First Nations

Where the Fruit Falls by Karen Wyld UWAP ISBN: 978-1-76080-157-1 Reviewed by ANNE BREWSTER   Karen Wyld’s Where the Fruit Falls is an important new novel in the field of Australian Aboriginal literature and a tribute to the work of UWAP under the stewardship of its out-going director Terri-Ann White who, as Wyld says in […]

Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen ISBN 978070226318 UQP Reviewed by TIMMAH BALL Dropbear: writing as an act of defiance  when my body is mine i will tell them with belly&bones do not touch this prefix or let you hands burn black with your unsettlement there are no metaphors here -decolonial poetics (avant gubba) Multiple modes and […]

Throat By Ellen Van Neerven UQP Reviewed by DANIEL SLEIMAN     In reading poetry, we look for those rare moments where a creative sequence of words thoroughly subjects our thinking, our feeling and our knowledge to a momentary realisation of reinterpreted or interrupted truth. There are many of those moments one finds while reading […]

Nicole Smede is a musician, poet and educator of Worimi and European heritage, exploring a reclamation and reconnection to ancestry through language, poetry and song. Her work has been broadcast on national and international radio, published in anthologies and journals and features on ferries, in visual art and sound art works. Nicole is grateful to […]

Dirty Words by Natalie Harkin Cordite Books ISBN 978-0-994259-63-9 Reviewed by PIP NEWLING     ‘Consider this                   words like lives have histories actions     like   knives cut-deep’ (p.23) Natalie Harkin’s first collection of poetry, Dirty Words, illustrates the effects of words down the generations of white […]

Yimbama by Ken Canning Vagabond Press ISBN 978-1-922181-43-5 Reviewed by BRENDA SAUNDERS   The poetry in this collection covers the full range of social and cultural conditions facing Aboriginal people today. Burraga Gutya writes of imprisonment, mental illness, domestic violence, dislocation and the injustice due to racism or ignorance. On the back cover notes to […]

Heat and Light by Ellen Van Neerven UQP ISBN: 978 0 7022 5321 8 Reviewed by Christine Regan In Heat and Light Ellen Van Neerven tells us stories exploring ancestry and identity and the experiences particularly of Aboriginal women and girls in small Australian towns or dwelling on the metaphorical fringes of Brisbane and the […]

Graham Akhurst is currently in his last semester of a Bachelor of Creative Arts in writing at the University of Queensland. Prior to this he completed an Advanced Diploma of Performing Arts from the Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts where he studied music, and wrote and co-created several performances that were held at QPAC. […]

Born on Wakka Wakka land at Barambah, which is now known as Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve,  Lionel Fogarty has travelled nationally and internationally presenting and performing his work. Since the seventies Lionel has been a prominent activist, poet writer and artist; a Murri spokesperson for Indigenous Rights in Australia and overseas. His poetry art work and oral […]

Mogwie-Idan Stories of the Land by Lionel Fogarty Vagabond Press ISBN 978-1-922181-02-2   Reviewed by TIM WRIGHT   Arguments for the importance and power of Fogarty’s poetry have been made by a number of writers since the 1980s. Some prominent examples are: the forewords to Fogarty’s first two collections, written by Cheryl Buchanan and Gary […]