Kindred | Kirli Saunders #Poetry

 

2019 was the International Year of Indigenous Languages:

It is through language that we communicate with the world, define our identity, express our history and culture, learn, defend our human rights and participate in all aspects of society, to name but a few.

Through language, people preserve their community’s history, customs and traditions, memory, unique modes of thinking, meaning and expression. They also use it to construct their future. Language is pivotal in the areas of human rights protection, good governance, peace building, reconciliation, and sustainable development.

A person’s right to use his or her chosen language is a prerequisite for freedom of thought, opinion and expression, access to education and information, employment, building inclusive societies, and other values enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Many of us take it for granted that we can conduct our lives in our home languages without any constraints or prejudice. But this is not the case for everyone.

Part of the shameful role of colonial behaviour in Australia since 1788, is the conscious and unconscious effort to create a White Australia that only spoke English. This required new immigrants to forget their native language and assimilate by only speaking English, but more significantly, it completely denied Aboriginal Australians the dignity or right to speak their own languages. 

I grew up in an Australia that was almost empty of Aboriginal words.

Many rural towns and suburbs retained names derived from an Indigenous term to describe the local area and some of our plants and animals have a similar history. As a teenager, in particular, an Indigenous word would enter our language colloquially, but there was no systemic teaching, understanding or use of local languages.

Until recently.

Slowly, slowly, Indigenous languages are being revived, encouraged and celebrated. Dictionaries are being created, recordings are being made and Indigenous writers and artists are using their own words more often in their work.

Two of the poems in Saunders' collection, Kindred, caught my eye for this reason.

• My Apologies (written on Dharawal Country with Dharawal translations informed by Aunty Jodi Edwards) finishes with a list of English words, followed by their Dharawal counterparts.

as I recite a monologue | of apology | on behalf of anyone | that has ever branded you | with a name that isn't yours

• And Wirritjiribin: Lyrebird - The one who Remembers (written on Gundungurra Country with Gundungurra translations informed by Aunty Velma Mulcahy and Aunty Trish Levett) contains two stanzas that mirror each other. One is written in part English/part Gundungurra, the other is a full English translation.

arise wirritjiribin | tangara your truth

Saunders divides the book into three sections: Mother, Earth Child and Lover. Very delicately, she draws our attention to grief, loss and trauma new trees | old scars | there is trauma here

Nature and being on country is the healer. She reveals safe places, tender new growth and the journey back home. Home to country, home to culture, home to language.

Facts:

• Kirli Saunders is a proud Gunai woman, born on Gundungurra Country with ties to the Yuin, Biripi and Gadigal people.
• Interview for Kindred in the National Indigenous Times 27th May 2019.
• Saunders was made Gunai Woman NSW Aboriginal Woman of the Year 2020.
• She developed Poetry in First Languages project for Red Room Poetry.
• Inaugural winner Daisy Utemorrah Award 2019
• Winner University of Canberra ATSI Poetry prize 2019
• Shortlist ABIA Award Small Publishers' Adult Book of the Year 2020

#AusReadingMonth2020

The White Girl | Tony Birch #AUSfiction

The White Girl by Tony Birch was my August book club choice. 

I'm always a little nervous when it's my turn to pick the book in case it turns out to be a book universally disliked, poorly written or just one of those duds that doesn't spark any kind of joy in anyone.

Thankfully, that wasn't the case with The White Girl.

I was initially concerned for young Sissy, the granddaughter of Odette Brown (our strong, resilient protagonist), early on in the story, that something ghastly would happen to her at the hands of the bullying young men who lived on the nearby farm. I actually had to put the book down for a few days, the fear and anxiety around what could happen to her was too much to think about or read about. 

I am grateful that Birch, ultimately, chose not to go down that road. 

So many awful things did happen, but they happened earlier in the story or off stage so to speak. In some ways this could be seen as an easy way out for the reader. So many young Aboriginal women had to experience and live through what happened to Sissy's mother, and almost happened to her, that making the reader face this fact would have been a valid and historically correct thing to do.

‘Trouble? Our people have been in one sort of trouble or another from the first day we set eyes on a white person’.

But this is a story about strong women and survival and the choices we make. Odette is determined to protect young Sissy in a way she could not protect her own daughter. It's not until she discovers the whole truth about Lila and learns of how the Kane boys are beginning to harass Sissy that Odette makes a huge decision. 

Odette is not a victim, instead she does what needs to be done.

As an early childhood educator with 18 years experience, I taught a number of Indigenous kids with incredibly strong, devoted grandmothers, determined to protect their grandchildren in ways they were unable to protect their own children. The tragedy is that Birch's story, set in a fictional town in 1960's Australia, still felt so relevant for my teaching experiences throughout 1990's, early 2000's Australia.

Initially you could think that Birch's story was fairly simple and straightforward storytelling. However, the simplicity masks deeper layers, subtly explored and exposed. Characters that could be seen as one-dimensional or even a stereotype feel fleshed out by the end of the book.

Birch even gives the awful Kane family some redeeming qualities with the younger son/brother who tries to protect, explain and understand everyone. We become aware of the ghastly childhoods they experienced at the hands of their father, that goes some way towards explaining their awful behaviour. The law and the church could not protect this family of white boys from the horrors of their childhood, yet it believed they could somehow protect and provide for Indigenous kids. 

Birch covers so many difficult, confronting topics, yet it never feels heavy or preachy. The story telling is fierce yet tender and full of hope. His restraint acts as a powerful tool that makes the reader face all the things left unsaid. The story is a beacon of resilience and strength for Indigenous readers and a challenge for non-Indigenous readers to step out in someone else's shoes.

I was trying to find a way to finish this post, when I read Sue @Whispering Gums thoughtful review from last year, She summed up my thoughts so succinctly that I have borrowed (with permission) her final paragraph:

What Birch shows, then, is that survival for indigenous people was (and mostly still is) quite a cat-and-mouse game. It involves “taking a chance with these white people”. This is a risk, Odette and her friends realise, but is often all they have. And that, I think, is the main message Birch wants to leave with his non-indigenous readers. The question is, can we rise to the challenge, and be trusted? Are we prepared to heed the truths being shared? So far, I’d say, the jury is still out.

