Abstract
In their introduction to Human Geography,, Derek Gregory and Noel Castree remind the reader that “if . . . theories and methods establish spaces of constructed visibility, these are also always spaces of constructed invisibility. The price of seeing this is not to see that” (xliv; italics in original). Such spaces of constructed invisibility are constitutive of Australian geography, where marginalised or discredited systems of knowledge offer alternative ways of perceiving the Australian territory. Hence, in human geography terms, “positionality” plays a central role, inasmuch as “[I]ndigenous or subaltern knowledges are often discounted in order to promote particular versions of ‘Science’ or ‘Development’” (Gregory and Castree, xxix). Without doubt, in the context of Australia, the colonial accumulation of geographical knowledge coincides with the dissimulation of Aboriginal geography. In this regard, Australian First Nations literature activates other spaces of visibility, those that have been rendered invisible through colonisation and succeeding settlement. As such, Australian First Nations literature responds and adds to postcolonial criticism by confronting different geographies of the same territory.1 The aim of this paper is therefore to reconsider the place of colonial-settler geography and to make visible another geography of Australia. To do so, our study of selected poems from the collection Walk Back Over by Wiradjuri poet, academic, and activist Jeanine Leane seeks to bring into the light another geography and, therefore, another history of the land. Through her fiction and essays, Jeanine Leane deconstructs the manner in which Aboriginal people are represented in non-Aboriginal narratives, while defending and promoting the place given to Aboriginal people’s voices and representations, by and for Aboriginal people.2 Jeanine Leane’s highly acclaimed fiction and non-fiction work gives presence to those made absent and a voice to those who have been silenced by past and present forms of colonisation.3 Concentrating most particularly on the section called Country, this essay aims to show how Leane’s poems bring together the explicit and the implicit of colonial and Aboriginal history, thereby provoking different readings and responses from both First Nations and non-First Nations readers. In this regard, the poems in Walk Back Over become the opportunity to consider a Wiradjuri geography perturbed by colonial discourse and action, but still positively and proudly acknowledged and admired by the poet.' (Introduction)
