shared, yet recognising the participatory encounter through listening across a ceremonial, and hence dialogical, space. She notes how ‘such intimate albeit ephemeral encounters in music open up for us the in-between-ness of sensing and making sense’ (2007:329). In listening to these poems through an imagined spirit of dadirri, I will try to speak of this sensing as I understand it to relate to spiritual sustenance. What I hear being called upon in these poems is a sense of the sacred and nurturing bond between women and their dreaming / ancestors / origins, that is as necessary and reassuring to Indigenous selfhood, as it is concurrently disturbed and fractured by loss.

‘Trails’ contains the coded reference of a mother’s knowledge and the pain of its interruption in the passage of its teaching from mother to daughter about where to find food and how to live. ‘Food from ovens cooked underground’ is about physical nurture, as much as the spiritual sustenance implicit in the work of memory in keeping this knowledge alive. Bellear takes up this call in

28 ‘Chops ‘n’ Things’ and works at transforming Johnson’s use of the past tense into an imaginary that is continuous with the past-present-future of a living ancestral dreaming. In this way, the speaker in each poem reaches out as a daughter to the mother’s footsteps (ancestral, cultural, literary) that are ‘embedded in the sand’ and brought to cognisance in the embers of a fire that connects with the sun and the voices of ancestors ‘yarning and laughing’ in the present tense sense of being-in-place-in-time. This is a moment in which the speaker takes time to listen to an inner soundscape of reassurance as a source of stabilising strength. Both ‘Trails’ and ‘Chops ‘n’ Things’ draw on a meditative space of stillness-in-silence, even as Yvette Holt’s poem ‘Woman’ offers similar images of renewal and resilience against a backdrop of grief and pain.

In addition to the influence of literal mothers, these poems evoke a sense of the work of an integrated mother-daughter self as necessary to the resilience and strength required by subjectivities under pressure. From ‘Closing all the windows and cupboards’ to ‘putting the little girl to rest’, Holt points to something other than the ‘normalised’ fracturing of self that is sometimes associated with white feminist poetic representations of motherhood (Sylvia Plath, for instance, or more recently, in the work of many of the Australian poets represented in books such as Motherlode: Australian Women’s Poetry 1986-2008 (Harrison, 2009)). Rather, these lines revolve around the speechless trauma of ‘psyches that still quiver from the shock’ of a history of colonisation ‘carved indelibly in blood’ over the past two hundred years (Gilbert 1988: xix). In mapping the transgenerational effects of systematic trauma on Indigenous peoples, Judy Atkinson refers to D.G Baker when she says: Baker calls psycho-social domination, in its various components, cultural genocide, cultural imperialism, thought control or brain- washing. Aboriginal people would call this the greatest violence, the violence that brings the loss of spirit, the destruction of self, of the soul. (2002: 69) The on-going mental trauma brought to bear on the generic ‘Woman’ who hears ‘babies rattling at night’ increases the disturbance of the speaker’s

29 distress to a level of significance in excess of its ability to be rendered in language. Elizabeth Scarry describes this excess as the ‘unmaking of the body’ in situations of torture and trauma in which physical and mental/psychic pain move beyond linguistic means of representation (see Elaine Scarry’s book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 1985). Here, the disturbance in Holt’s poem ‘Woman’ gestures towards a silence existing at the edges of language, when language begins to break down.

Yvette Holt’s poem ‘A Line in the Sand’ goes further in this direction, depicting the rape of an Indigenous woman by a white police officer. Though his whiteness is not made explicit, the repetitious signalling of the rapist as ‘the man in a uniform’ speaks in loud juxtaposition with the woman’s muteness ‘on the floor in the cell’, and her connection to ‘the blood of our brothers and sisters’ as referenced by the imagery of murals, hands, ocean and mangroves throughout the poem. Whereas Bellear notes in ‘Feelings’ the derogatory appellatives that racism uses to ‘mark’ the face of the Indigenous ‘other’, Holt reverses the colonial literary naming of skin colour in ‘A Line in the Sand’, by focusing on the literal ways white projections of power write themselves on the bodies of Indigenous women. Hence, the face of the woman in the cell, disfigured by the brutality done to her, signals her Indigeneity as clearly as the act of rape by a ‘man in uniform’ racially marks the face of institutionalised violence with that of whiteness.

A Line in the Sand

there is a woman on the floor in the cell her tears are burning and her lips are scratched crying from the corner of the hole voices masquerading from darkness to light

the woman on the floor has a determined spirit her clothes are removed and her face a real mess she cries for the touch of her mother a stranger’s handprint murals the walls

30

the woman on the floor has been cavity searched her purple eyes remain shut an eastern sea breeze is what she imagines a blunt ceiling light holding this image together she thinks about home and the mood of the waves would her beloved ocean welcome her back there is a man in a uniform grabbing his crotch tormenting the woman in the cell she screams at the shadows, imagining his feet walking through mangroves there is an unholy stench in this cell tonight her teeth are bare, her body trembling but the sea breeze and mangroves smell like home home is such a long walk away a saltwater baby in cold foreign storage her own mother wouldn’t know her tonight the man in the cell kneeling beside her hissing his world in her ear her palms are desperate his breath is venomous her language is mute and her shoulders are raw now all alone, waiting for sunlight there is somebody’s daughter on the floor in the cell as helpless as the day she was born the ocean waits for the woman in the cell calling her name welcoming her home the struggle for justice continues for the blood of our brothers and sisters the line in the sand has now been marked

Yvette Holt, Anonymous Premonition, p. 48-49

31 Holt approaches the difficulty of writing about the domination and torture of an Indigenous woman at the hands of a police officer by focusing on a linguistics of testimony, which functions at the level of both witness and protest in ‘A Line in the Sand’ without diminishing either the horror of the act nor an aestheticization of its effects. She achieves this by employing the clinical view of a close but impersonal third person narrator. The detachment of the speaker allows a certain surrealism to enter the poem as bald, factual language operates in tension with visceral affect.

In keeping with Elaine Scarry’s work on the psychosomatic structure of torture, silence and sound operate to destabilise language in this poem. The woman ‘crying from the corner of the hole’ hears ‘voices masquerading from darkness to light’. Despite her unravelling consciousness, the choice of the verb ‘masquerade’ suggests that this woman is already aware of the hypocrisy of the double standard to be expected from this place. Already physically hurt, she receives no care, but is stripped to a vulnerable nakedness and thrown into a cell where ‘a stranger’s handprint murals the wall.’ This line appears quite early in the poem, at the end of the second stanza, and implies that the walls have already been bloodied by a previous pair of human hands. This is a telling detail, which presents a bitterly ironic association with the rock murals of handprints so iconic of traditional culture. At the same time, this line suggests an acuteness of observation at odds with the speaker’s clinical point of view. The violence of this place is overt, yet also encoded by the silent connection it makes on several levels with embodied human hands. The speaker is no neutral observer to this event. Hands speak a language where words fail: body/clothing; face/touch; trembling/cold; hands/feet; ear/palms/breath; a stranger’s handprint— the image of a hand acting as a verb to mural a wall signals both the slipperiness of language in this poem as it is produced under torture, and the record of a civilisation of more than forty thousand years confronting the discourse of ‘protection’ within the policies of white power that harbour the active intent to destroy.