Facts:

• Birch is a novelist, a short story-writer, poet, academic historian, climate justice-Indigenous rights activist 
• He grew up in inner-city Melbourne with an Aboriginal, Barbadian (convict), Irish and Afghani heritage.
• Birch’s great grandfather on his mother’s side was an Afghani, Bouta Khan, from the Punjab. 
• His great grandfather was James “Prince” Moodie, transported from Barbados to Tasmania.
• Birch spent a decade as a firefighter. 
• When he was 30, he went to the University of Melbourne, as a mature-age student.
• In 2003 he was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal for the best PhD in Arts. 
• He is now the Bruce McGuinness research fellow at Victoria University.
• His work includes climate change research and how it impacts Indigenous communities and people on the margins of society.

Favourite Quote:

After visiting with her parents Odette walked Sissy past the other graves, explaining the connection she had to family and Odette’s childhood friends.
‘You need to know all of these people,’ she said, ‘and you must remember them.’
Sissy looked around at the headstones. ‘There’s a lot of people here, Nan. How will I remember all of them?’
‘Through the stories,’ Odette said. ‘I’m telling them to you, and it will be your job to remember. It’s just like the story in the book you’re reading. The story of the dog from Africa. You told me about that today, and already I can remember it. Our stories are not written in any books, which means you’ll need to keep telling them to your own family one day.’

Book 10 of 20 Books of Summer Winter

Indigenous Picture Books

Lisa @ANZLitLover is hosting her annual Indigenous Literature Week. Normally this week is also NAIDOC week, but due to Covid it has been postponed until 8th -15th November. The 2020 theme is 

Always Was, Always Will Be. 

Always Was, Always Will Be. recognises that First Nations people have occupied and cared for this continent for over 65,000 years. 

The picture books below honour this theme with their focus on country, family, success past and present, dreaming, songlines and sharing language & culture. They share a pride in Aboriginal heritage, acknowledging the wrongs and the suffering but looking forward to a more hopeful, inclusive future.

Respect | Aunty Fay Muir & Sue Lawson | Magabala Books | 1st May 2020

You have to respect this book.

It's heart is in the right place. Every page reflects love of country and family.

Respect combines a deep concern for taking care of each other, with acknowledging cultural heritage and traditions. It generously shares a part of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture with the wider community.

Magabala Books are planning a series of such books:

Respect is the first title in the ‘Our Place’ series of four children’s picture books which welcome and introduce children to important elements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture.

Lisa Kennedy's illustrations are stunning. Full of warmth and colour and a pleasing simple design that engages and draws the reader in.

I can't wait to see the other three books in this series.

Aunty Fay Muir is a Boonwurrung Elder.

Lawson's first book with Aunty Fay was Nganga: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Words and Phrases.
Lisa Kennedy is a descendant of the coastal Trawlwoolway people of north-east Tasmania.

Family | Aunty Fay Muir & Sue Lawson | Magabala Books | 1st July 2020

Family is book two in the Our Place series of picture books from Magabala Books. It's an Indigenous picture book about heart and home.

These books are designed for a preschool aged audience. Simple, clear language is used to show how caring and sharing for country and mob is an integral philosophy of Aboriginal life. This book focuses on how daily rituals and traditions create belonging and connection.

The earthy tones and palate used by Seymour throughout the book, feature family groups interacting together with country.

Respect and Family are both gentle, positive introductions for younger readers to Indigenous family and culture.

Aunty Fay Muir is a Boonwurrung Elder.
This is the third book that Sue Lawson has written with Aunty Fay.
Jasmine Seymour a Darug writer and artist.


Cooee Mittigar | Jasmine Seymour | Magabala Books | 1st November 2019

The full title for this book is Cooee Mittigar: A Story of Darug Songlines.
Cooee mittigar means come here friend. Seymour & Watson, two Darug women, invite us inside to share their story and to pay respect to country.

Darug country encompasses the greater Sydney Basin and Hawkesbury River.

Seymour & Watson have created a story that celebrates the Darug language by embedding it naturally within the text.

A glossary at the back provides simple meanings for each new word, but each word is also explained on the page where it is used, separate to the main text.

Mulgo, Black Swan takes us on a history lesson through Dreamtime and songlines, before moving onto a seasonal journey through Darug country.

Cooee mittigar. Tread softly on our lands.

Know that this dreaming was here. Is still here.

Will be forever.

Beautifully illustrated with native animals and local plants.
This is my pick of the crop (so far) for Indigenous picture books published in the past year.

Shortlisted – 2020 CBCA Award for New Illustrator
Notable – 2020 CBCA Book of the Year Awards: Eve Pownall Award

Coming Home to Country | Bronwyn Bancroft | Little Hare Books | 1st February 2020

Bancroft's illustrations feel very personal. They feature the rivers of her childhood in northern NSW that flow from page to page. Love of country and nature jump off each page in bold colours as Bronwyn takes us on a journey through her home, past and present.

A sense of where her home is grounds her. Knowing where she belongs allows her to go out into the world to make her own way. 

Over the years, her way, has included time as a textile and fashion designer, artist, activist and children's picture book writer and illustrator.

In 2016 Bancroft was the Australian Finalist for the Hans Christian Andersen Award (Illustrator).

She is now a finalist for the 2020 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.

Born in Tenterfield, in northern NSW, Bronwyn Bancroft is a descendant of the Djanbun clan of the Bundjalung nation.

Our Home, Our Heartbeat | Adam Briggs | Little Hare Books | 1st May 2020

Yorta Yorta rapper Adam Briggs' energetic, enthusiastic personality oozes from every page and lyric in this book.

In 2014 Briggs released a song during Naidoc week called The Children Came Back. The song celebrates successful, well-known Indigenous athletes and artists, past and present. It was written on the 25th anniversary of Archie Roach's song Took the Children Away to continue the conversation originally started by Roach. His aim is to normalise Indigenous success.

Briggs claims his song is a "history lesson, a monologue, a celebration and an education." 

I've included the lyrics from the song below but urge you to search out the various youtube videos of the song, including the live versions done with Paul Kelly and Dan Sultan.

