Bonny Cassidy Bonny Cassidy i(A83840 works by) (birth name: Bonny Dot Cassidy)
Also writes as: Boni Kesidi
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 "Just Passing" : Teaching and Learning with Non-Indigenous Students through Acknowledgement of Country Bonny Cassidy , 2024 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , 4 November vol. 23 no. 2 2024;

'At the opening of the Federal Parliament’s Senate Chamber in August 2022, Senator Pauline Hanson staged a demonstration against the Acknowledgement of Country, including a prepared media statement and a performative walkout from the chamber. The act of acknowledging Ngambri and Ngunnawal Country was, Hanson stated, not a traditional custom and was a “divisive” one. As a non-Indigenous academic in the tertiary sector, I want to explore how pedagogy can create a site to reflect this public conversation and take it much further than the media cycle.' (Publication abstract)

1 3 y separately published work icon Monument Bonny Cassidy , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2024 26663839 2024 selected work poetry prose 'An important literary memoir which views white settler family history against the impacts on the Indigenous people with whom they interact. Monument is poet and critic Bonny Cassidy's fourth book. Moving seamlessly through genres in its recovery of the past - part poetry, part prose, microhistory, memoir, travel writing, and sometimes counterfactual speculation - it traces the complex consequences of colonial settlement across the generations of a White Australian family of mixed origins and ancestries. Following the threads and detours signalled by research, objects and testimony, Cassidy makes a case for the value of 'collected memory' against the tide of settlement and silence. Inspired by the methods of Natalie Harkin's archival poetics and Katrina Schlunke's Bluff Rock: Autobiography of a Massacre, Cassidy's Monument considers how non-Indigenous Australians might absorb First Nations truth-telling; and what this means for acts of speech, and writing. Should our memories serve the living or the dead, the past or the present? Why do we need new monuments in Australia, and where should we expect to find them?' (Publication summary) 
1 Ned Kelly’s Descendants Claim Cultural Heritage Rights over the Site of his Last Stand. The Supreme Court Disagrees Bonny Cassidy , 2023 single work column
— Appears in: The Conversation , 1 August 2023;
1 Memory Book Bonny Cassidy , 2023 single work prose
— Appears in: Heat (Series 3) , June no. 9 2023; (p. 34-42)
1 Photo Poems and Bathroom Abstractions : in The Book of Falling, David McCooey Offers a Series of Psychological Snapshots Bonny Cassidy , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 3 May 2023;

— Review of The Book of Falling David McCooey , 2023 selected work poetry

'On a recent award-judging panel, I found myself once again in a conversation about what makes a book of poems “cohesive” – that is, what makes it a book-length experience, as distinct from a single-poem dip, a chapbook dive or, indeed, the narrative journey of a novel.'(Introduction)

1 Mandala Bonny Cassidy , 2022 single work poetry
— Appears in: Best of Australian Poems 2022 2022; (p. 96)
1 In Bon and Lesley, Shaun Prescott Has Written an Australian Horror Story of Uniquely Local Proportions Bonny Cassidy , 2022 single work essay
— Appears in: The Conversation , 15 September 2022;
1 The Race Bonny Cassidy , 2021 single work prose
— Appears in: Borderless : A Transnational Anthology of Feminist Poetry 2021; (p. 24)
1 Not Touching the Void, Listening for the Drip : Witnessing Water Cycles Bonny Cassidy , Catherine Cassidy , 2021 single work essay
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , October no. 103 2021;
1 The Star i "I return to the valleys and hills, following channels overland into dips.", Bonny Cassidy , 2021 single work poetry
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , October no. 103 2021;
1 Un-knowing Expertise in the Time of Pandemic : Three Teaching Perspectives Bonny Cassidy , Linda Daley , Brigid Magner , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: TEXT : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs , vol. 25 no. 2 2021;
'This article frames three individual perspectives on the experience of unsettling disciplinary and institutional subjectivities through teaching and learning practices in Creative Writing and Literary Studies. At the centre of this experience is a common engagement of teaching and learning with sovereign knowledges. More specifically, the accounts in the article are drawn from experiences in 2020, when the forces of extra-academic life – especially lockdown during COVID-19 in Victoria – intensified the objectives and the means of challenging the boundaries of settler colonial expertise. The authors find that collaborative and iterative sharing of teaching experiences and methods not only supported them during a time of acute change but also empowered them to take risks that challenge disciplinary authority. In seeking to un-learn their privilege together and with their students, the authors reflect here on a set of new pedagogical contexts and approaches that are perpetually in-process.' (Publication abstract)
1 Between Night and Night Bonny Cassidy , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , October 2020; Critic Swallows Book : Ten Years of the Sydney Review of Books 2023;

— Review of Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness Peter Boyle , 2019 selected work poetry