32 Annette Hamilton, in the opening pages of Garimara’s novel Caprice, writes: ‘In the life of an Aboriginal woman, no one is more important than her mother when she is young, her daughters when she is old’ (Hamilton in Garimara 2002: preface). The woman in the cell ‘cries for the touch of her mother’. I read Holt’s line here as a coded reference to this woman’s youth and her separation from family and land. After being cavity searched, the reader also realises that this young woman can barely see: the brutality of her assault has resulted in eyes so swollen they remain shut. Salt in this poem is literal: tears burn. Salt as a metaphor is also concomitant with the symbolic psycho-social pain of being separated from one’s place of belonging. Drawing on her ‘determined spirit’, the literal salt of her tears turns the woman to imagining ‘an eastern sea breeze’ in an attempt to orientate herself towards her home-place under the ‘blunt ceiling light holding this image together’.

The break from the pattern of four line stanzas to the next two lines signals a fulcrum in the poem’s movement from the woman seen as an object to the reassembling of her subjectivity at a point immediately prior to an increase in the level of her torment. Here a sense of rocking is evoked by ‘the mood of the waves’ and the association of ocean, tears and distance from home leads subliminally back to the desire for her mother’s touch. The ‘beloved ocean’ links the country of home to a spirit place of welcome and belonging. Yet doubt conflicts with desire in the ambivalence of the conditional tense, and the absence of a question mark seems to suggest its unspoken reference to previous trauma. Less rhetorical question, and more an expression of vulnerability as registered by this woman’s separation from her homeland, this line also marks the trauma of separation as a means of surviving what is happening to her body in an effort to keep some part of herself intact.

This subliminal place is violated once again by the man in uniform, who speaks his position of power by his immunity to charges of abuse in his unaccompanied access to the woman in the cell. The woman’s scream calls attention to the horror of what is happening in the same way that screams in nightmares register as silence by the fact that they go unheard.

33 Holt marks the pause between ‘imagining his feet’ and the act of his feet ‘walking through the mangroves’ with the use of an indented line. The sound of the woman’s scream echoes through this shift into silence, which marks the officially unrecorded event of a rape in custody. The shadows are literal – they recall the reader to the physical aspects of the woman’s partial loss of sight – but the act of rape also foreshadows the white man’s menace across the inner and outer landscapes of spirit, country, self and subjectivity. This pause operates as the only indented line in the poem. Between imagining the violation of his feet— to experiencing the violation of having her rapist ‘walking through mangroves’ which are simultaneously internalised components of country, self and home— this is the silence of the inexpressible, indrawn breath. In the holding of this breath, the stanza now has a fifth line: ‘there is an unholy stench in this cell tonight’ and in that word ‘unholy’, combined with the physical smell of what he has done to her, the rape is witnessed in the encoded language of the senses, as well as through an implied Christian morality.

Holt’s choice of the adjective ‘unholy’ widens the poem’s sphere of protest against hypocrisy, as it turns on supposedly white values sitting in judgement on this act by a white official. Rhetorically, what Holt achieves here is an amplification of the connection between church and state historically imposed on Indigenous people through an ironic discourse of ‘protection’. This is not an isolated event. In lifting the poem to a critique of the apparatuses of power that have wreaked abuse on Indigneous people with impunity, Holt also achieves a representational level of witness that draws on a collective narrative of trauma.

To survive, this singular (yet symbolically representative figure of an Indigenous) woman, retreats further into her ‘home-place’, reconstructing the breeze and the mangroves that ‘smell like home’ even as the fear, the cold and the pain (‘her teeth are bare, her body trembling’) continue the disassembling of her physical self. Her mother, who would not know her, she feels, either because of what is being done to her, or because she has indeed

34 been ‘stored’ in a foreign place, after having been removed from her mother’s presence, and all that is implicit of separation in those starkly simple lines.

What transpires next is a verbal act of violence intent on destroying the last pieces of self the woman holds as her own, and this is enacted through the language of the man in uniform ‘hissing his world in her ear’. The power and poison of his words are realised upon his breath. The woman uses her palms, or the open part of her hand, to try to push the words away. The only language the woman has left is the ‘language of muteness’ and the desperation of her open hands. The dehumanisation she has endured in the space of hours, is decoded by the distancing effect of numbness in the lines there is somebody’s daughter on the floor of the cell as helpless as the day she was born Yet these words also call up a vital image of her preciousness as a daughter, a child of the place that knows her, where her spirit walks and the ocean calls her by name. By this point, the poem has reached a liminal space on the threshold of death.

The line in the sand marked in blood operates in this poem as a fundamental cry against these atrocities continuing. The phrase evokes a metaphoric gesture that draws on the ceremonial power of voice speaking against the silence of what remains unseen and unheard by white Australia. The line marks a limit, and draws on a return to ocean, water, grief, to mark and to mourn what is intolerable, what shall be lived with no more. It is also a highly ambivalent gesture, denoting the complexity of the continuum: since, whether at high-tide or at low, the line in the sand, as a record of violence, keeps being erased. What the poem achieves, then, is the tension of the threat of linguistic implosion under the weight of what the poem is being asked to bear. It also demonstrates, and protests against, the history of white colonial projections of ‘othering’ as ‘written’ upon the Indigenous female body. The urge to testify equals the urgency and complexity of white witness, and in this extremity, an excess of silence overflows.

35 Romaine Moreton has spoken about ‘the importance of recognising the affective outcomes of the colonial history of invasion, terror and dispossession in Australia’ (Brewster 2008:63) as they are registered on Indigenous bodies, spirits, and material lives. Brewster has argued that ‘feeling has conventionally been cast in a binary opposition to argumentation’(63) and that this binary is constantly reworked and contested in Romaine Moreton’s poetry. On the work of emotion, Moreton herself says: there’s a long way to go before there is an actual outcome between the relations between non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians, and the most we can hope for at the moment is that the emotional impact of colonisation, evasion [sic], being removed from your family, is at least acknowledged. ... They’ve documented our bodies, our brain size, our leg size, how we sit and stand, but not how we feel (Moreton in an interview with Andrew Ford, 2003).

On this point, I make another conceptual link with dadirri, and note the importance of the mind-heart connection in its approach to listening:

Dadirri reflects the mind-heart connection in the words “‘I’m thinking and feeling here’, underlying the depth of critical thinking and intensity of feeling” (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women’s Task Force on Violence Report, 1999: xvi), crucial to thinking, feeling, choosing to act in right relationship, in understanding of violence, trauma and healing. Dadirri is therefore a process of listening, reflecting, observing the feelings and actions, reflecting and learning, and in this cyclic process, re-listening at deeper and deeper levels of understanding and knowledge-building. (Atkinson 2002:19)

I believe this approach applies as much to the poet working on the ‘mystery’ of a poem, as it does to the reader approaching a poem, whereby the process of listening engages both the writer and the reader in the mystery of how a poem enters one’s consciousness and affects change. Brewster has shown how Brian Massumi has analysed the catalytic role of affect in triggering change (2006:94). In my own words, I take the ‘turning point’ that embodies the potential for change to be an active dynamic in the field of dadirri. Listening in dialogic space, I argue, takes the process of dadirri to this ‘turning point’ at which the past opens directly onto the future (Massumi 2002:30). This is the ‘field of emergence’ Massumi speaks of in his book Parables of the

36 Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, 2002. Socially open-ended, indeterminate, and flowing with the notion of passage, I imagine a circle of poems containing both the voices of the speakers and the mystery of the unspoken, as sitting together in a circle on the ground. This would be the galtha, the ‘connecting spot’ Duffy supplies as a Yolngu term to mean: a spot where people make solid contact with the earth, when they have been brought together from different places, and now they are having a discussion together to agree on a plan of action. Anywhere there is a ceremony, there will be galtha. Every ceremony must be different, because its art lies in creating that ceremony to specifically reflect the participants and the place and the time (2007:327). The core idea here, of course, is relationality, and relationality, according to Massumi, ‘registers on the body materially and affectively before it registers cognitively or consciously. Participation (in the dynamics of interrelationality) precedes cognitive understanding’ (Brewster 2006:94).