I'm Fitzroy where the stars be
I'm Wanganeen in '93
I'm Mundine, I'm Cathy Free-
Man, that fire inside a me
I'm Adam Goodes, and Adam should
Be applauded when he stand up
You can look to us when that time stop
I'm Patty Mills with the last shot

I'm Gurrumul, I'm Archie
I'm everything that you ask me
I'm everything that you can't be
I'm the dead hearts, heart beat

The children came back
The children came back
Back where their hearts grow strong
Back where they all belong
The children came back

I'm Doug Nicholls, I'm jimmy little
With a royal telephone
I'm the world champ in '68
Boy I'm Lionel Rose
I'm William Cooper, I take a stand
When no one even knows
I'm the walk off, I'm the sound of
The children coming home

I'm Gurrumul, I'm Archie
I'm everything you ask me
I'm everything you can't be
I'm the dead hearts, heart beat

The children came back
The children came back
Back where their hearts grow strong
Back where they all belong
The children came back

Let me take it home, I'm Rumba
I'm the sand hills on Cummera
I'm Les Briggs, I'm Paul Briggs
I'm Uncle Ringo with all them kids
I'm Uncle Buddy - everybody love me
Ain't none below, ain't none above me
I'm the carvings outta every scar tree
I'm those flats that birthed Archie

Now Mr abbott, think about it - me and you we feel the same
That might sound strange, I'm just saying,
We both unsettled when the boats came

I'm Gurrumul, I'm Archie
I'm everything you ask me
I'm everything you can’t be
I'm the dead hearts, heart beat

The children came back
The children came back
Back where their hearts grow strong
Back where they all belong
The children came back.

Our Home, Our Heartbeat is a younger readers version of this song. Briggs then made a very deliberate decision to have non-traditional illustrations, choosing a contemporary, almost cartoon style with bold, bright colours and lots of action.

From Lunch Lady interview |  21st May 2020

the Dreamtime stories, which are all fantastic, and all the artwork is amazing and fantastic. But cool, we have that. Let’s not do that, because people who are really good at that are already doing it. Here’s my contribution. It’s not here to take away. It’s here to add....I wanted it to be really super vibrant. I wanted everything to be bright and colourful and not like earthy ochre tones. I wanted it to really pop.

Kate Moon is a Melbourne based designer and 3D artist.

Rachael Sarra is a contemporary Aboriginal artist from Goreng Goreng country.

Truganini | Cassandra Pybus #AWW

Truganini: Journey through the apocalypse is an extraordinary read. 

Cassandra Pybus has compiled a thorough and very personal history of Truganini's life and times. I say personal, because what gives this book that little extra something special is Pybus' relationship to Truganini. As she says in her Preface, the 'rapid dispossession (of the original people of Tasmania), and its terrible aftermath, is the foundation narrative of my family.' 

This book has been a 30 year labour of love for Pybus, as she has searched for the right way to tell this story. Feeling very conscious about not speaking for someone who left behind no letters, diaries or direct speech of her own, Pybus chose to only use documents that contained first hand accounts from people who had actually met Truganini, 'people who saw and heard her with their own eyes and ears, then - ideally - made a contemporaneous record of it.'

Pybus was also conscious that most of these first hand accounts about Truganini, were written by men, 'pompous, blinkered, acquisitive, self-aggrandising men who controlled and directed the context of what they described.' She was determined to find the 'woman behind the myth.'

One of those pompous, blinkered, acquisitive, self-aggrandising men was George Augustus Robinson (1791-1866). His Australian Dictionary of Biography claims that he was a protector of Aborigines, however his diaries reveal a man far more self-interested and self-serving than this generous sounding title would imply. 

Richard Pybus and his wife (Cassandra's ancestors) arrived in Australia in 1829 and were given a 'massive swathe of North Bruny Island, an unencumbered free land grant, even while Truganini and her family were still living there.' Their other (white) neighbour on this island, Nuenonne land, was George Robinson.

This is where we first meet a young Truganini - in the journals, letters and notes made by the Harrison - at home on Bruny Island with her family.

I cannot imagine what it must have been like for people of Truganini's generation. To have been born into one world - a safe, familiar, world where you knew you belonged - but then to grow up in another - with alien rules and expectations, even while still living on your own country. To have the certainty of your birth right taken from you, subjected to judgement and harsh treatment and to be denied the solace of your own way of life A way of life now seen as inferior, if not completely denigrated and despised.

Robinson's diaries document this rapidly changing world for Truganini and her family. Whalers stealing the young girls and women, having to barter for goods (often with their bodies), the life-long effects of syphilis and other venereal diseases, dressing up in European clothes to impress governors, Christian leaders and journalists only to run off naked back to their home land, what was left of it...that is, until the influenza virus of 1829.

After the flu virus had ravaged the island, Robinson in his diary said,

only fourteen Nuenonne remained to receive the benefit of his proselytising. These traumatisied survivors were slashing their faces and bodies in grief, in no state to heed his Christian platitudes.

Naturally, Truganini's story is bound up with Robinson's story. He seemed to have taken on a fatherly role in her life. She also seemed to realise that by sticking by him, she was guaranteed a safer passage through this fast-changing world. So when Robinson left Bruny Island to take on a missionary role tracking remote clans on the west coast of Tasmania so he could bring them 'under his protection'. Truganini joined him, little realising that she would never live on Bruny Island, her home country, again.

Robinson was a curious fellow,

He reasoned to himself that his object in plunging into the wild was to shine the light of God into the darkness, while his wholehearted embrace of untamed nature revealed a passion for elemental experience much at odds with his evangelical posturing....it seemed as if he was in the process of becoming one of them....he shared the food they caught and was at pains to make himself part of their rituals and daily activity.

Although it's not easy to like him or even respect him very much by today's standards, Pybus reminds us of how he was seen by his contemporaries. His desire to protect, or broker a reconciliation with the original people of Van Dieman's Land was actually at odds with most of the other white settlers of the colony, who just wanted a clear field and a clear conscious to do what they wanted in this new land.

The bulk of the book is about the long, arduous treks that Robinson took around Tasmania, with his native guides, searching for the last surviving tribes. By the end, he had even travelled to the newly founded settlement of Melbourne on the mainland. Robinson's changing perspective and position in regards to whether he was proselytising or capturing, preserving or protecting, acting compassionately or purely for self-promotion, ultimately made him a man that Truganini and her friends could not trust completely, yet they had so few other options available to them for survival.

Having watched the people sing the land, he knew it was the wellspring of their spiritual life and their material culture. For them, land and life were indivisible. Until this bond was completely severed, he believed their souls would never be saved for God.

Pybus talked about the effects of Stockholm syndrome on the Indigenous population, especially how it could explain why the young women kept returning to abusive white whalers and sealers, even though they were treated so appallingly.

