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Works about this Work
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The Voice of the She-oak : Vegetal Poetics and Hope in Kirli Saunders’s Verse Novel Bindi
2023
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Storying Plants in Australian Children's and Young Adult Literature : Roots and Winged Seeds 2023; (p. 107-127)'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)
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Six Groundings for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Story in the Australian Creative Writing Classroom : Part 1
2017
single work
criticism
— Appears in: TEXT : Journal of Writing and Writing Courses , October vol. 21 no. 2 2017;'‘All Australian children deserve to know the country that they share through the stories that Aboriginal people can tell them,’ write Gladys Idjirrimoonra Milroy and Jill Milroy (2008: 42). If country and story, place and voice are intertwined, it is vital that we make space in Australian creative writing classrooms for the reading and writing of Australian Indigenous story. What principles and questions can allow us to begin? We propose six groundings for this work:
- Indigenous story is literary history, literary history is creative power.
- We do culture together: culture becomes in collaboration, conscious or unconscious.
- There is no such thing as Indigenous story, and yet it can be performed and known.
- Country speaks, to our conceptions of voice and point of view.
- History and memory are written in the land and on the body in bodies of practice.
- Story transmits narrative responsibility. Narrative responsibility requires fierce listening.
This two-part paper will discuss each of these groundings as orienting and motivating principles for work we do as teachers of introductory creative writing units at the University of Canberra.' (Publication abstract)
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Six Groundings for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Story in the Australian Creative Writing Classroom : Part 1
2017
single work
criticism
— Appears in: TEXT : Journal of Writing and Writing Courses , October vol. 21 no. 2 2017;'‘All Australian children deserve to know the country that they share through the stories that Aboriginal people can tell them,’ write Gladys Idjirrimoonra Milroy and Jill Milroy (2008: 42). If country and story, place and voice are intertwined, it is vital that we make space in Australian creative writing classrooms for the reading and writing of Australian Indigenous story. What principles and questions can allow us to begin? We propose six groundings for this work:
- Indigenous story is literary history, literary history is creative power.
- We do culture together: culture becomes in collaboration, conscious or unconscious.
- There is no such thing as Indigenous story, and yet it can be performed and known.
- Country speaks, to our conceptions of voice and point of view.
- History and memory are written in the land and on the body in bodies of practice.
- Story transmits narrative responsibility. Narrative responsibility requires fierce listening.
This two-part paper will discuss each of these groundings as orienting and motivating principles for work we do as teachers of introductory creative writing units at the University of Canberra.' (Publication abstract)
-
The Voice of the She-oak : Vegetal Poetics and Hope in Kirli Saunders’s Verse Novel Bindi
2023
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Storying Plants in Australian Children's and Young Adult Literature : Roots and Winged Seeds 2023; (p. 107-127)'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)