'Death’s intrusion upon love is an old complaint. Philosophically, in Western Europe, it may have emerged as a problem in response to ideas of human limitation in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. This was early materialist thinking intended to prepare the late Roman mind for the finitude of life, belief, control and pleasure. The poetry of death-in-love is another matter. It is characterised by rage, disbelief and helplessness. It is ancient and myriad.' (Introduction)

1 Structural Whiteness and the Business of Creative Writing in Australia : Developing Reflexive Pedagogy Bonny Cassidy , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: TEXT : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs , April vol. 24 no. 1 2020;
'Two decades in my academic discipline have accreted a strata of assumptions within my practices. Most of these are about knowledge: its source in me and my informants, its places and modes of production, and methods or processes for its communication. From these have grown assumptions about myself within the discipline: the extent of my expertise, and others’ expectations of it; and its relationship to other elements of my life. I take responsibility for these assumptions, however, I also understand them to be intimately connected to the cultural systems of knowledge in which I have been brought up as an Australian academic. In this discussion I contextualise how, when provoked, our discipline of creative writing reveals its local, systemic contingencies. Using my experiences within RMIT University’s Bundyi Girri program as a launching point, I reflect on the ways that non-Indigenous awareness of historically excluded sovereign knowledges provokes the discipline and how recognition of these might look through the practices of the academy. I argue that reflexivity is a tool for structural change, and that it can be focused and fostered through pedagogy. To illustrate this, I share some process notes from my own recent teaching and learning. The questions that preoccupy me are: What is the readiness of creative writing as an academic discipline towards acknowledgement of sovereign knowledges? How does working within sovereign relationships differ or distinguish itself from cultural awareness or from ‘Indigenising’ curriculum? How is my expertise and authority as a creative writing practitioner challenged by this acknowledgement?' (Publication abstract)
1 Introduction to Prithvi Varatharajan’s Entries Bonny Cassidy , 2020 single work essay
— Appears in: Entries 2020;
1 Tresspass i "I don't feel troubled by the hurry-boys on the highway, today. If I get off", Bonny Cassidy , 2019 single work poetry
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Journal , vol. 9 no. 1 2019; (p. 35)
1 Woke to the Past, Shaun Prescott’s The Town Moves beyond Colonialism and Then Its Protagonist Bonny Cassidy , 2019 single work column
— Appears in: The Conversation , 7 November 2019;

'From Patrick White’s Voss to Tim Winton’s Breath, white, male Australian novelists have reproduced the hero character through sexualised conquests of other bodies and spaces.' (Introduction)

1 Bonny Cassidy Reviews João by John Mateer Bonny Cassidy , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , March no. 23 2019;

— Review of João John Mateer , 2018 selected work poetry

'Speaking recently in Adelaide, the expatriate Australian theorist Sneja Gunew proposed that nations are the museums of identity. I took her to mean that, regardless of our status as foreigner/visitor or citizen/member, we tour them—we observe national identity being curated and performed. But can we resign from identifying our self through nationality; can we inhabit another kind of space that is not even partly defined by it?'  (Introduction)

1 Intangible Asset i "The novelist ripped", Bonny Cassidy , 2018 single work poetry
— Appears in: Stilts , December no. 3 2018;
1 Dig i "In the pan your gravels crashing hatched their prize—", Bonny Cassidy , 2018 single work poetry
— Appears in: Hope for Whole : Poets Speak up to Adani 2018; (p. 60)
1 Undulating Separate : Locality and Nation in the Poetries of John Anderson and Lisa Bellear Bonny Cassidy , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 2 no. 18 2018;

'As Troy Bramston writes, ‘By the end of 1992, [Paul] Keating had asked Australians to think about their history and their long-term future more than any other prime minister had. He was giving voice to a new nationalism for Australia at home and abroad.’ Politically speaking, this national ‘reorientation’ away from supposed cultural ties to Europe was partly reliant upon a strengthened relationship with North America as well as Asia (437); but a ‘new nationalism’ was being activated in the culture: what Anne Brewster terms a ‘new political imaginary’ that, ‘positions indigenous and non-indigenous people in a space of co-existence and co-habitation, where hierarchy is replaced with a sense of the coevalness of contemporary indigenous and non-indigenous modernisms’ (‘Brokering Cross-racial Feminism’ 218). A significant example of this is John Anderson’s long poem, the forest set out like the night. It was published in 1995, the year before Keating’s defeat as Prime Minister. Between the terms of Keating and Howard there emerged a constant public discourse about cultural identity. Lisa Bellear’s collection of poems, Dreaming in Urban Areas was published the year of Howard’s 1996 election win, and stands out as a voice of its moment. This essay considers these books together, against the background of their political era: not as historical artefacts, but rather, as works that try to act upon local and national culture through language. In light of growing commentary on, and contribution to decolonised poetics, this discussion suggests how that tension between the two books takes on a new, timely significance. ' (Publication abstract)

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