'Meet 11-year-old Bindi. She’s not really into maths but LOVES art class and playing hockey. Her absolute FAVOURITE thing is adventuring outside with friends or her horse, Nell.
'A new year starts like normal—school, family, hockey, dancing. But this year hasn’t gone to plan! There’s a big art assignment, a drought, a broken wrist AND the biggest bushfires her town has ever seen!
'Bindi is a verse novel for mid-upper primary students. Written ‘for those who plant trees’, Bindi explores climate, bushfires, and healing. Written from the point of view of 11-year-old Bindi and her friends on Gundungurra Country.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Unit Suitable For AC: Year 6 (NSW Stage 3)
Duration Four to five lessons per week for five weeks
General Capabilities
Critical and Creative Thinking, Digital Literacy, Ethical Understanding, Literacy
Cross-curriculum Priorities
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures, Sustainability
Kirli Saunders on Poetry and Multi-disciplinary Practice
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2024
27446536
2024
single work
podcast
interview
'Kirli Saunders is a proud Gunai Woman, award-winning author and multidisciplinary artist. Her books include Bindi, Kindred and Returning. Her play, Going Home, is in development, as is her first novel, Yaraman. In 2022 she was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for her contribution to the arts.' (Introduction)
'Bindi (2020), by Gunai poet and children’s author Kirli Saunders, is a verse novel dedicated to “those who plant trees.” Told from the perspective of eleven-year-old Bindi, it is a story of a community caring for Country, while experiencing and recovering from a bushfire. The planting of she-oak seedlings forms the core of the narrative and provides a structure: the verse novel’s three parts are named “Seedlings,” “Cinders,” and “Sprouts.” While Anglophone Australian poetry traditionally depicts the voice of the wind in the sighing branches of the she-oak tree as mournful, the pods of she-oak trees are the only food of the threatened glossy black cockatoo, and in Bindi, the trees are connected with hope and resilience. The “vegetal hope” manifest in Bindi is connected to the materiality, culture and ecology of plants, not just their symbolic function, and is underscored by the use of Gundungurra words within the poems. Drawing on John Charles Ryan’s approaches to vegetal poetics and Palyku writers Gladys and Jill Milroy’s essay “Different Ways of Knowing: Trees Are Our Family Too” (2008), this chapter argues that she-oak trees in Bindi function as material and semiotic agents of hope.' (Publication abstract)
'Bindi (2020), by Gunai poet and children’s author Kirli Saunders, is a verse novel dedicated to “those who plant trees.” Told from the perspective of eleven-year-old Bindi, it is a story of a community caring for Country, while experiencing and recovering from a bushfire. The planting of she-oak seedlings forms the core of the narrative and provides a structure: the verse novel’s three parts are named “Seedlings,” “Cinders,” and “Sprouts.” While Anglophone Australian poetry traditionally depicts the voice of the wind in the sighing branches of the she-oak tree as mournful, the pods of she-oak trees are the only food of the threatened glossy black cockatoo, and in Bindi, the trees are connected with hope and resilience. The “vegetal hope” manifest in Bindi is connected to the materiality, culture and ecology of plants, not just their symbolic function, and is underscored by the use of Gundungurra words within the poems. Drawing on John Charles Ryan’s approaches to vegetal poetics and Palyku writers Gladys and Jill Milroy’s essay “Different Ways of Knowing: Trees Are Our Family Too” (2008), this chapter argues that she-oak trees in Bindi function as material and semiotic agents of hope.' (Publication abstract)
Kirli Saunders on Poetry and Multi-disciplinary Practice
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2024
27446536
2024
single work
podcast
interview
'Kirli Saunders is a proud Gunai Woman, award-winning author and multidisciplinary artist. Her books include Bindi, Kindred and Returning. Her play, Going Home, is in development, as is her first novel, Yaraman. In 2022 she was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for her contribution to the arts.' (Introduction)
