This collection pulls no punches. It confronts you, yells at you. It will move you to tears. Tears of sadness, anger, frustration. This poetry sings. It yearns. It aches. It bleeds. Songlines and stories of country are picked open into fault-linesthe hardship, the horror inflicted on our first peoples, the devastation of country by development, a nation a people disconnected, dismissed, denied, deleted. This poetry calls out the supressed history, culture, the inherited colonial narrative, the whitewashed history which obscures the invasion of captains of propriety and property. Stolen lands. Stolen generations. Stolen stories. The thievery of truth.
Beneath white Australia's narrative runs a sinister songline, rich and old. Papertalk-Green and Kinsella mine this songline in verse and antiphon. Papertalk-Green tells of her country and her culture. Kinsella unsees the world we were taught at school. Two different lives, different stories weave together, rarely pausing for breath. Words that reflect this land to us all, reveals our identity, our journey to here.
And this poetry celebrates, country and culture, it reaches for reconnection, belonging. Acknowledgement. These poems break free of this anthology, insist on being read and seen, on being visible.
Charmaine Papertalk-Green born at Eradu on the Greenough River between Mullewa and Geraldton on Amangu country, is a member of the Wajarri and Badimaya groups from the Yamaji Nation of Western Australia. She is a visual and installation artist, poet and writer and was instrumental in the incubation of the nationally and internationally touring exhibition Ilarijiri - Things belonging to the Sky arts and the cultural project.
John Kinsella is the author of over thirty books. His numerous awards include the Australian Prime Ministers Literary Award for Poetry, the Victorian Premiers Award for Poetry, and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry. His most recent works include Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems (Picador, 2016), On the Outskirts (UQP, 2017), and Old Growth (Transit Lounge, 2017). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University. He lives on Ballardong Noongar land at Jam Tree Gully in the Western Australian wheatbelt and went to high school on Yamaji land in Geraldton.