I wish to close my discussion by examining one final poem by Romaine Moreton. ‘Dear Siss’, an evocative epistolary poem, appears in Romaine Moreton’s first book of poems, The Callused Stick of Wanting, 1995. Here Moreton deploys the intimacy of a letter between friends to enter the zone of emotion and its effects on the body. In the ‘field of emergence’ inherent in the relationality between bodies that the reader encounters in the ‘circle of meaning’ (Stockton 1995:104) that is dadirri, ‘Dear Siss’ releases the resonance of a cathartic witness, which contains, I argue, the catalyst for change.

Dear Siss,

It’s Monday 5th July, it’s overcast and the skies are emitting slight tears of concern, Tracey Chapman is playing and my tea is lukewarm. No sunny day, blue skies.

The Camellia tree is in bloom; stark pink flowers of the rose bush stand out amongst the greyness of the day, the dogs play and shiver at the same time out on the verandah. They are not allowed in.

37 I’m considering my future, my purpose, my point. I have no job, no reason, no true life. At this point I am surrounded by tragedy, death thrice, funerals too. Rape, spinal injuries, alcoholism, misunderstanding and getting lost and losing sight of the real issue.

It’s cold, but the rain fends off the ice – on the grass, but not in hearts and minds; defrosted only by substance, agony, joy, sometimes intertwines and inseparable, becoming one and the same.

An old black man down the road has just died, the black woman at the Point was raped a few weeks ago by her own cultural brothers. And I feel melancholy, and unguided and without divine provision. What is this poison that has affected our minds?

And Tracey Chapman still strums and sings down-heart.

My tea is cold. And sometimes I still consider suicide.

I want to walk, but it is raining and I have no umbrella. I love the rain and to let it soothe me, caress me, but dislike illness induced debilitation less. I will sit, listen and watch. Nature’s sedative for the sad and thoughtful.

They still think the boys should do the lawns and the girls should do the cooking and the cleaning. My thinking is not here yet, so I stay silent, simply because I do not have the energy for arguments, however slight or severe exchange of opinions get.

And the boys get ten dollars more.

And I think of how I always wanted fame, significance in the plurality, rise from the dirt of the plain to stand on the mountain’s peak; and how sometimes the peak is very distant. Sometimes to go around is easier than climbing.

But each morning I climb— out of bed, and each morning I rise, and each new day I want to die happy, and each night I sleep, not wanting to know what tomorrow brings. And each day I live in the hope that I will make a difference for someone following – not just signatures in the sand to be erased effortlessly by an indifferent wind.

38 And they still line up with temporary dollars to win temporary fortunes.

And I’ve grown tired. And I am still young.

It is just another day.

All my love.

Z. Romaine Moreton, The Calloused Stick of Wanting, p.14

The addressee in ‘Dear Siss’ is a friend, a sister in the non-ironic sense of the word, someone who knows about listening, someone whom the speaker trusts. This mode of address invites the non-Indigneous reader into a rare zone of intimacy with the Indigenous speaking subject and the affect registers on the reader’s listening body as a privilege, which further opens a zone of compassion. Moreton’s poem ‘Dear Siss’ embodies what Ruth Frankenberg has called the ‘micropolitics of racial cross-traffic’ or ‘the dailiness of racial separation’(1996: 3-17), but it achieves this through the turn of surprise the white reader feels in being included at this level of frankness and intimacy at the speaker’s kitchen table. In a vivid way, reading ‘Dear Siss’ evokes for me what Frankenberg describes after she witnesses a conversation between friends at a kitchen table to which she had been invited: ‘[this was] the first time I had been in private space with women of colour…[and] it took me some time… to realize that something extraordinary had happened in my somehow being invited into that space and that conversation’ (1996: 11). Such an invitation answers, I suggest, a very real desire in the non-Indigenous reader to be invited into such ‘private’ space, as the Balanda women in Duffy’s article exemplify. Inclusion at this level, as it would take place in the reciprocity of dadirri, requires, tangentially, that the white reader begin the self-reflexive work of how they have become racialised in the first place: for what and how ‘whiteness’ signifies in the social contract.

This recognition keeps the reader at a conscious level of witness to the testimonial aspects of ‘Dear Siss’. That is to say, the porousness of the

39 boundaries operating in the poem between inside/outside, public/private, hearts/minds, and the gendered socio-economic realities of oppression bearing down on the speaker in shades of grey and layers of cold, are only porous due to the fact that the reader is listening and registering the affects of this corporeally. The subtlety of the poem lies in its understatement: each sentence deploys the function of a line break, and the detail that piles up in each cluster of clauses releases a dynamics of sound and silence. This is where the visceral precedes cognisance.

The Camellia tree is in bloom; stark pink flowers of the rose bush stand out amongst the greyness of the day, the dogs play and shiver at the same time out on the verandah. They are not allowed in.

Moreton’s choice of the adjective, ‘stark’, undercuts the normalised (white) colour-values against which this poem finds its speech. The Camellia and the rose take on the subtle shade of de-familiarisation, as Moreton heightens what it means to ‘stand out’ in the poem’s context of daily racialisation. Colour, she implies, carries significance. This linguistic disturbance continues with the clustering of the verbs ‘play and shiver’ when placed in connection with the fact that the dogs are ‘not allowed in’. In keeping with the surface texture of the poem’s contrasts between warmth and cold, these subliminal linguistic cues are quickly and deftly referenced by their correlation to the speaker’s daily world (‘no job, no reason, no true life’, ‘tragedy’, ‘death’, ‘funerals’, ‘rape’, ‘injuries’, ‘alcoholism’, ‘misunderstanding’, ‘getting lost and losing sight’), which in turn are also referenced by the effects of colonisation on Indigenous bodies and minds.

An old black man down the road has just died, the black woman at the Point was raped a few weeks ago by her own cultural brothers. And I feel melancholy, unguided and without divine provision. What is this poison that has infected our minds?

And Tracey Chapman still strums and sings down-heart.

My tea is cold. And sometimes I still consider suicide.

40

Desire springs forth against the chill of death (‘I want to walk’), and the speaker surmounts the absence of the material (‘but it is raining and I have no umbrella’) by citing her love of the rain and her strategy for survival by choosing to ‘sit, listen and watch’ as a way of letting nature soothe her without succumbing to the temptation of self-destruction. This is the underground work of a soul providing for herself in the absence of provision in the material environment. This is a strong voice despite its weariness.

My thinking is not here yet, so I stay silent, simply because I do not have the energy for arguments, however slight or severe exchange of opinions get.

And the boys get ten dollars more.

There is much that is compellingly human in the voice of this speaker, as she attests to frustration, complaint, helplessness, confusion and weariness. In terms of the context of the other poems in A Callused Stick of Wanting, what is remarkable about the feminist acuity in ‘Dear Siss’ is the honesty, and also the danger, inherent in owning the weakness and debility that impoverished women daily face. The other poems attest to this speaker’s vitality, strength and will to go on, yet ‘Dear Siss’ also shows how close the speaker comes to being crushed by the systemic material, cultural and patriarchal conditions of her life, and by implication, recognises the unspoken voices of the countless women who don’t make it, who simply don’t survive.

Sometimes to go around is easier than climbing.

