henrylphillips 's review for:

Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen

3.25

challenging reflective slow-paced

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There were moments (poems, collections of poems) in this debut that stunned me. But ultimately I liked it less than I thought I would. Maybe there's good reason for that, since the book isn't (and shouldn't be) for me. But the moments where Araluen spoke with such brutal and concrete honesty about her people (in several senses) were so moving that I felt the allusive, collative, and intertextual aspects of the work became a little tiresome.

I think Araluen would, could and likely should, disagree with what l've just said, since the central theme of the book is a literary resistance to the literary inheritance that she, as a First Nations writer, has inherited--a rejection and recreation of the ways First Nations people have been written into and erased from the history of Australian writing. This project is of central importance. And to achieve its aim Araluen has to be allusive and intertextual; she needs material with which to work.

But maybe the reason I felt that these parts of the book fell flat was because when Araluen frees herself from this allusive project, when she speaks directly of and about her life, about the ways she has to (and has had to) find a place as a poet in a country whose language has caricatured and erased her and her people, she finds a voice so powerful and interesting that the reader has no choice but to accept this new distinctly Australian language that recognises its own history and places First Nations people at its beginning and centre.