I learnt more than I ever want to know about the ghastly Black Line - the pincer movement decreed by Governor George Arthur that 'every able-bodied male - settler and convict - was required to muster into a militia' to capture and remove every single remaining Aboriginal from the new colony.

I learnt what a loathsome character John Batman was, not only in Robinson's eye, but in the eye's of many others and how a blind eye was turned towards his activities by those in charge, simply because he got stuff done. His particular habit of capturing young Aboriginal boys to 'rear them' was considered a very dubious practice by Robinson.

I learnt that Flinders Island was used to house the remaining Tasmanian Aborigines, so that on the 3rd February, 1835, Robinson was able to claim that 'he had cleared all the original people from the colony.'

I learnt that the painter, John Glover spent time with Robinson and some his native guides on the Nile River in January 1834. Glover spent several days sketching the group. He later used these in his paintings including The River Nile, Van Diemen's Land, from Mr Glover's farm | 1837 | below.

 

Robinson had truly believed that his removal of the original people of Van Dieman's Land was for their own good. He had wanted to protect them from murderous settlers, to bring them into God's grace and to bestow the great benefits of civilisation, as he understood it. Never did he think that his beneficent God would permit them all to die. Now the inescapable reality was that his intended sanctuary would become one great graveyard.

In 1839, Robinson took Truganini and some of the other guides, to the Port Phillip District, where he basically let them loose to fend for themselves. Things did not go well for them. 

We know that Truganini spent some time back on Flinders Island before being removed to an abandoned penal station at Oyster Cove, south of Hobart. It sounded like a ghastly place to live, yet somehow Truganini basically lived out her life there. From here, she was able to regularly visit Bruny Island, so perhaps that was enough reason. In 1872 she was the sole remaining person living there.

At the end, Pybus provides an extensive biography on Truganini's contemporaries, as well as a timeline and her various sources.

For those of us in the AWW blogging world, you may be as delighted as I was, to note that Pybus cited as one her online sources The Resident Judge of Port Philip. How wonderful that all the hard work and love we pour into our blogs can be appreciated and acknowledged in the wider world.

Truganini's story is compelling and heart-breaking. Pybus has honoured her story and returned the myth back into a flesh and blood woman.

Sand Talk | Tyson Yunkaporta #NonFiction

Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta is a book almost designed to be provocative and contentious. I only say that because I know that there will always be people who feel the need to pull down or dismiss any point of view that diverges from the dominant, mainstream view.

Whereas I'm LOVING how the publishing world is currently embracing a wide variety of views from within our Indigenous community. There is no longer the expectation that all Indigenous thinking should be the same, and that all Indigenous people should speak with the one voice and the one purpose. It is also useful (if not challenging) for the dominant culture to have it ways of life reflected back via a completely different lens.

Our knowledge is only valued if it is fossilised, while our evolving customs and thought patterns are viewed with distaste and scepticism.

I'm not convinced that any one way of thinking, Indigenous or otherwise, will save our world but books like Sand Talk can open our minds and hearts to seeing the world through another's eyes. They may even give us a new way of seeing and thinking about our world that expands and enriches our current position. 

Apocalypses have proven to be survivable in the past, although on the downside it usually means that your culture will never be the same again.

I'm all for having your mind expanded by other possibilities and other perspectives. Yunkaporta has very definite opinions and beliefs, but he doesn't expect you to follow him and he doesn't harangue you. He acknowledges there are other ways, even within his own community.

The invisible privilege of your technocratic, one-sided peacefulness is an act of violence.

It's obvious that he is on a life-long search for meaning and understanding, he is simply sharing where he is on this journey at this moment. Evolving, emerging, reflecting, bringing together his thoughts so he can move onto the next phase, whatever that may be.

Living cultures and languages evolve and transform.

This is a book that deserves to be revisited.
It was a lot to take in with one sitting. And I'm not sure, I was ready to hear some of what Yunkaporta had to say. Or more accurately, the use of yarning to convey information was one that I struggled to fully connect with. It was a bit like those long, long poems in The Lord of the Rings, that I usually skim over to get to the next bit of the story.

Sand Talk is definitely a book you should read for yourself to make up your own mind, though. The writing style is accessible and engaging. Yunkaporta clearly states his aims and addresses his own biases. He doesn't expect his readers, black or white, to embrace everything he has to say. He simply feels that it is important to put his ideas out there to be part of the ongoing discussion about Indigenous life in Australia.

A DRAWING FROM SAND TALK (TEXT PUBLISHING)

I Am the Road | Claire G Coleman #AWW

The Peter Porter Prize is a literary prize for a new poem run by the Australian Book Review. It's an annual prize, running since 2005. It's worth a total of $9,000. This year, the judges – John Hawke, Bronwyn Lea, and Philip Mead – have shortlisted five poems. The winner will be announced on 16th January. For anyone living in Melbourne, the award night is a free night where the shortlisted poets will present their poems to the audience in the led up the announcement.

The Longlist and Shortlist:

• Lachlan Brown (NSW), 'Precision Signs' – Shortlisted
• Claire G. Coleman (Vic.), 'That Wadjela Tongue' – Shortlisted
• Diane Fahey (Vic.), 'The Yellow Room' – Longlisted
• S.J. Finn (Vic.), 'A Morning Shot' – Longlisted
• Ross Gillett (Vic.), 'South Coast Sonnets' – Shortlisted
• A. Frances Johnson (Vic.), 'My Father's Thesaurus' – Shortlisted
• Anthony Lawrence (QLD), 'Zoologistics' – Longlisted
• Kathryn Lyster (NSW), 'Diana' – Longlisted
• Julie Manning (QLD), 'Constellation of Bees' – Shortlisted
• Greg McLaren (NSW), 'Autumn mediations' – Longlisted
• Claire Potter (United Kingdom), 'Of Birds' Feet' – Longlisted
• Gig Ryan (Vic.), 'Fortune's Favours' – Longlisted
• Corey Wakeling (Japan), 'Drafts in Red' – Longlisted

All five shortlisted poems can be found here at the Australian Book Review.
I was particularly struck by Coleman's poem, That Wadjela Tongue, and I hope you take the time to duck over to read all five.
But for today, I will share one of Coleman's earlier poems.


I Am the Road | Claire G Coleman
              Highly commended for the 2018 Oodgeroo Noonuccal Poetry Prize.


My grandfather was the bush, the coast, salmon gums, hakeas, blue-grey banskias

Wind-whipped water, tea-black estuaries, sun on grey stone

My grandfather was born on Country, was buried on Country

His bones are Country

I am the road.