But each morning I climb— out of bed, and each morning I rise, and each new day I want to die happy, and each night I sleep, not wanting to know what tomorrow brings. And each day I live in the hope that I will make a difference for someone following – not just signatures in the sand to be erased by an indifferent wind.

The level of intimacy ‘Dear Siss’ creates, draws the reader into a dadirri that kindles a desire for change. I sense in this poem a recognition, within the

41 circle of those I have considered around it, of the intangible and necessary work of poems that matter. The sense of a poem waiting like a seed in the grass for someone to sit beside it and listen to it grow. The feeling-life that Moreton speaks of in her interview with Andrew Ford is a vital part of the contract this poem makes with the reader: if you can feel, then you are listening, if you are listening, then your heart is alive, if your heart is alive, then there is hope. Hope being what the speaker has run out of, but what the poem as a vessel, has kept alive.

Sitting down on the ground with these poems to listen in a circle of ritualised space over time is one way I have sought to approach dadirri in my reading practice throughout this thesis. I include here a description of the process I undertook, as quoted from the writing journal I kept during this time. I have found a place and decided what to do. Making a pilgrimage to the source of the Yarra River will not happen because the constraints of children hold me here, in this place, and I am not free, and I cannot go far, or far away for long. But I walk every day and this is the place I keep coming back to, this clearing by the river where nobody comes. I drop them to school and I walk back from my house down this gravel road, and along the track the River Action group in Millgrove have worked at so lovingly and well, and the clearing opens up like a promise every time I approach it, only now they’ve plonked a table to the side of it, a table that looks incongruous with its back to the river and no bench or chairs. Never mind about the table. I will bring the poems here and place them in a circle and sit with them on the ground for as long as it takes. I will do this every day to begin with, to get over the fear of starting. Better than staring at a blank page. But I will do this because it puts the idea in practice, and this place with the river running in white caps beside it, is as resonant as any I know. There is something here. I keep seeing a kookaburra on the lower branch of the tree I enter this clearing by, and it sits for the duration, and glides off like a blessing every time I turn to leave. It’s a perfect spot for listening, and I shall do this formally every week for the first three months of this thesis, while beginning to gather the words to write. Yes. And see what happens, speaking the poems aloud. In a circle, moving from each to each, a stone marking each spot, including where I shall sit, not outside the circle and not inside it either, but a stone to mark my place in this circle, and what that might feel like, just listening, without speaking, just imagining the voices of the poems as

42 they were written, and what could happen, if poems could sit together, like people, on the ground. Could dadirri influence a ritual undertaken in solitude to open up a resonance of living texts in the breathing of a group of poems in a literal way? By speaking the poems in a circle and listening to the words fall away? (Personal Journal Entry 2009)

The literal placing of these poems on sheets of paper under stones gathered by the river where I go to listen marks the virtuality of the ritual space I am precluded from approaching in daily life. Speaking these poems aloud, I have felt in my body the weight of what they are being asked to carry, even as I negotiate the overflow into silence of what cannot be spoken, and what must be listened to in different ways.

Deafness, both physical and cultural, is a great silencer. I have worked at imagining the orality of the voices whose living strength I have sensed flowing through this textual zone of encounter, and I have worked also at sitting still and quiet in the witnessing of the emotional effect on the body of a silence that reaches in indeterminate ways towards what I sense as ‘a touching, the transmission of a trembling at the edge of being’ (Nancy 1991:61). I have noticed space holds a resonance that is still palpable when I return. This is intangible and unprovable, but real in its visceral effect. I felt self-conscious in the beginning, fearing interruption, especially as the track along which others might walk was positioned at my back. I felt surprise, each time I returned, and the stones I had gathered from the bank were still in a circle in the long grass. Other times, I had to lay the stones out again. Sometimes there would be cans or bottles marking the passage of others through this place, and once a cooking fire, a few bits of rubbish around it, ashes still warm. But I was never interrupted, and the kookaburra was almost always there. Over time, I felt both present and presence in that space, and the ritual would begin as I entered the clearing and stood for a moment taking in the moving light between the trees. Mostly, it was about the same time of day, early to mid morning, and when sunny, the river made everything quiver with light. At first, I just washed my hands in the river before beginning, but as the weeks went on, I found myself drinking from my cupped hands and washing my face,

43 sometimes removing my shoes. Some days, feeling down, it was a joy to arrive there, and to welcome the wordlessness of it. What I noticed when I lay the pages in a circle was that they were all turned inward, so that if I walked around them to read from outside the circle, they were each upside down. But by sitting in each spot, holding the stone in my hand as I read the poems aloud, and placing the stone back on the page before quietly moving to the next spot, I noticed by the end, back in my own position in the circle with a stone in my hand, no words, just tears, was that each poem now faced outwards and could have been read by someone walking around outside the circle, had there been anybody there. This intrigued me, and I noticed it each time afterwards, but forgot it again, when coming the next time to lay the pages out.

One thing I have learnt is that you cannot rush these poems. And I like that. I recognise a flinty knowing in them that seems to me both hard-won and difficult to pin down. In becoming attentive to white affect, the textured aspects of silence working at the simultaneous levels of mode and code in these poems, I have learned to recognise ‘the dual orientation of beings inwards and outwards; the noncoincidence of whiteness with itself; that whiteness is inseparable from the immediacy of its relations with its others; and the reversibility of racialised identifications’ (Brewster 2006:102). I have also revelled in the ‘generative openness of indeterminacy’ (102) in the listening trope of dadirri as I have sought to understand it in relation to exploring aspects of potentiality in reading poems as dialogic space. My reading of the resonances released lies in the imaginary of a ‘circle of meaning’ (Stockton 1995:104) between a collective narrative made up of individual Indigenous speaking subjects through individual poems to an individual white subject as audience, whose experience of listening spirals up from the ground to bridge rather than confound the ‘dailiness of racial separation’ (Frankenberg 1996). In this, I sense a way through ‘the paralysis of witness’ to inhabiting ‘the anxiety of whiteness without capitulating to it’ (Brewster 2007:214). The opening of possible fields of emergence in moving from ‘mastery to mystery’ in the reading of Indigenous poetries in Australia

44 through a reinvigorated trope of listening is what I hope this thesis has in some small way approached.

This approach, however, speaks also of a connection to daily life, and the silence this involves. Poems enter consciousness; witness engenders an ethics of response. I do not yet know what shape this response might take. But I do know that these poems have brought me into a space of stillness-in- silence I cannot forget or ignore. In writing the poems that accompany this thesis, I have wished to experiment with making whiteness visible in some of my own work. Some of this experiment has turned to include a self-reflexive investigation of my own experience of silence and the dislocations of defamiliarised space. The speakers in the poems I present in tandem with this thesis both struggle with and take advantage of the impunity of whiteness and its various aestheticisations of silence. I struggle with my own criticism of this. The poems I present here were not written explicitly in engagement with exploring a notion of dadirri: rather, they were gathered over time, and in the shadows of this other work. I do not have any useful conclusions on this. My experience so far has been that poems cannot be unduly willed or directed, but that they can be listened to. And in this case, the rituals of walking and sitting on the ground have been part of the listening work of paying attention over time. Tentatively, I would suggest that mystery prospers where ritual occurs, and that listening as a ritual welcomes the invitation of a poem. But in this case, I cannot say that one mode of practice implies the cause or consequence of the other.

