Cirrus@Austlit

'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.

'My dad was diagnosed with lung cancer on his fifty-ninth birthday and after a fierce battle with his body and mind, he died two years later. In the face of all odds, he maintained optimism and hope. He could never accept the inevitable, and in the words of Dylan Thomas, he did indeed rage against the dying of the light. His courage, dignity and will shone bright until the very end.' (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.

'Archival-poetics is an active, embodied reckoning with history and the violence of the colonial archive, particularly South Australia’s Aboriginal records. Family records at the heart of this work trigger questions about surveillance, representation and agency, bearing witness to the state’s archivisation processes and the revelation of what is both absent and present on the record. Emotion and intuition compel such archival-intimacy, particularly when reckoning with traumatic, contested and buried episodes of history that inevitably return to haunt. As my research progressed, I unintentionally re-created and became stuck in the very thing I was interrogating: the archive box. The only way to unbind myself was to write poetry and weave my way out, which grounded this archival-poetics in unanticipated ways. This article will explore the process of weaving with my nanna’s and great-grandmother's handwritten letters, as both conceptual metaphor and as literal, cultural practice. As a creative arts praxis, it will also discuss the transformative effect and decolonising potential of weaving archives into something beautiful and honouring, to offer new narratives of history for the future record. A Ngarrindjeri basket can hold many stories. This is one of them.' (Publication abstract)

'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.'