Pilbara Palyku mob share opulent illustrations, tense questions

First published in National Indigenous Times on September 26, 2018.

We All Sleep by Sally Morgan and Ezekiel Kwaymullina. Image supplied by Fremantle Press.

Crocs, kookaburras and a dingo howling in the golden light of the moon—these are some of the creatures that populate mother-and-son team Sally Morgan and Ezekiel Kwaymullina’s gorgeous book for infants We All Sleep.

The book spans a day and takes youngsters on a journey from mangrove-trimmed lagoons, to red rock ridges alive with snakes. The illustrations vibrate on the page, opulent colours that bring to life country and its creatures.

It’s one of two new editions recently released by Fremantle Press—the other, I Love Me, by Sally Morgan and Ambelin Kwaymullina, is full of joy, elation, and encourages infants and children to celebrate and trust in the uniqueness of the self.

‘I love my eyes, I love my nose, I love the way my curly hair grows!’ Sally Morgan writes.

Both stories are in the form of board books, with thick card pages perfect to resist bumped-over liquids or smeared food, and great for weekends camping or on country.

Sally, Ezekiel and Ambelin are all Palyku people, from Western Australia’s Pilbara region.

In addition to these two children’s books, Ezekiel and Ambelin have also been involved—as a poet, and illustrator/editor respectively—in another recent publication by Fremantle Press, a collection of short stories, memoir, and poetry titled Meet Me at the Intersection, released at the start of this month.

The anthology opens with the voices of First Nations’ people and then widens to incorporate other marginalised Australian voices, including writers who live with disabilities or mental illness, and LGBTIQA+ writers.

The book’s editors, Ambelin Kwaymullina and Rebecca Lim, were prompted to found the anthology when considering the under-representation of diverse Australian voices in children’s and young adult literature.

The results are fresh and important. In Kyle Lynch’s memoir ‘Dear Mate’ we learn of his attempts to snag a job in Kalgoorlie, WA.

‘You gunna help me or what?’ he asks his aunty in the KACC office.

She helps him build a solid résumé—but that’s only the start.

The next tricky thing is trying to find a lift into town so that he can drop it off. There’s a hot thread of tension running through this piece—the checking and rechecking the phone, the disappointment when the first job doesn’t come through—and it’s a tension apparent in the other pieces too.

The writers ask: how does one form a strong Aboriginal identity in the wake of colonisation? How does one form a strong, queer Aboriginal identity? And in the case of Ezekiel Kwaymullina, how does one overcome dyslexia, when the teachers are completely oblivious to the Aboriginal boy at the back of the class whose mind is a ‘fading star’?

All three books are available at www.fremantlepress.com.au or you can check in with your local bookshop.

Heart is full and burstin’ blak

First published in National Indigenous Times on September 12, 2018.

Poet Alison Whittaker. Photo by Jonno Revanche.

Whitework, bloodwork, badwork, blakwork: Alison Whittaker’s sassy second collection of poems is structured in chapters ranging from the collective to the deeply personal, from the comic, to the deadly serious. A Gomeroi woman, from the floodplains of Gunnedah in northern NSW, Whittaker flips white Australian narratives about country. In one of the opening poems of the collection she muses on Dorothea Mackellar’s ‘My Country’, that patriotic poem that begins:

I love a sunburnt country
A land of sweeping plains.

‘My Country’ is said to be inspired by Whittaker’s home region around Gunnedah and Whittaker loves this country too, it’s cored in her heart. But unlike ‘sweet Mackellar’ whose ‘gaze turns rivers into sand’ Whittaker has a different view. Her response to Mackellar is like the answering part of a duet, troubled, darker and thread with pain.

                                                                                                   I love white nativity
that digs its roots and ticks to suck the floodplains and the sea—
the love that swept those sweeping plains from Nan, from Mum, from me.

Many of the poems in Blakwork contend with the calamity of colonisation. We meet a trespassing lamb, ‘a tuft of sustenance, adrip with meat’ as it pads the clay, and a stock image barefoot child ‘with pea-thick flies on face’. In the poem ‘beneviolence’ we’re told:

THIS IS GOOD FOR YOU!
THIS IS FOR YOUR GOOD. YOUR OWN
GOOD. THIS IS FOR YOU.

The arc of the poems takes us from the past closer to the present. She notes a bustling trade in the soft currencies of guilt and reconciliation and is unsparing in her depictions of entrenched racism. Where she’s best, however, is in her vivid observations. Her poem ‘for the feral girls’ is gorgeous in its femininity—we’re accosted by leopard prints and river map undie seams, by sweat and sex and Kmart bras and Centrelink. She writes:

You got that
chain-smoking habit, Nintendo 64 and KFC for dinner …

On the whole, Blakwork is a delight: the challenges to white Australian narratives like ‘My Country’ and ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’, the fresh use of form and language and the knock-your-socks-off one-liners like, ‘A tea bag haemorrhaging ‘round its spoon.’

It’s no surprise that Whittaker was co-winner of the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize in 2017, the winner of the State Library of Queensland’s black&write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship in 2015, and that she was the Australian Indigenous Poet-In-Residence for the 2018 Queensland Poetry Festival. On top of these accolades, between 2017-2018, she was a Fulbright scholar at Harvard Law School, where she was named the Dean’s Scholar in Race, Gender and Criminal Law.

Blakwork was released by Magabala Books, Australia’s oldest Indigenous publishing house, in September this year. More information can be found at: https://www.magabala.com/young-adult/blakwork.htm