I would like to conclude by returning obliquely to Frederic Jameson, where he suggests that: [t]he symbolic act… begins by generating and producing its own context in the same moment of emergence in which it steps back from it, taking its measure with a view towards its own projects of transformation (1981:81). In the case of approaching dadirri as a listening trope particularly situated as a means of responding to a number of poems by a number of Indigenous women poets, I have applied, to some extent, Jameson’s proposition that

45 ‘[t]he literary or aesthetic act…always entertains some active relationship with the Real; yet in order to do so, it cannot simply allow “reality” to persevere inertly in its own being, outside the text and at distance’ (81). Drawing on the associations of water in Ungunmerr’s depiction of dadirri as ‘a deep spring inside us’ and on some of Jameson’s proposals for how the political unconscious shapes the forms through which we make meaning, I have sought with this thesis to respond to Ungunmerr’s desire that white listeners ‘come closer’ to respect and understanding by attempting to render a reading of these poems as a symbolic act. ‘Insofar, in other words, as symbolic action… is a way of doing something to the world, to that degree what we are calling “world” must inhere within it, as the content it has to take up into itself in order to submit it to the transformations of form’(81). I see the necessity of listening as drawn from the necessity of white witness to the historical forces shaping what constitutes ‘Australia’ as both social site and mythic ideology in the world as we know it. Poetry as symbolic act invites transformation in the social contract. Conceived in this sense, History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its “ruses’ turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force (Jameson 1981:102). The effects of ‘History’ in the Australian context of race relations has involved, in this thesis, a necessary analysis of silence. In the charged spaces where listening is active, poems as verbal artefacts of cultural inscription carry in them possibilities for cross-cultural dialogue, as well as the potential for witnessing a mystery that answers an impossible hunger and need.

Yarra River, Millgrove

46 Bibliography:

Atkinson, Judy (2002). Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press. Belfrage, Jane (2007). ‘The Great Australian Silence.’ Hearing Places: Sound, Place, Time and Culture. Ed. Ross Bandt, Michelle Duffy and Dolly MacKinnon. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 37-57. Bellear, Lisa (1996). Dreaming in Urban Areas. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Bellear, Lisa (2009). ‘Women’s Liberation’. Macquarie Pen Anthology of Australian Literature. Ed. Nicholas Jose. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin. 1344-1346. Birch, Tony (2007). ‘Locks of Hair to Untangle: Speaking But Not Being Heard.’ . Ed. Ross Bandt, Michelle Duffy and Dolly MacKinnon. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 31-36. Brewster, Anne (2005). ‘Writing Whiteness: the Personal Turn’. Australian Humanities Review. June 2005. 35. Brewster, Anne (2006). ‘Remembering Whiteness: Reading Indigenous Life Narrative.’ Critics and Writers Speak: Revisioning Post-Colonial Studies. Ed. Ignor Maver. Lanham, Oxford: Lexington Books. 85-105. Brewster, Anne (2007). ‘Brokering Cross-Racial Feminism: Reading Indigenous Australian Poet Lisa Bellear.’ Feminist Theory. 8(2):209- 221. Brewster, Anne (2008). ‘Engaging the Public Intimacy of Whiteness: the Indigenous Protest Poetry of Romaine Moreton.’ JASAL:: The Colonial Present (Special Issue): 56-76. Cage, John (1961). ‘4’33’’’. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3. Last accessed October 2009. Duffy, Michelle (2007). ‘The Possibilities of Music: 'To learn from and to listen to one another...'’ Ed. Ross Bandt, Michelle Duffy and Dolly MacKinnon. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 319-332. Dyer, Richard (1997). White. London: Routledge.

47 Eagleton, Terry (2007). How to Read a Poem. Malden, Oxford, Carlton: Blackwell Publishing. Fine, Michelle (1997). ‘Witnessing Whiteness.’ Off White: Readings on Race, Power and Society. Ed. Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell and L. Mun Wong. New York: Routledge. 57-65. Ford, Andrew (25 January 2003). Interview with Kerrianne Cox and Romaine Moreton. The Music Show. Radio National. Frankenberg, Ruth (1996). ‘When We Are Capable of Stopping We Begin to See: Being White, Seeing Whiteness.’ Names We Call Home: Autobiographies on Racial Identities. Ed. Becky Thompson and Sanjeeta Tyagi. New York: Routledge. 3-17. Garimara, Nugi (Doris Pilkington)(2002). Caprice : A Stockman's Daughter. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Gilbert, Kevin (1988). Inside Black Australia: An Anthology of Aboriginal Poetry. Ringwood: Penguin Books. Harrison, Jennifer and Kate Waterhouse (2009). Motherlode: Australian Women's Poetry 1986 – 2008. Glebe: Puncher and Wattmann. Hage, Ghassan (1998). White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Sydney, Australia: Pluto Press. Hodgson, Elizabeth (2008). Skin Painting.(Winner of the David Unaipon Award). St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Holt, Yvette (2008). Anonymous Premonition. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Jameson, Fredric (1981). The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Cornell University Press. Johnson, Eva (1993). ‘Trails’. Spirit Song: A Collection of Aboriginal Poetry. Ed. Lorraine Mafi-Williams. Norwood, SA: Omnibus Books. 39. Laub, Dori in Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub (1992). Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Pschoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge. Lipsky, Michael (1968). ‘Protest as a Political Resource’. The American Political Science Review. 62.4: 1144-1158. Massumi, Brian (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, North Carolina and London: Duke University Press.

48 McDermott, Dennis (2002). ‘Bare Feet, Broken Glass: Aboriginal Poetry and the Leaving of Trauma.’ Departures: How Australia Reinvents Itself. Ed. Xavier Pons. Carlton South: Melbourne University Press. 271-303. McDermott, Dennis. (June 2003). ‘In Your Face, Out Your Ear.’ Blue Dog 2(3): 64-71. Mills, Charles W. (2000). ‘Race and the Social Contract Condition.’ Social Identities 6(4): 441-462. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen (2000). Talkin' up to the white woman : Aboriginal Women and Feminism. St Lucia: University Of Queensland Press. Moreton, Romaine (1995). The Callused Stick of Wanting. Australia Council for the Arts: Breakout Design. Moreton, Romaine (2004). Post me to the Prime Minister. Alice Springs: IAD Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc (1991). The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Reed-Gilbert, Kerry (2000). The Strength of Us as Women: Black Women Speak. Charnwood, ACT: Ginninderra Press. Rich, Adrienne (1979). On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966- 1978. New York, London: W.W. Norton and Company. Ridgeway, Aden (2000). ‘An Impasse or a Relationship in the Making’. In Michelle Gratton, ed. Reconciliation: Essays on Australian Reconciliation. Melbourne: Black Inc. 12-17. Robertson, B. (2000). The Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Women's Task Force on Violence Report. State of Queensland. Scarry, Elaine (1985,1987). The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York, Oxford University Press. Stockton, Eugene (1995). The Aboriginal Gift. Alexandria: Millennium Books. Ungunmerr, Miriam Rose (1993). ‘Dadirri: Listening to One Another.’ A Spirituality of Catholic Aborigines and the Struggle for Justice. Ed. Hendriks and Hefferan. Brisbane: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Apostolate, Catholic Archdiocese of Brisbane. 34-37. Warner, Michael (2002). ’Publics and Counterpublics.’ Public Culture 14(1): 49-90.

