Australian Aboriginal poetry

When the tea trees are in bloom

Above: ants and honey. Image by Balaram Mahalder, 2011, via Wikimedia Commons.

From the pages of Oceania to the digital troves of Indigenous corporations working today, animals are everywhere in the Australian Aboriginal poetry archive. In many different cultural expressions they are hunted, celebrated, memorialized, loved, and mythologized; they also serve as metaphors for who we are now.

From Oceania with love

Parnell Dempster, 'Down to Drink,' c1949, Pastel on paper, 586mm x 764mm, The Curtin University Art Collection, The Herbert Mayer Collection of Carrolup Artwork.

Although we can debate the historicization of literary modernism, particularly by attending to its formal rather than authorial delineations, it is less contestable to suggest that it had a prominent position in the cultural life of the 1930s. This was, of course, the decade of Pound’s Cantos, Beckett’s Murphy, Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, and Stein in America. Perhaps this canonized imperative declined somewhat in subsequent decades, but arguably it is not until the 1960s that we see modernism’s replacement in high culture; hence, Charles Olson’s letter to Bob Creeley about his generation being “postmodern.” The 1960s, of course, sees the flowering of a whole raft of poetries, not least among them ethnopoetics, with Jerome Rothenberg’s seminal Technicians of the Sacred being published in 1969. But what of the prehistory of the field of ethnopoetics?

Australian Aboriginal songpoetry

A selection

Uluru in Australia’s Northern Territory.

A history of Australian Aboriginal songpoetry in English is a shadow project. Of course it exists as a thing in and of itself. But in translation, as it so often is, songpoetry can be considered symptomatic of an Anglophone poetry project. This is not to suggest there is no exchange between the country of the songs and the poetry context into which they are translated. It is surely a work of collaboration.

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