I was born off Country, in that city

I hear, less than two-weeks old I travelled Country

A bassinet on the back seat of the Kingswood

I remember travels more than I remember a home

I am the road.


My father is the beach, the peppermint tree, the city back when, before it was a city

My father is the ancient tall-tree country, between his father Country and that town

My father is World War II, his father was a soldier

My father wandered, worked on rail, drove trucks

I am the road


Campgrounds up and down that coast were the childhood home of my heart

Where my memories fled, where my happiness lived

Campgrounds in somebody else’s stolen country

I am the road


The road unrolls before me

My rusty old troopy wipes oily sweat from its underside on the asphalt

Says ‘I am here, I am here’

The engine breathes in, breathes out, pants faster than I can

Sings a wailing thundering song

Wraps its steel self around me and keeps me safe, a too large overcoat

I am the road


I slept, for a time, on the streets of Melbourne

No country, no home, as faceless as the pavement

I was dirt on the streets, as grey as the stone, as the concrete

I am the road


We showed explorers where the water was

They lay their road over our path, from water to water

Lay a highway over their road, tamed my country with their highway

I am the road


My Boodja has been stolen, raped, they dug it up, took some of it away

They killed our boorn, killed our yonga, our waitch, damar, kwoka

Put in wheat and sheep, no country for sheep my Boodja

My Country, most it is empty, the whitefellas have no use for it

Except to keep it from us

Because we want it back, need it back, because they can

I am the road.


People ask where I am from, I cannot, simply answer

To mob, I am Noongar, South Coast. I am Banksias, wind on waves on stone

To travellers, whitefella nomads, I am from where I live – that caravan over there

To whitefellas from Melbourne who see how I drink my coffee

I must be from Melbourne, I am not Melbourne

I am the road


One day wish to, hope to, dream, buy some of my grandfather’s country back

Pay the thieves for stolen goods

Theft is a crime, receiving stolen goods is a crime

Until one day

I am the road. 

Claire G. Coleman is a Wirlomin Noongar woman whose ancestral country is on the south coast of Western Australia. She has written two novels, Terra Nullius and The Old Lie.

Jennifer @Holds Upon Happiness posts a lovely Poem for a Thursday each week. I enjoy sourcing poems from my recent reads to join in with her whenever I can.

A Poem for Thursday Dub Leffler

Photo by Christoph von Gellhorn on Unsplash

Dub Leffler grew up in the small western NSW town of Quirindi. He is descended from the Bigambul and Mandandanji people of south-west Queensland. He is an illustrator of children's books, including one of my favourites from 2011 Once There was a Boy (which he also wrote) and Sorry Day (2018) with Coral Vass.

NSW is currently in the grip of the worst start to the bushfire season in living memory. Over two months of non-stop fires, that have now joined up to create a 'mega-fire' zone north of Sydney, with no end in sight. I understand that Leffler's reasons for crying in this poem run much deeper than the current environmental crisis, still, it seemed appropriate to visit this particular poem today.

I Cry for You, Country
By Dub Leffler | 1 February 2019 | Cordite Poetry Review


I cry about this country.
As I travel about in between the sliced stone mountains.
The train is a salt dipped saw.
Sawing back and forth in the wounds.

I watch the relentless invasion of lantana. We open the cuts and rip off
Bandaids
I cry for you country.

A tree’s single scream lasts years.

When I die, you will have my body.
You take my water, you take my bone.

When we have our dead days,
I will think on you.

The day we finally go, is the day, we finally return.


Jennifer @Holds Upon Happiness posts a lovely Poem for a Thursday each week. I enjoy sourcing poems from my recent reads to join in with her whenever I can.

Caring For Country by Billy Griffiths

Recently I read something or saw something about the Ranger program in the Northern Territory, which led me to Billy Griffiths report in the Griffith Review Edition 56 | Millennials Strike Back | April 2017, Caring for country: The place where the Dreaming changed shape.

It's fascinating and encouraging to see the various ways that Indigenous peoples around the world are maintaining faith with their old ways as they incorporate the parts of modern life that suit them as well. The Ranger programs running in the NT are all about teaching the young how to care for country and get in touch with their culture. To make their work easier, they now use GPS, satellite imagery, aerial photography and other modern technologies. They also learn how to create new stories, art, dance and songlines that reflect their modern lives.

The other emerging story, gaining traction in the articles I'm reading, is the capacity of the Aborigines of Australia to evolve and adapt to seismic change over the 65 000 years they have lived on this continent. From the extinction of the megafauna to surviving the last ice age. White settlement is just one more thing to survive, adapt to and incorporate. The (white) story is also slowly evolving - from seeing the Aborigines as a culture doomed to die out in the face of a (superior) larger civilisation - to celebrating the longest living culture in the world surviving against all odds. Two hundred years in the context of 65 000 may seem like a mere blimp in time, but the consequences of our 200 years together impact all our daily interactions and understandings. We can marvel at the 65 000 years but it is today that we have to live in.

How does the NT ranger program figure in all of this?

Billy Griffiths takes us to Djinkarr, a small outstation in western Arnhem Land. He claims that these small, remote, poorly connected settlements are a good thing, (which flies in the face of the usual white conviction). He says there are 'overwhelming benefits to having people living on country. People sustain country, and country in turn sustains people.'

The country also gets a lot of love from Griffiths:

Small fires streak the savanna beneath me, as the land is worked and cleaned. The gentle smoke on the horizon is sign of a healthy country. In the distance, disappearing into a soft haze, lies the rugged stone country of the Arnhem Land Plateau. The plane wobbles over the mouth of the Liverpool River, where saltwater meets fresh, and descends towards a thin ribbon of grey on a cleared patch of thick, earthy red: the international airport. On one side of the airstrip, a few dozen houses cluster around a football oval; on the other, a neat grid delineates the newest suburb, called simply ‘New Sub’. Maningrida, as our destination is known, takes its name from the Kunibídji phrase Mane djang karirra: ‘the place where the Dreaming changed shape’.

This particular essay came about thanks to Griffiths involvement in a short-term, independent art and environment initiative known as The Arnhembrand Project. The aim was to tell 'healthy country' stories through paint and performance, science and oral history. The rangers play an important role in creating new stories about what is happening to their country.