49

PART TWO

Silence and its Thinking Thoughts: Selected Poems

by

Shari Kocher

50

CONTENTS

The Steady Circle of Silence with its Outer Rim on Fire………52 Dreaming in Auslan: a Study in Yellow and Grey………………53 Suburban Song Cycle……………………………………….……….55 Forms of Consent…………………………………………………….59 4am at the Mercy……………………………………………………...61 Switch-On………………………………………………………………62 Inside the Toorak Flower Shop…………………………………….64 Daisy…………………………………………………………………….65 The Poem……………………………………………………………....66 True and/or False……………………………………………………..68 Bloodlines……………………………………………………………...71 Spoons………………………………………………………………….74 Phyllis and Doris……………………………………………………...75 Snapshots of an Irish Immigrant in Reverse…………………….77 (Paintings by Arthur Boyd)…………….…………………………...81 Horse Skull Dreaming………………………………………………..86

51

The Pioneer, 1904. Frederick McCubbin

*

The Steady Circle of Silence with its Outer Rim on Fire

So when you step inside the circle What breathes fire in the cold? Empty-handed, tableless— How seize this sphere you cannot hold? No apple glowing in the bowl— How draw it, burning, to your lips? Who are you here? What call precedes you? What cry belongs? *

52

Dreaming in Auslan: a Study in Yellow and Grey

Waking a little at a time, the chain of light a helix at the window, the way the night divides like ears of wheat a small low bleating on the edge of sleep; the indistinct memory of sound in the heart of the shell that withers and falls silent in circles that lap, circling, open; she will go— the door swinging open— to meet herself at the ends of her feet (a spiral dream) that small green frog leaping into hands in the darkness the rain a grey drum pouring the mountain out inside the belly of a cloud; one hand on the cheek in a circle is “grey”, lit up like mist on the mountain; grey face smiling; the small rubber frog kissing the baby with blessings at the temple; the bells on their bell-ropes vibrating the air in rippling circles denoting the density of “mountain”; all alone, yes, her sloping feet carrying the baby with a pulse like a frog, the texture of a language the lit palms and lilting figures charging the body’s space of air with meaning; the door opening on the colour yellow the craziness of yellow those curtains she hung like mustard, the madness of it! Barely a trace, but suggestive in the circle, the gesture by the temple; the coloured cloud, yellow as cat’s eyes, twitching open in the dream language of a sleeping body in motion;

53 loud as the hunt and the harvest moon dilated those eyes with the candles in them the pink cat tonsils and sour breath raking her chest, imperious, demanding the night the full gravital pull of the round white moon eloquent as cat speech curled in a basket twitching in grey shadow language the shape of her body; legs in motion; sleeping a little at a time, quivering open; the raid on dreaming made visible at the window in the pale light giving way to morning: man with yellow sun on grey cat, yawning.

54 Suburban Song Cycle

(i)

Sun-lit shade on pine needles, a granite ledge, the sound of water trickling: luminous as pigeons, or the red bulge of a cactus flower that blooms once a year at midnight. Pine cones fall. The world expands. Light as air we sway on branches whose shadows lift us, dreaming, to a space where roses let fall petals made of wood, and the kite we’ve lost is the midday moon, tethered to a tree. Pine-bark sticky with ants and sap, and a sky-line tilting ever higher. Take me to the moon! I tease, you reel me in, How about Eterni-Tea? The baby burbles on the rug. The sun shines on your feet. Your nails flash like spoons.

55 (ii)

(inspired by Kerry Johns’ painting ‘Breakfast at Full Tide’)

Breakfast at full tide, beneath the darkening sky. The table rocks, arching the seabed like a boat. The children, minnows darting, anchor the yolk laced in salt and pepper, this swimming egg that lies like the morning, its veins undone before the day begun, the rim of your cup ablaze. Why must you be hurrying still wet from the shower, out the door? This billowing tide enclosed, awash with dishes and dirty sun- light flooding the walls like mashed banana— something slips, I’m in the thick of it, pulled asunder (what’s the matter?) the backwash of the day’s hard clatter split wide open. My legs that drip with seed like larva. No good morning— the chairs accuse. The children fight. I squint and bump my bones on too much glancing light.

56

(iii)

Yes. And see how the weeds wave in the little wind. The dew in the cut grass: the uncut grass on either side of the path, willowing like water. The silver threads that link the flowers like telegraph wires.

All week, the lanterns in the Vietnamese restaurant sway like bells on ropes of air suspended in reflection above the tram-line, and in my mind the darkness at the window, a lit tunnel through the night.

“So I rented a cave for a year,” you said, and I saw the dim interior, the slow wood and musk, the ticking of water in the pipes, the heating, the clock.

Saw myself leaving a house on a hill with its doors waving, its empty windows, the loss still circling a white-faced heron touching down with a knock.

57

Breakfast at Full Tide, Kerry Johns

58 Forms of Consent

What matters in the end is not which box you tick, or the spelling of your name, but that small skittering of your heart through which a starling steals in, then out, leaving skid-marks on all the walls.

You try to clean up but the walls are a mystery white as Ajax nothing stains them: trip-wires and chemicals bright as desire beneath the plaster

(flensed and shining) absorb and erase again all that disembodied whiteness closing in. Red skies and stormy light spell starlings stitching flight-paths in ariels made of skin.

You stammer past your fear of anaesthesia, coaxing back all other fears, including the syllables that empty out a loss of meaning when your surgeon’s eyes graze the ceiling, radiating walls. You sit up straight, already

59

naked on some trolley’s plate and emit, in clipped and unheard decibels, the pitch of distress a whale calls across the ocean’s roar. Your surgeon flexes his fountain pen. A flock of starlings fly back in. You slide toward a door.

60 4am at the Mercy

Flying low under the pitch and tar the dream is drugged but time is the milky stem of a cut flower

Pulling up sharply through a sea of rock the urgent grasp of a hand in a blue glove, grasping land, as the surgeon’s face-mask, coming into view with the thumbs-up sign, fades into a washed tenderness of stems. Night rolling in on wheels of sap soft faces, cotton, the touch of children, strangers, a hand holding a small cup of crushed ice: the cool clear liquid drip of language breaking down the unmaking of the body a slipstream of curling gold generous as clouds.

61 Switch-On

1

Sounds like Hong Kong traffic from the thirteenth floor of a high-rise building— birds and ribbons streaming out of your mouth in flutish tones that taste like water— the green next higher note a thin metal wire flashing in the wind. Speech is nonsense and I am a sugar-glider reaching for the split-sweetness of sound forked like a snake— the treble note and its digital shell parting the curved air between the invisible tree of your body and its branches full of eyes.

Lumberous trams arrive on threads of ting. A blank sky departs, cirrus clouds drifting.

62 Last night, it rained dark dreams and I rolled under the difficult labour of peat-bog-bodies being dredged and drained.

Heavy as a swamp this morning all I hear is mud—and you, Belovéd at your breakfast— slurping.

Come, let’s pull on this suck and pucker— let’s make Neanderthal footprints and speak in grunts and call it music!

Who cares what the world hears? This is Mud, and you and I, Belovéd are rolling in it: Glug-glug, glug-glug, glug-glug.

63 Inside the Toorak Flower Shop you point to some cold hellishly white labial lilies in lily-white paper pintucks in grey linen iron-pressed a steely edgy narrow lit-lit room so straight and proper- ly polite you feel the floor shrivel under your feet as if you’d died without noticing and ended up here buying odourless lilies from a wallet that opens and falls like water as she folds and folds the floral paper cutting the string with her teeth.

64 Daisy

Well, I did ask that you let me return as a daisy so I guess it’s only fitting thank God for small mercies not in a jam jar.

Well, here I am nothing fancy but enough to see by the whole of my body the sun rotating my daily sky and with it the thrum of the busy old bee rasping and grasping the honey from me.

