Cirrus@Austlit

'I: A note on Indigenous Australians

'A great many Australian poets are in an interesting and ironic state of dispossession, although perhaps only a small proportion of them actually feels that way – that proportion, let’s say, whose subjects and predispositions draw them towards the landscape, its flora and fauna, and their human experience thereof and thereupon. And perhaps we are speaking only of a proportion of this proportion – although even as we contemplate this we cannot exclude the possibility that some proportion of those great many who turn their backs upon such subject matter do so themselves out of some unacknowledged sense of impropriety or dispossession.' (Introduction)

'Responding to architecture

'Natalie Harkin has suggested that for her, and for other Indigenous poets and writers, poetry is a responsibility.¹ In this vein, Birch recently challenged white Australians’ Sorry Day performances of guilt: ‘As we contemplate the word sorry and question to what extent it has become little more than a symbolic gesture – at best – we must also pause and give due thought to the word responsibility.’² This call is a timely provocation for thinking about White Australia’s relationship with Chinese-Australian history and communities too. Two days before Birch’s piece was published a group of 10 Chinese Australians, including Ballarat leader Charles Zhang, ended a march from Robe, South Australia, at Parliament House – a building designed to impress authority if there ever was one. Standing in the Parliament foyer, just meters from the chambers where the Immigration Restriction Act was passed 116 years earlier, Premier Daniel Andrews apologised for the government’s historically unjust treatment of Chinese people; ‘On behalf of the Victorian government’ he expressed ‘our deepest sorrow and I say to you that we are profoundly sorry’.³ Andrew’s apology is evidently heartfelt, but, though he claimed that ‘we are in your debt for all of those kilometres that you’ve walked’⁴, it remains unclear whether this debt – linked, as it was, to the labour of the walkers and not to the historical labour of Chinese Australians – is merely symbolic or will translate to monetary compensation, as it has in New Zealand and Canada.' (Introduction)

'Lowest prices are just the beginning

'Drive anywhere in Australia for long enough and you’ll pass a Bunnings Warehouse. Bunnings, a titanic home improvement merchant whose buying power enables the offering of low prices on products relating to the building and maintenance of the home, was around when I grew up in Australia, but I think my family went to a different, no-name hardware store. I certainly don’t remember counting Bunningses back when I was a child. I only started counting Bunningses when I was well into my twenties, zoned out behind the wheel, happy and relaxed after a day of day tripping. There’s a Bunnings on the way to Rye, Victoria, that I particularly enjoy driving by.' (Introduction)

'We are standing in the midst of a football field doubled in size and then doubled again; a great, flat oval of water covered by streaks of green sedge that strike up from the surface like spindly grass. It’s a wetland, but one that has spent the last few years of drought as land; this year, the heavy winter rains that have filled the island’s hydro dams have tipped this landscape into living water.' (Introduction)

'A long day of road walking out of Tokushima. Twenty-five, twenty-six kilometres including five hundred metres of gravel before and after Temple 18. Rosie and I left the hotel at about 7:15am and walked along one of the main arterial roads. It was like walking from Perth to Armadale along Albany Highway during peak hour. Our main respite from the fumes and heat was a muffin meal at McDonald’s. We kept an eye out for a supermarket because we had been warned that there were no shops for three nights after Temple 19. Unable to read the billboards, we kept approaching what looked like a supermarket but they were either an Officeworks or casino. On the other side of a major intersection, with huge dump trucks idling, an industrial warehouse came into view and inside was the Food Garden where Rosie bought some sick tasting crab cheese sausage that we tried at a worker hut rest stop about eight kilometres later. Imagine a miner’s donga open and available to anyone passing by to help themselves to coffee and snacks. A couple of other Henro’s stopped while we were there. One tidied up and reorganised the slippers in the small vinyl entrance. A chatty guy arrived as we were leaving, taking to Rosie and giving her stories of life in the time I visited the port-a-loo out back.' (Introduction)