The Djelk IPA is a vast estate, extending across monsoon rainforests, tropical savannas, grasslands, wetlands, sea country and stone country – ....Buffaloes, pigs, feral cats and cane toads have trampled, chewed, rubbed and wallowed their way across a delicate ecosystem, destroying habitats, spreading weeds, muddying springs, transforming the vegetation and exacerbating the eroding impact of wildfire. The effect on native species has been devastating. Their decline and extinction have deprived the Bininj of bush tucker as well as delivering a more existential loss: the displacement of totemic beings from their ancestral homes.

The rangers are using cool fires to manage the land, they are systemically clearing the land of weeds such as mimosa and they are culling the buffalo herds that are devastating the land and the local fauna.

The outstation movement and ranger programs have been evolving since the 1970's as small groups left the townships, failing due to illness and alcoholism and lack of purpose. They felt 'driven by a responsibility to return to country, to tend to sacred sites and to work the land through fire, ceremony, hunting and gathering.'

Betty Meehan, anthropologist, has spent her career working with various Aboriginal groups around Australia. In the 70's she was in the NT with the Blyth River people, where she claimed that this was not 'the end of the Dreaming', instead this was the place where the Dreaming was changing shape.

The late Lofty Bardayal Nadjamerrek (Wamud Namok), an Aboriginal elder from Manangrida said that the biggest threat to the environment is ‘empty country’: ‘not having people on country to look after it’.

The outstations, combined with the ranger services, are the key to avoiding the neglect that comes from empty country. ‘Outstations are not about the old ways, they are the birthplace of the new ways for us.’

The ranger program has not only benefited the local environment, it has also reintroduced pride and purpose into the community with kids staying at school longer to qualify for the internships. The flow on effects for health, mental health and the local economy seem self-evident.

There have been numerous articles and programs highlighting the ranger programs in the NT, Queensland and WA and even more websites devoted to sharing the news about local programs. A few are listed below.

ABC News | 25 Nov 2018 | Indigenous rangers in training.
The Conversation | 15 Jan 2018 | Indigenous ranger programs are working in Queensland.
SBS News | 14 Feb 2018 | WA gets all female Indigenous ranger teams.
Njanjma Aboriginal Corporation
Warddeken Land Management
APN Cape York
Pulu Indigenous Protected Area
Western Mulga

I'm glad I could end #AusReadingMonth with a good news story.

Image source

Facts:

• Billy Griffiths is an historian and lecturer in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies. 
• Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia (Black Inc., 2018)
• Winner of the Ernest Scott Prize 
• The John Mulvaney Book Award
• The Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction
• 2019 Book of the Year at the NSW Premier’s History Awards.

A Poem for a Thursday by Ali Cobby Eckermann

N.B. I selected my AusReadingMonth poems over a month ago.

Given the horrendous bush fires around NSW and Queensland throughout November, I felt it was important to come back to say that this poem, and my choice to post it today in no way reflects the current state of emergency in many of our national parks and forests.

As Eckerman clearly states in her preface to her poem, it was written in response to a (stupid) political appointment a year ago and describes a feeling, not an action.

When I first read (Kuru Waru) Bushfires Eyes I was struck by the powerful imagery and the passion behind the words. Repeat readings have only reinforced its impact.


(Kuru Waru) Bushfires Eyes
By Ali Cobby Eckermann | 1 February 2019 | Cordite Poetry Review


A response to the appointment of Tony Abbott as Special Envoy of Indigenous Affairs by the newly self-elected Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison 29 August, 2018.

There are bushfires burning in my eyes
I am burning down the modern world
I am burning your invasion of me
I am burning the image of you
You are all burning on my pyre

I am burning your prejudice of me
I am burning your paternalism
I am burning your policies
I am burning your excuses
I am burning your greed

I am burning your lack of understanding
I am burning your refusal to acknowledge that
I am burning your insults and beratings
I am burning your reaction to this poem
There are bushfires burning in my eyes

My Mother the land is crying
My Mother is crying with beauty
My Mother is crying with sadness
I am crying for all my mothers
We are crying for our land

Our tears are embers unable to quell
There has been no lull in you
There will be no lull in me
I am burning down the modern world
There are bushfires burning in my eyes


Jennifer @Holds Upon Happiness posts a lovely Poem for a Thursday each week. I enjoy sourcing poems from my recent reads to join in with her whenever I can.

Griffith Review 63: Writing the Country edited by Julianne Schultz & Ashley Hay

Image: James Tylor, Turralyendi Yerta (Womma) 2017 Photograph with ochre & charcoal.

Place. Land. Country. Home. These words frame the settings of our stories. Griffith Review 63: Writing the Country focuses on Australia’s vast raft of environments to investigate how these places are changing and what they might become; what is flourishing and what is at risk. 

How we speak of and to the world we live in requires us to make sense of where we are and where we’re going; it requires us to describe, interrogate and analyse our places from the smallest to the grandest of scales. In the second issue of Griffith Review, published fifteen years ago, Melissa Lucashenko wrote of ‘earthspeaking, talking about this place, my home’. All these years later, the need to hear all sorts of earthspeak has perhaps never been more urgent.

In the past, I would have gobbled up the stories, essays, poems and articles in a Griffith Review edition in one fell swoop. Leaving me with a general impression of the theme of the edition and a vague memory of some of the pieces. But this time, I decided to go slow.

Slow Reading is my new mantra. I want to read as thoughtfully, consciously and carefully as I can as often as I can. Obviously, not all books lend themselves to this approach. Some stories are lightly told, some favourite series are formulaic although lovable and comforting and some books are nothing more than a quick, easy holiday read. They all have their purpose, time and place.

But some books deserve more. And sometimes I deserve more!
Sometimes I want to devote more time to one book so that I can savour each moment, delve deeply and create a rich reading memory of my time with the book.

In recent times. Les Miserables was one such book, and I'm currently reading Moby-Dick with this slow reading approach. Back in February, when I acquired my copy of the Griffith Review 63, I decided to do the same. To slow read each essay and story. To let each one stand alone in my memory.

I confess, I didn't think I would still be reading it in November!

It also left me in a quandary about how best to record my slow reading experience. Giving each piece it's own post would be too laborious for me and rather dull for you, oh brave internet wanderer who landed on my page!

The passing of time has allowed the answer to present itself to me. Just like my Moby-Dick chapter posts, I will present each essay with a brief snapshot of the things that caught my eye or captured my imagination. Poems and stories I will leave for another time.