Nothing much has changed I guess but in the moonlight when the moths come I curl up like an eyelash and close myself to

their pale bodies resting on me the dream of the weight of my own mute feet deep in clay and dying to be free.

65 The Poem

(i) Being born sideways is no small thing. I wonder what the poem feels when this happens. Who writes the thunder, who rocks space? Who bites the caul from the poem’s face? Who tied my mother to a pole and burnt her, crying Witch? Who threw her lover, and not my father, into a bog-black ditch? I don’t believe in men walking on water, do you? I wonder what the poem believes if the weight of stone is true. Who threw the first one, who the last? Who sees what a poem sees in pitch and peat and dark?

(ii) I was at a party once. Beach, bonfire etc. Poetry is everything, someone said. We were drinking beer in polystyrene cups straight from a keg that had fallen off the back of a— exactly. Yeah, like religion. What, you a priest or something? Nah, don’t be so bloody fundamental. The beer was pretty flat. What about the women? Thought you said there’d be some? Later, a fight broke out. Poetry sucks, someone said, while throwing up under a tea tree bush. Anyway, I’m gonna be a brain surgeon.

66 (iii)

The thing is, when I hold a poem up to the light my mind falls out the bottom of it and when I tilt a poem sideways my body leaps out like a body falling without a parachute also like a rabbit released from the slaughter of twin headlights on a low coastal road in the dark on a low coastal road in the dark thought goes out trailing like a vine on hooks of water the murmur of fear also the flash along the edge of the knife with the rainbow in it scraping scales on a Sunday afternoon under a thinning sky, at a backyard sink (the bucket for the fish’s head standing in the parsley bed) the point of the knife going in comes out clean and there you have it, in English on the tongue, hidden like a wish, the poem is not the fish but the thing that happens to it: its cream, its offal, its stink.

67

True and/or False

As a child, I often said nothing rather than accidentally tell a lie.

Here, in this room a kitchen table converted to a desk. A drawer with a blue book in it. A blue book of random words and their hand-written dictionary meanings.

Helix, canticle, littoral. Callow, frigid, fugue. Extraneous.

Now tell me. Tell me the truth. You’re not to leave this room until you do.

The desk in front of a window. The window overlooking the neighbour’s front windows, their front doors yards, front bedrooms. One God-given graceful maple tree pruned so brutally it looks like a strangled upside down mop stuck in the ground to dry.

Capacious, cadenced, incarnate. Plumbago, mulberry, elm. Glossy ibis. Fig bird. Pith.

I will get to the bottom of this even if I have to shake the truth out of you.

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Here in this room in this newly strange house I watch the banks sloping down to the river imagine the original trees before they were felled. Here, the crisp oil burning, the tick-ticking of the flame. A watercolour on the wall of myself at eight a boy called David who should have been me.

I want the truth now! You had better tell me what you were doing under that blanket.

A book opens on the desk. All the lost objects I grieve. The children’s beds, stripped, fragrant, beautifully clean put out under the trees half an hour before the auction. My mother’s blue cupboard, her sanded door. The bicycles. The chairs with the curved mahogany handles. The stack of magazines in a box, a decade of them all those imagined interiors lost.

You’re a liar or else a filthy little girl. Now get to your bedroom and don’t come out until you’re ready to apologise to your Mother and I.

Liars get no supper in this house.

69

My first childhood room. A tree with a kookaburra in it. My totem bird, a snake dangling from its beak, keeping me safe. A blue bedside table. A Mickey-Mouse chair. The golliwogs and the long-legged clown with the goggly eyes stuffed in a sea-trunk under my bed. Three steps to the door in a band of moonlight or else you just hang on all night and pray.

Magna gum, stinging tree, gyroscope. Chalk. Granite. Limestone. That little word, hope.

My mother clicking her tongue like spurs. My father wielding his belt. Being held out over rushing water by the armpits: Don’t struggle, or I’ll drop you.

At a motel pool: Throw her in! It’s the only way she’ll learn to swim!

My father who stopped speaking to me at fourteen. Mother, tell your daughter to pass the salt. Mother, tell your daughter….

70 Bloodlines

So thick the ankles swell It’s the thyroid, you see She’s got diabetes too, didn’t you know? Yeah, the back’s gone again Laid flat, still smoking, yeah Laid off, a pack a day, six pack, on his back Nothing I can do about it, she said Deidre, she said, I think I can see my future We just have to accept No we don’t Mum, he’s a right royal pain in the Can’t eat cheese just like a baby She even has to change him Yeah I heard, one of us should get round there Nah, he wouldn’t like it You still walking? Nah, gave it up, too hard Getting up in the morning Not getting it not getting it up Think you missed the boat there They got married on a boat, didn’t you go? Nah! Fancy having to pay to go to your own sister’s wedding! Yeah well, heard she left him Nah, the other one, did you know ’im? Not really, took it bad, but. Prolapsed they say, maybe cancer Haven’t seen her in a while should call round She died the other day really that’s terrible Are you going to the funeral? Nah she’s getting cremated Doing it on the cheap Back to counting sheep

71 Mum says hello but she can’t talk now Thick as thieves thicker than water anyhow She’s putting on a baby shower Still think they should have waited She couldn’t wait that one Baby popped out like a champagne cork! You coming to the baptism? Nah, how many does she have now? Hold on a tick I need my glasses The others have all grown up though Too right I said I wouldn’t be caught dead in that And she asked for the placenta back! Keeps it in a jar under the bed! Grandma’s getting a bit blind these days Maybe after the operation Yeah too bad good luck with it all Anything I can do? Just flush it down the loo love and be done with it! She wasn’t even wearing gloves And then when Grandpa— There you are! I’ve been looking for you everywhere! Fancy they’re going to call the new baby Molly What’s that about Dolly? Sshh, Dad, baby’s asleep What about Dolly the sheep? Bad business, that Put your glasses on, Dad Mum you tell him Oh yes well dear me Nice seeing you Yeah see you round some time See you later Seeya seeya All right then bye love Send a postcard Don’t work too hard Good God aren’t you gone yet?

72 Just leaving Not in this family you don’t! Who the devil was that? See what happens when they all start spawning! All right all right don’t get your knickers in a Hello love what are you doing back? Good grief I’ll put the kettle on Not a word now, don’t let on.

73 Spoons crowded in drawers or leaning precariously by the sink their metal mouths pursed and shrinking the way my mother shrank from us as if each child that swelled inside her gouged her out a little more until we became, mouth by mouth a set of spoons unpolished, mostly bent but for the one sterling silver boy who would save us, take us all away to some shining place someday or so I saw and blindly hungered for in that swift brief look of love she reserved for him which seemed to linger in a space of light framed by the door where he had stood or the kitchen window, his hair alight his toast encrusted knife plunged handle-up in the butter dish the lemons on the tree outside vivid against the foliage, hardly stirring the way she looked at him the pause of her spoon and her mouth.

74 Phyllis and Doris

I see one in the kitchen, all the food tidied away, nothing to eat. All the chrome gleaming. The tea-towels folded into eighths. I see the other at her sewing machine, her split heels and one horned foot at the pedal going hell for leather, her mouth full of pins.

In the present tense, Phyllis cleans floors for a living and washes clothes and wipes the custard from the mouths of those she adopts at the hospice, while Doris plays the organ in a cathedral thundering with unbreakable tradition.

