'"What is it I take for granted? Skin. The body's fragile, necessary, and sensitive clothing marked by culture accrues value (or otherwise) in particular places for no good reason but history, and an obdurate maintenance of relationships of power and (dis)possession. Hoping to unsettle presumptions of superiority and their mingled threads of colonial violence, I am writing to access and decolonise a white settler unconscious. In limited ways, again and again, poem by poem, by collage, by prose approximations to poems, I am joining a small and growing throng of writers questioning whiteness.
'This collection has been building for some years, prompted by thinkers and poets such as Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, and more recently Peter Minter, Natalie Harkin and Shane Rhodes. Minter writes of a 'vision of a decolonised Australia, a place where settler and Indigenous cultures have begun to find an existential common ground that is beyond postcolonial'. White on White takes a path through histories and incidents, familial, social, and historical, thinking whiteness, in the hope of opening towards that 'existential common ground'."-Anne Elvey' (Publication summary)
for my sons, Matthew Elvey Price and Andrew Elvey Price
'Anne Elvey’s White on White and Reneé Pettitt-Schipp’s The Sky Runs Right Through Us both offer ideas of unsettlement in contemporary Australia; Elvey’s is the unsettlement brought by the arrival of colonists, whereas Pettitt-Schipp explores the unsettlement associated with denying arrival. In White on White, Elvey explores the limitations and downfalls of colonialism, and the paradoxical act of ‘building a falling’ that settlement represents. Despite its title, the collection is about the co-existence of whiteness and colour, as in the line, ‘On my desk the whiteout / is shelved beside the pens’. This line is also telling as it is about imprints and markings existing beside modes of erasure. In the prose poem ‘School days’, readers are introduced to the speaker’s skin that is ‘peach and cream with a blue undernote […] the colour of my soul’, which a ‘drop of ink’ would mortally stain. Here, Elvey invokes a thread running through the collection: the potential for ink, the medium for writing and textuality, to be fraught with sin and moral complications. At these moments, readers may reflect on the fact that it was white settlers who brought written language to Australia, with all of its blessings and burdens.' (Introduction)
'Anne Elvey’s White on White and Reneé Pettitt-Schipp’s The Sky Runs Right Through Us both offer ideas of unsettlement in contemporary Australia; Elvey’s is the unsettlement brought by the arrival of colonists, whereas Pettitt-Schipp explores the unsettlement associated with denying arrival. In White on White, Elvey explores the limitations and downfalls of colonialism, and the paradoxical act of ‘building a falling’ that settlement represents. Despite its title, the collection is about the co-existence of whiteness and colour, as in the line, ‘On my desk the whiteout / is shelved beside the pens’. This line is also telling as it is about imprints and markings existing beside modes of erasure. In the prose poem ‘School days’, readers are introduced to the speaker’s skin that is ‘peach and cream with a blue undernote […] the colour of my soul’, which a ‘drop of ink’ would mortally stain. Here, Elvey invokes a thread running through the collection: the potential for ink, the medium for writing and textuality, to be fraught with sin and moral complications. At these moments, readers may reflect on the fact that it was white settlers who brought written language to Australia, with all of its blessings and burdens.' (Introduction)
