'Archival-Poetics offers a unique contribution to Australian poetry through a new way to write into, and out from, the State’s Aboriginal archives and from a Narungga woman’s standpoint. It will demonstrate an embodied reckoning with the colonial archive and those traumatic, contested and buried episodes of history that inevitably return to haunt. Family records at the heart of this work include South Australia’s Aboriginal Protection Board and Children’s Welfare Board records, highlighting assimilation policy measures targeting Aboriginal girls for removal into indenture domestic labour. Three interconnected threads underpin this Archival-poetic writing, and each thread is expanded as the theoretical heart to each section of the work: On Blood Memory – a reclamation of re-imagined histories through cultural identity (blood), narrative (memory) and connection to country (land); On Haunting as a ‘way of knowing’ – an active and honouring response to that which is silent and hidden; the seething and felt, yet unseen presence of colonial violence or unfinished business; On the Colonial Archive – a poetic spotlight on the colonial State and those key institutions, repositories and systems that maintain and perpetuate dominant discourses and representations on Indigenous peoples and histories. Each section of the work will be a potent, multi-textual artefact in its own right that centres the affective, transformative and honouring dimensions of haunting, where the potency of place, colonial-histories and blood-memory collide. They each bear witness to the state’s archivisation processes and the revelation of what is both absent and present on the record. As a trilogy offering in one volume of work, it collectively considers important questions of representation, surveillance and agency; and questions of power that resonate in our daily lives, on and through the colonial archive. It also bears witness to individual and collective loss in order to actively honour and contribute, beyond the local, to larger counter-hegemonic narratives of colonial history. This work demonstrates a critical-creative way of decolonising and transforming the colonial archive through poetic refusal, resistance and memory-making; a poetry that also engages theory, images and primary source archival material.'
Three chapbooks presented as a single publication with a single ISBN: On Blood Memory, On Haunting, and On the Colonial Archive.
'Taking Kerry Reed-Gilbert’s anthology The Strength of Us as Women: Black Women Speak (2000) as touchstone, the chapter undertakes a conversation between two Aboriginal women poets from Narungga and Wiradjuri standpoints about the transformative power of Indigenous poetry and its significant contribution to literature in the world. Offering an alternative to the essay, the authors discuss embodied engagements with the colonial archive and the theme of relationality that informs so much of Aboriginal writing. The chapter considers the potential of poetry to be both an affective tool and literary intervention. It outlines the methods of Gathering and Archival-Poetic praxis as ways to explore the counter-narrative potential of poetry. In considering the role of memory work and memory-making, the authors also discuss blood memory and body memory.'
Source: Abstract.
'Despite the unsettling advancement of weapons technology in the 21st century, storytelling remains a powerful force for promoting conflict resolution and peace. First Nations poetry of peace is a continuation of millennia-old Indigenous practices to maintain or restore balance in our worlds through storytelling.' (Introduction)
'We are on Ulleungdo, famed for its wild mountains that jut from the Eastern Sea more than one hundred kilometres from the Korean east coast, shockingly, like a stone fist smashing wetly into the echelons. This is the closest sovereign territory to the contested landmass, 독도 (Dokdo), some ninety kilometres further east and otherwise known as ‘the Liancourt Rocks’ (this moniker derived from a French whaling ship, Le Liancourt, which foundered on the islands in 1849), or ‘Takeshima’ (Japan). I am here with more than a dozen Korean artists – painters, composers, art directors, musicians – awaiting tomorrow’s ferry to 독도. This year’s group assembles, as groups of creative producers have done so annually under the auspices of the para-political lobby group, La Mer et l’Île, to make pilgrimage to 독도 and refocus a global conversation: our brief is to simply sit on the islands, reflectively, and allow art to materialise. Perhaps this is partly how soft power can operate, non-dogmatically, through casting into representational modes (language, etc.) in order to explore for something beyond the merely descriptive but perhaps, even, essential: a newer way of seeing, arising through coming to terms with newer ways of saying and stating. The historical documents do not need to be reframed, and have long referred to these islands. One of the earliest, the 세종실록 (or ‘Chronicle of King Sejong’ [1432]), mentions a sole rocky outcrop being visible from the top of Ulleungdo’s mountains ‘only during fine weather’. Despite the existence of this and a great many other documents that form the canon of Korean sovereignty, neighbouring states continue to contest and claim 독도 as their own, for their own politically complex reasons. How to act as a poet, then, and make a non-propagandistic suite that will speak clearly and without bias.' (Introduction)
'Aboriginal domestic service, indentured labour, and stolen wages stories are largely invisible and not widely acknowledged or understood as significant in official narratives of history in South Australia. This paper will demonstrate the importance of accessing the state's archives in order to trace assimilation-based measures targeting girls for removal from their families and for domestic labour. It also aims to theorise the violence of the colonial archive from Indigenous standpoints as a key site of memory, conservation, and erasure that continues to resonate. Such records trigger questions of government control, surveillance, representation, and agency, particularly as we encounter the gendered and racialised intimacies of everyday life. 'Archival-poetics' is introduced as a culturally and locally situated method of resistance and transformation through creative engagement with archives; one way to repatriate stories and love to our families, bridge the labour history knowledge gap in SA, and generate new knowledge with healing, decolonising intent.'