Introduction: On Suicide on Watch? The Enduring Power of Nature | Julianne Schultz (26th Nov 2018).

• societies and cultures evolve in response to the environment in which people find themselves.
• unforeseeable natural events have destroyed some civilisations...but others have been undone by over-exploitation. 
• Arnold J Toynbee quip - more civilisations die from suicide than murder.
• A classical historian and writer of comparative history.
• Hugely popular and influential in the 1940's and 50's.
• Now criticised for being more of a Christian moralist than an historian - ouch! (Encyclopedia Britannica).
• Schultz believes that we may be on 'suicide watch' but we can still feel optimistic with a 'sense of agency'.
• McLean Foundation and The Nature Conservancy commissioned writers for this edition.
• The McLean Foundation is a family foundation that has four areas of interest: protecting Australia’s biodiversity; supporting inter-city, rural and remote literacy programs for disadvantaged Australian children; rural tertiary education scholarships; and community development programs. 
• Their environmental funding to date has included establishing and supporting The Nature Conservancy Australia and their Nature Writing Prize. Robert McLean is the Chair of The Nature Conservancy Australia, a Senior Advisor to McKinsey & Co, and a Board Member of Philanthropy Australia.
• I love that people like Robert McLean exist. Read his 2011 bio in the SMH here.

Essay: Crossing the Line | Ashley Hay

• or the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef.
• There are mechanisms and consequences we can already see and understand (the known knowns).
• There are effects and impacts we can see happening without yet understanding why, or how they might impact each other (the known unknowns).
• And then there are the 'unknown unknowns', the layers of knowledge about our planet's natural systems, their requirements, their reactions and interactions that we don't know about yet. The Things that we cannot see coming.
• 30 yrs ago the CSIRO investigated what would happen if we doubled the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere. 
• 'Most of the consequences that science then predicted would occur by 2030 we've already seen.' Griffith University's Emeritus Professor Ian Lowe.
• Including Perth's rainfall declining by about a quarter in 30 years. But what wasn't predicted was the decline by two-thirds of the run-off rate. 
• 'it's hotter and drier when it rains, which means there's a more dramatic reduction in run-off' - which means there is less water available to be collected when it does rain.
• A road trip is a kind of mediation. Time and space stretch a little and you pay different attention to the landscapes you move through.
• biophilia - love of nature
• The Permian-Triassic extinction, 252 million years ago, wiped out more than nine-tenths of all species. It took the ecosystems effected about 5-8 million years to recover.
• The unknown unknowns in all of this are each and every one of us: what we purchase, what we vote for and what we insist on, as much as how we live.
• Hay's solution - pay attention, witness this moment, imagine the unknowns, imagine what's coming next.

Essay: Lost and Found in Translation | Kim Mahood

• Books in books - Kangaroo (D H Lawrence), Voss (Patrick White), To the Islands, Tourmaline, Midnite, Visitants and The Merry-go-round in the Sea (Randolph Stow), Animal Farm (George Orwell), Tracks (Robyn Davidson), The Songlines (Bruce Chatwin), Belomor (Nicholas Rothwell)
• what is consistent in all these books is the presence of Aboriginal people in various configurations.
• Ochre and Rust (Philip Jones) songlines are a 'kind of scripture, a framework for relating people to land, and to show that their relationship is inalienable.'
• The major songlines, such as the Seven Sisters, are like arteries that carry the life force of the culture through the body of the country.
• songlines are fixed in the landscape
• but they can be performed anywhere, with permission.
• the land is as conscious as the people who live in it.

Essay: Boodjar ngan djoorla: Country, my bones | Claire G Coleman

• My bones are in the soul of Country, and Country is in my bones.
• No matter where we go Country calls out to us.
• I wept when I realised Country had not forgotten me even when I did not know Country. My old-people, my ancestors, would care for me.
• Truth escapes in the end, lies cannot live forever.

Essay: A Fragile Civilisation: Collective living on Australian soil | Stephen Muecke

• Ancient Indigenous civilisations and/or modern Western civilisations.
• I would like to define civilisation as planned, sustainable collective living.
• Yolngu as Indigenous example.
• If the Yolgnu have flourished for up to 50 000 years, while the kind of civilisation based on large cities could self-destruct after only a few hundred, perhaps it is time to recalibrate what we mean by civilisations.

Essay: The Planet is Alive: Radical histories for uncanny times | Tom Griffiths

• Amitav Ghosh - The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016)
• we are knowingly killing the planetary systems that support survival of our species.
• we half aware of this predicament yet also paralysed by it, caught between horror and hubris.
• Anthropocene - a new geological epoch that recognises the power of humans in changing the nature of the planet, its atmosphere, oceans, climate, biodiversity, even its rocks and stratigraphy.
• The Great Acceleration - from the 1950's when the human enterprise suddenly exploded in population and energy use.
• Or the Sixth Extinction - humans have wiped out about two-thirds of the world's wildlife in just the last half century.
• Big History - David Christian - history of the universe - global storytellers.

Reportage: A Change in the Political Weather? Forecasting the future of climate policy | Paul Daley

• Carl Feilberg - late 1800's Queensland - human rights activist & environmentalist.
• Bio coming soon by Robert Ørsted-Jensen.
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
• Daley wrote this piece Nov 2018 and talked about politicians being out of step with public opinion about climate change and that this would be evident in the federal election in 2019. Instead it showed that journalists were out of step with the broader public opinion about climate change. They were (I am) living in an inner city bubble and we all made the mistake in thinking that the rest of Australia (rural, suburban and city fringes) felt the same as us or had the same priorities and concerns.

Essay: We All Took a Stand: Margaret River versus the coal industry | David Ritter

• Loved this piece.
• I had no idea that this even happened - there is power in our stories if we choose to tell them.
• The community of the Margaret River took on the coal industry and won.
• Australia's approval systems for fossil fuel mining are antiquated and loaded towards the interests of developers.
•  In this case, the political and business elite decided, emphatically, that some things are more important than the extraction of fossil fuels.

Essay: Life and Death on Dyarubbin: Reports from the Hawkesbury River | Grace Karskens

• The Real Secret River: Dyarubbin | 2017

Essay: Rebuilding Reefs, Restoring Memory: At work in the waters of history | Anna Clark

• Clifton Springs shellfish reef restoration project, near Geelong.
• R H Tawney - doing history well meant contemplating the processes of how (and where) the past relates to people in the present.
• over 95% of native flat oyster & blue mussel reefs have disappeared across southern Australia.
• each generation remembers what fisheries were like at the beginning of their own lifetimes, so that the baseline of that ecosystem subtly changes over time...an ever-lower bar is set as the 'new normal'.

