'I told you this was a thirst so great it could carve rivers.
'This fierce debut from award-winning writer Evelyn Araluen confronts the tropes and iconography of an unreconciled nation with biting satire and lyrical fury. Dropbear interrogates the complexities of colonial and personal history with an alternately playful, tender and mournful intertextual voice, deftly navigating the responsibilities that gather from sovereign country, the spectres of memory and the debris of settler-coloniality. This innovative mix of poetry and essay offers an eloquent witness to the entangled present, an uncompromising provocation of history, and an embattled but redemptive hope for a decolonial future.' (Publication summary)
Dedication:
To Mum and Dad, it's an honour to honour you.
For J, every word. Before or after, and no matter what survives us, be it horizons, highways, poems or stars. Every word, and every place it came from.
'In a chapbook of poetic responses to Dorothea Mackellar’s ubiquitous verse ‘I Love a Sunburnt Country’, Alison Whittaker, in her contributing poem, names the settler literary appropriation of her Gomeroi homelands as a ‘white nativity’. Two recent collections by young Aboriginal women – Dropbear (2021) by Evelyn Araluen and Blakwork (2018) by Alison Whittaker – challenge the pastoral renderings in settler literature by writing back into them – or reinscribing – from an embodied writing practice. This essay closely reads poems from the collections to honour and explore the refusal of the literary legacies of the settler imagination – a legacy that has denied First Nations peoples’ sovereignty of narrative, story, life and bodily autonomy. I also contend that the literary continuum of reinscribing practices – of which Whittaker and Araluen are only its contemporary iteration – make visible the paradox of settler relationality to Country, where Aboriginal land is a vessel for the conjuring of a national identity but is extracted for its natural resources with impunity. More crucially, however, a reinscribing method attends to histories covered over by the colonial gaze. This gaze, I suggest, is the ‘appropriating’ of Country, and a method that seeks to naturalise the settler on stolen land.' (Publication abstract)
'This chapter examines the transnational Australian novel from a different perspective, focusing on First Nations writing. Whereas most visions of the global privilege literary institutions whose power stems from existing political and global inequalities, First Nations writing fosters a transnationalism of resistance, solidarity, and fungibility. It considers Alexis Wrights novels in translation, and writers engaged in collaborative projects.' (Publication abstract)
'Australian fiction has long been dominated by the realist novel. A new wave of writers continue the avant-garde tradition—but are experimental and offbeat stories always destined to be relegated to a literary niche? '
''Moving Day' captures slanted light, anxiety, understanding and love amid the minutiae of a relationship. There is so much intensity in these poems, such vivid imagery such caustic hurt, such clarity about great loss that they drill down into the reader. Drop bear is poetry that stays with you, beauty and power, anger and wit, pain and love, long after you have closed its pages.' (Publication abstract)
'Araluen’s first collection repurposes Biblical themes, Australiana kitsch and settler-colonial tropes to astonishing effect'
'Since the invasion of Australia in 1788, First Nations Peoples have been forced into the literary images of the colonisers. We have been described as noble savages, vermin, half-castes, temptresses, and problems, just to name a few. Our entrapment in the literary canon of the invading settlers is what constructed and maintained the colonial mythscape of the modern nation of Australia.' (Introduction)
'Multiple modes and literary disciplines weave through Evelyn Araleun’s first collection Dropbear, shifting between poetry, prose, micro-fiction and essay seamlessly. The taut threads are a reflection of her interdisciplinary work where writing and social justice intersect. There are no metaphors instead resistance is displayed through her piercingly accurate understanding of the flawed settler nation we inhabit. As she describes in the collections notes ‘our resistance, therefore must also be literary’ an acknowledgment that the social, environmental and political change being sought must also engage with the literary culture we inherited such as May Gibbs problematic Australian classic Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. A much loved children’s book series where the bush is represented through terra nullius. As a scholar, poet, teacher, activist, editor, essayist and fiction writer Araleun resists and defies imposed colonialism, which is most fiercely embodied through Dropbear. The collection speaks back to defunct systems and shows that Aboriginal Sovereignty is crystalline.' (Introduction)
Evelyn Araluen : On ‘Dropbear’
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2021
23450370
2021
single work
podcast
interview
'Evelyn Araluen is the coeditor of Overland, as well as a poet, educator and researcher working with Indigenous literatures. 2021's Dropbear is her first collection.
'Her shorter works have won the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize and a Wheeler Centre Next Chapter Fellowship. Born, raised, and writing in Dharug country, she is a Bundjalung descendant.' (Production introduction)