Source: Abstract.
'Most people think of archives, especially big government archives, as either neutral sites of memory and history, or as mundane, boring storage facilities for administrative records, or they don’t think about them at all. But the poet Dr Natalie Harkin (Narungga) knows what many First Nations people know, that official archives are a powerful colonial weapon as well as a site of mourning. They are time capsules and they are also bullets. Created by state-sanctioned surveillance and violence, these archives have the power to sustain and reproduce that same violence. As Harkin says, there is ‘blood on the records’.' (Introduction)
'It can be tempting to imagine that colonisation is a thing of the past; that posting an infographic on Instagram on Sorry Day counts as activism; that the horrors white settlers inflicted on First Nations peoples can be considered in the past tense. Natalie Harkin’s Archival Poetics reminds us that colonisation is ongoing and that far from fading away, the savagery of colonial oppression remains constant in our communities and our culture.' (Introduction)
'It’s described as haunting. And I know it well.
'Led by our relatives, our ancestors, we do feverish work, memory work, detective work. But the compulsion is not just to fill in gaps. Doesn’t just stop at the finding.' (Introduction)
'We are on Ulleungdo, famed for its wild mountains that jut from the Eastern Sea more than one hundred kilometres from the Korean east coast, shockingly, like a stone fist smashing wetly into the echelons. This is the closest sovereign territory to the contested landmass, 독도 (Dokdo), some ninety kilometres further east and otherwise known as ‘the Liancourt Rocks’ (this moniker derived from a French whaling ship, Le Liancourt, which foundered on the islands in 1849), or ‘Takeshima’ (Japan). I am here with more than a dozen Korean artists – painters, composers, art directors, musicians – awaiting tomorrow’s ferry to 독도. This year’s group assembles, as groups of creative producers have done so annually under the auspices of the para-political lobby group, La Mer et l’Île, to make pilgrimage to 독도 and refocus a global conversation: our brief is to simply sit on the islands, reflectively, and allow art to materialise. Perhaps this is partly how soft power can operate, non-dogmatically, through casting into representational modes (language, etc.) in order to explore for something beyond the merely descriptive but perhaps, even, essential: a newer way of seeing, arising through coming to terms with newer ways of saying and stating. The historical documents do not need to be reframed, and have long referred to these islands. One of the earliest, the 세종실록 (or ‘Chronicle of King Sejong’ [1432]), mentions a sole rocky outcrop being visible from the top of Ulleungdo’s mountains ‘only during fine weather’. Despite the existence of this and a great many other documents that form the canon of Korean sovereignty, neighbouring states continue to contest and claim 독도 as their own, for their own politically complex reasons. How to act as a poet, then, and make a non-propagandistic suite that will speak clearly and without bias.' (Introduction)
'Aboriginal domestic service, indentured labour, and stolen wages stories are largely invisible and not widely acknowledged or understood as significant in official narratives of history in South Australia. This paper will demonstrate the importance of accessing the state's archives in order to trace assimilation-based measures targeting girls for removal from their families and for domestic labour. It also aims to theorise the violence of the colonial archive from Indigenous standpoints as a key site of memory, conservation, and erasure that continues to resonate. Such records trigger questions of government control, surveillance, representation, and agency, particularly as we encounter the gendered and racialised intimacies of everyday life. 'Archival-poetics' is introduced as a culturally and locally situated method of resistance and transformation through creative engagement with archives; one way to repatriate stories and love to our families, bridge the labour history knowledge gap in SA, and generate new knowledge with healing, decolonising intent.'
Source: Abstract.
'Despite the unsettling advancement of weapons technology in the 21st century, storytelling remains a powerful force for promoting conflict resolution and peace. First Nations poetry of peace is a continuation of millennia-old Indigenous practices to maintain or restore balance in our worlds through storytelling.' (Introduction)
'Taking Kerry Reed-Gilbert’s anthology The Strength of Us as Women: Black Women Speak (2000) as touchstone, the chapter undertakes a conversation between two Aboriginal women poets from Narungga and Wiradjuri standpoints about the transformative power of Indigenous poetry and its significant contribution to literature in the world. Offering an alternative to the essay, the authors discuss embodied engagements with the colonial archive and the theme of relationality that informs so much of Aboriginal writing. The chapter considers the potential of poetry to be both an affective tool and literary intervention. It outlines the methods of Gathering and Archival-Poetic praxis as ways to explore the counter-narrative potential of poetry. In considering the role of memory work and memory-making, the authors also discuss blood memory and body memory.'
Source: Abstract.