Reportage: The Butterfly Effect: Stalking a giant in PNG | Jo Chandler

• 1906 | Albert Stewart Meek
• Ornithoptera alexandrae | Queen Alexandra's birdwing - largest butterfly in the world.
• rural people do not always understand the outsider notion of 'conservation', and outsiders do not always understand what villagers think of when they imagine 'development'.

Memoir: The Suburbsm the 60's: What use a scrap of bush? | Kate Veitch

• Growing up in Vermont and Nunawading.
• An outdoor life, playing in the nearby bush.
• Naturally, we never talked about our adventures to our parents. Nor did they ask. This was an era when parents had better things to do than hover over their children, monitoring their every move.
• Healesville Freeway Reserve | 2012
• The importance of place & childhood spaces.

Reportage: Eating Turtle: Changing narratives of the normal | Suzy Freeman-Greene

• Heron Island
• the heroes of the story are scientists.

Memoir: It's Scary but Nobody Cares: Challenging Australia's reputation for deadliness | Ashley Kalagian Blunt

• A Canadian view of Australia, drop bears and other deadly creatures.

Essay: Valuing Country: Let me count three ways | Jane Gleeson-White

• In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to recognise the rights of nature.
• Rights-of-nature laws also now in Bolivia, New Zealand, India and Colombia.
• three ways of thinking about the natural world - country, natural capital, rights of nature.
• 2016 Fitzroy River Declaration recognises the river as a living ancestral being with its own life force.
• 2017 Yarra River Protection (Wilip-gin Birrarung murron).
• 2018 petition to protect the legal rights of the Great Barrier Reef.
• Capitalism is fundamentally opposed to preserving nature.
• ecological economics.
• protecting the environment is a good thing for humanity | Carl Obst

Reportage: Ghost Species and Shadow Places: Seabirds and plastic pollution on Lord Howe Island | Cameron Muir

• Runner-Up Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing 2019
• Shortlisted for the Eureka Prize for Science Communication
• flesh-footed shearwaters | mutton birds
• they vomit plastic. The parent shearwaters here are slowly feeding their chicks to death with plastic.
• the plastic blocks their digestive tracts and can pierce internal organs.
• A torrent of plastic is coming. More plastic was produced in the last fifteen years than in the previous fifty. 

Essay: The Cost of Consumption: Dispatches from a planet in decline | James Bradley

•  2018 Living Planet Report
• The sheer scale of the problem makes it difficult to think about.
• As creatures disappear, we forget them, as baselines shift we adjust, and the world as it was is lost.
• The Great Acceleration
• For while population growth has played a part, the rise in GDP and energy far outstrips the rise in population. In fact it is humanity's booming middle classes...who are the problem. The ecological footprint of an average Australian or American is three times that of a Costa Rican, and almost eight or nine times that of the average Indian or African. It is also, significantly, double that of many Europeans.
• The real problem is the insatiable consumption of the world's wealthy.
• We already possess the technologies to deal with the problem - renewable energy, sustainable farming practices...better education and literacy, especially for women...basic income...progressive taxation and economic reform...better governance....
• Environmental justice is also social justice and intergenerational justice. But it is also interspecies justice.

Essay: Climate Change, Science and Country: A never-ending story | Brendan Mackey

• the climate norm will be there is no norm.
• scientists are not catastrophists - they project rather than predict.
• Climate change may be a scientific discovery, but it is the humanities and creative arts that speak to what this means.

Reportage: Remaking Nature: Novel strategies in modified landscapes | Andrew Stafford

• Bitterns in Rice project
• Yandina Creek Wetlands

Image Source

Essay: Transforming Landscapes: Regenerating country in the Anthropocene | Charles Massey

• regenerative farming
• Many of the world's desertifying environments are the result of human activity. In Australia - as in the Middle East...
• in mismanaged landscapes the small water cycles are destroyed.
• capitalist market economy believes in continual growth. Nature is viewed as a raw material for wealth and property creation.
• to become landscape literate.
• Paul Hawken | human brain is not wired to deal with future existential threats.
• Project Drawdown
• This is not a liberal agenda, nor is it a conservative agenda...this is a human agenda.

Essay: Encounters with Amnesia: Confronting the ghosts of Australian landscape | Inga Simpson

• Judith Wright | The love of the land we have invaded, and the guilt of invasion - have become a part of me. It is a haunted country.
• Louisa Atkinson | 1853 | The Illustrated Sydney News | Nature Notes

• Eric Rolls | A Million Wild Acres | 1981
• Mark Tredinnick | The Blue Plateau | 2009
• One of the most obvious characteristics of Australian nature writingnis the tension, for non-Indigenous Australians, around how to write about our connection to the places we love, knowing that those places were stolen from others, and possibly sites of violence.
• Although thinking of ourselves as a bush nation, we are, in fact, urban and suburban - and increasingly illiterate in nature.
• Nature writing...is...about wanting to belong, a yearning for connection with the natural world and the places in which we live. To be at home....Instead of trying to write ourselves all over the landscape, it is time to hear what it is saying and write it deeper into our selves.

This is the very first Griffith Review I have read from cover to cover. 

Previously I have enjoyed the occasional essay or story when an online prompt led me to the one free monthly read I am allowed as a non-subscriber. I was, however, particularly drawn to the topic of this edition. I figured it would have lots to say about the environment, climate change, Indigenous perspectives and landscape. It did. 

My Goodreads wishlist has exploded as I pour over the individual the bibliographies and I have found new authors to explore. I have discovered new-to-me websites and environmental projects that not only provide the scientific facts about climate but also give us all hope that we can really look after this planet we live on, if we really want to.

I won't be able to devote as much time as I have for this edition to all future editions, or even to catching up on the back list editions. It will be a case of cherry-picking the topics and authors that interest me or challenge me the most.

The various essays, stories and poems in this edition, helped me to complete several squares on my AusReadingMonth Bingo card - NSW, VIC, QLD, TAS and WA. As a bonus, I also ticked off a few nearby islands - Heron Island, Lord Howe Island and PNG.

#AusReadingMonth
#NonFictionNovember