One slams doors when angry. The other weeps. One says I can’t at every new thing. One says I couldn’t, sex a sin. Both fly past in a crackling dress bustling with ironing boards and seams to press, and shooting sparks and stars that read audacity, hilarity, tenacity— speeding by, they scoop me up and swing me high pie-in-the-sky, in capering clogs and a funny hat and Doris sings, and pretends to smoke, and Phyllis, laughing twirls, and claps. There are others. Sisters of these mothers. And their mothers. Charlotte wore trousers and choked on a fishbone, or swallowed pills, it was never clear which. And Margaret had reason to fear being her father’s favourite yet still she left her daughters with him

75 when he came to baby sit. All were young or in their early prime when trapped inside the marriage-carriage rhyme they left their father’s houses to become the mothers I embrace and run from. How to trace the shapes we live? Phyllis fears what she wants and Doris finds it only reasonable, given how hard it is to give— Love, (brittle as barley sugar shot with twists) is all, they say. Accept. Forgive.

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Snapshots of an Irish Immigrant in Reverse

1

The pine needles quivering, swift downstrokes of running light. The bell-flowers shaking out their tassels, the slugs upon them fat as tongues.

The thrips and gnats and midges milling the air in moated clouds inches above the grass. The silver undersides of leaves like glass.

The wattle on the corner growing hard up against a fence post where the sound of a metal cutter cutting bricks for pavers on the neighbour’s drive scours the spinning blade of a saw-toothed sun sending out hot sparks, and one small chip a speck of dust or sand, the sudden flash and sting this catalogue of a neighbourhood I’ve been happy in this grit in my eye in this wavering light as the houses return to their customary flatness and the trees fall mute.

77 2

Cut me in half! my daughter screams. You might as well! I’m already dead!

The smell of new-born bread.

The wind in the bare branches budding.

3

The window opens. My soul flies out. The empty space remaining is my body standing under an alien sky.

Every tree and leaf and stone unnamed to me, not recognised, not known.

Not even the plot of stars this ground grew under. Not even the moon, back to front.

4

The walls of this strange house are not at all friendly. They are not even immediately known in the dark. Fingers fumble for light switches that may or may not exist, certainly not at the accustomed height. I dream of basket chaos – I am coming! The dream voice calls Wait for me!

The thronging crowds. The unscudding clouds. The density of mist.

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5

Singing in silence beneath the flood the lineaments of what is familiar, good blurring and twisting like a knot in wood.

6

I’ll lift you up and stretch you out and fold you in sweet air.

Answering on my spirit’s stave pulse-beat, wing-shimmer ‘guileless milk of the word.’1

1 Gwen Harwood

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7

The crying is at the wolf’s name. Dancing in a room with the door closed. The irreparable loss, in this time and age, of innocence.

Oh, but there again is that rare and hungering cat.

“I’ll lift you up and stretch you out and fold you in sweet air.”

Go now and get the cart / for the rhythm in her foot.

The rhythm of train wheels – the music in my head – the fact of babies. Knowing how to feed them is not innate, it must be learned. My left breast filled with singing milk lunging forward for a mouth: ‘body’ of poetry reflected in the water drink this, and drink deep, my lovely daughter.

Here we are. Late as it is, and hungry. This gnawing-bellied land of ghosts. This wanting feast, this toast.

80

Death of a Horse, 1981. Arthur Boyd from The Artist and the River: Arthur Boyd and the Shoalhaven, Sandra McGrath,

Sydney and London, Bay Books, 1982, p241

81

Bridegroom going to his wedding, 1958. Arthur Boyd from Arthur Boyd: Retrospective, Barry Pearce, Art Gallery of NSW, Beagle Press,

1993, p.105

82

Shearers playing for a bride, 1957. Arthur Boyd from Arthur Boyd: Retrospective, Barry Pearce, Art Gallery of NSW, Beagle Press, 1993, p.104

83

Persecuted lovers, 1957-58. Arthur Boyd from Arthur Boyd: Retrospective, Barry Pearce, Art Gallery of NSW, Beagle Press,

1993, p.103

following page, from The Artist and the River: Arthur Boyd and the Shoalhaven, Sandra

McGrath, Sydney and London, Bay Books, 1982, p.237

84

Skull on Winter’s Morning with Mist and Flame Trees, 1981. Arthur Boyd

85 Horse Skull Dreaming

(in memory of the massacres of Aboriginal people at the hands of white settlers as documented at the Bunkilika Aboriginal Cultural Centre and further inspired by Arthur Boyd’s Bride Series (1957-1959) and his Bundanon Paintings (1978-82) )

[“… the best way to [procure a run] is to go outside and take up a new run, provided the conscience of the party is sufficiently seared to enable him without remorse to slaughter natives…” Niel Black, Squatter, 9 Dec, 1839]

Blonde-black, blonde-black Dreaming backwards Horses’ bridles made of hair

With the horses we were going somewhere, a soakage, they said, or a watering-hole

Blonde-black, blonde-black Dreaming backwards under a milk-studded sky that tumbled and glowed a thousand campfires gleaming Blonde-black, blonde-black but in the gloaming what I saw were men on horses, roaming

Blonde-black, blonde-black Horses’ bridles made of hair and every man bit who sucked them till they ran with blood and the last man kicked with black boots on

86 [“They gave the men a child to lay next to the fire. They put it close to the fire and roasted it.” GA Robinson, Chief Protector of Aborigines, 7 June 1841] roll them, roll them over Horses’ bridles made of hair

Pushing circulations of vastness through The women’s breasts hung in perpendicular sacks and every man bit who sucked them (Go back! Go back! my mother cried)

[“The Human Rights Commission’s Enquiry into Racist Violence found that it was common for white police to rape Indigenous women after taking them into custody” Aileen Moreton-Robinson in Talkin’ Up to the White Woman, p170] rolled in ashes and cooked like damper Go back! But no one is there rolled in ash and keening

This is my mother’s house I hear myself say but it cannot be, because this is my mother’s house and I am in it

I run outside screaming

[“In my country, Wiradjuri, a large mob of my countrymen, women and children were herded and driven like sheep before the guns to the big swamps near Bathurst. There they were ‘dispersed’ with guns and

87 clubs, whereupon these pioneering, head-hunting whites cut off a large number of the peoples’ heads, boiled them down in buckets and sent 45 of the skulls and other bones off to Britain.” Kevin Gilbert in Inside Black Australia, pxx ]

The horse’s skull in Arthur Boyd’s paintings belonged to a horse called Flame who belonged to a white girl who loved that gelding and buried it under some flame trees in Arthur Boyd’s paddock before he came to own it but the head of the horse in “Bridegroom going to his wedding” is the head of an Aboriginal woman with the bridegroom riding on her back

Crouched down low burning slow there’s a fire beneath the ground

Smoke rises I push it under Sssh, says Lydia, (my child-bride mother) it’s only thunder

In the silence crouching low

I can hear the horses’ breathing can hear the horses’ breathing…

88 Acknowledgements

My thanks to all my family and friends (especially Penny Drysdale, Andreas Kocher, Marianne Kocher, Jules Ward, Nina Massarik, Hayley Singer, Wendy James and my children Janine and Marcel) who have supported me in numerous ways to give me the time to undertake this work: my heartfelt gratitude.

My sincere thanks to Kevin Brophy, Elizabeth MacFarlene and Tony Birch for support and encouragement in every way.

My thanks also to the editors of the following journals in which some of these poems have, or are due to, appear: Blue Dog, for ‘Spoons’ (Vol 2 No. 4: 37) and ‘Snapshots of an Irish Immigrant in Reverse’(Vol 5 No.10: 13-15); Swamp, (Issue 4) for ‘Inside the Toorak Flower Shop’; and Island (forthcoming June 2010) for ‘Suburban Song Cycle, part ii’.

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