Issue Details: First known date: 2023... 2023 The Voice of the She-oak : Vegetal Poetics and Hope in Kirli Saunders’s Verse Novel Bindi
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'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)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Storying Plants in Australian Children's and Young Adult Literature : Roots and Winged Seeds Melanie Duckworth (editor), Annika Herb (editor), Cham : Palgrave Macmillan , 2023 27274711 2023 anthology criticism

    'Storying Plants in Australian Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Roots and Winged Seeds explores cultural and historical aspects of the representation of plants in Australian children’s and young adult literature, encompassing colonial, postcolonial, and Indigenous perspectives. While plants tend to be backgrounded as of less narrative interest than animals and humans, this book, in conversation with the field of critical plant studies, approaches them as living beings worthy of attention. Australia is home to over 20,000 species of native plants – from pungent Eucalypts to twisting mangroves, from tiny orchids to spiky, silvery spinifex. Indigenous Australians have lived with, relied upon, and cultivated these plants for many thousands of years. When European explorers and colonists first invaded Australia, unfamiliar species of plants captured their imagination. Vulnerable to bushfires, climate change, and introduced species, plants continue to occupy fraught but vital places in Australian ecologies, texts, and cultures. Discussing writers from Ambelin Kwaymullina and Aunty Joy Murphy to May Gibbs and Ethel Turner, and embracing transnational perspectives from Ukraine, Poland, and Aotearoa New Zealand, Storying Plants addresses the stories told about plants but also the stories that plants themselves tell, engaging with the wide-ranging significance of plants in Australian children’s and Young Adult literature.'  (Publication summary)


     
    Cham : Palgrave Macmillan , 2023
    pg. 107-127
Last amended 13 Dec 2023 14:12:16
107-127 The Voice of the She-oak : Vegetal Poetics and Hope in Kirli Saunders’s Verse Novel Bindismall AustLit logo
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