Evelyn Araluen is a poet, researcher and co-editor of Overland Literary Journal. Her widely published criticism, fiction and poetry has been awarded the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, a Wheeler Centre Next Chapter Fellowship, and a Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund grant. Born and raised on Dharug country, she is a descendant of the Bundjalung Nation.
Today, Evelyn is on the blog to tell us about Dropbear, her innovative collection of poetry and prose, and to share with us her favourite reads from First Nations authors. Read on!
A note from Evelyn on Dropbear
‘Dropbear moves from poems of rage and dreaming to cathartic fragments of personal essay. It’s a book about kitsch, nostalgia, desire and wrath: all the feelings which swirl around the complex relationships Aboriginal people have with stories and images that have been created about the lands and waters we belong to.’
Book Recommendations from Evelyn Araluen
Fire Front
edited by Alison Whittaker
This important anthology, curated by Gomeroi poet and academic Alison Whittaker, showcases Australia’s most-respected First Nations poets alongside some of the rising stars.
Buy it here
Homecoming
by Elfie Shiosaki
Homecoming pieces together fragments of stories about four generations of Noongar women and explores how they navigated the changing landscapes of colonisation, protectionism, and assimilation to hold their families together.
Buy it here
A History of My Brief Body
by Billy-Ray Belcourt
A dazzling collection of personal essays from internationally acclaimed First Nations Canadian writer Billy-Ray Belcourt, who mines his own personal history to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be.
Buy it here
Born Into This
by Adam Thompson
Engaging, thought-provoking stories from a young Tasmanian Aboriginal author who addresses universal themes – identity, racism, heritage destruction – from a wholly original perspective.
Buy it here
The Yield
by Tara June Winch
Profoundly moving and exquisitely written, Tara June Winch’s The Yield is the story of a people and a culture dispossessed. But it is as much a celebration of what was and what endures, and a powerful reclaiming of Indigenous language, storytelling and identity.
Buy it here
Guwayu, for all times: A Collection of First Nations Poems
by Jeanine Leane (Editor), commissioned by Red Room Poetry
Guwayu, For All Times is a collection of First Nations poems commissioned by Red Room Poetry over the past 16 years, and is a radical literary intervention for its breadth of representation, temporal depth and diversity of language.
Buy it here
Throat
by Ellen van Neerven
Throat is the explosive second poetry collection from award-winning Mununjali Yugambeh writer Ellen van Neerven. Exploring love, language and land, van Neerven flexes their distinctive muscles and shines a light on Australia’s unreconciled past and precarious present with humour and heart.
Buy it here
Blakwork
by Alison Whittaker
Alison Whittaker’s Blakwork is an original and unapologetic collection from which two things emerge; an incomprehensible loss, and the poet’s fearless examination of the present.
Buy it here
Ghost River
by Tony Birch
The river is a place of history and secrets. For Ren and Sonny, two unlikely friends, it’s a place of freedom and adventure. For a group of storytelling vagrants, it’s a refuge. And for the isolated daughter of a cult reverend, it’s an escape.
Buy it here
The Swan Book
by Alexis Wright
The Swan Book is set in the future, with Aboriginals still living under the Intervention in the north, in an environment fundamentally altered by climate change.
Buy it here
Iep Jaltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter
by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner
Marshallese poet and activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s writing highlights the traumas of colonialism, racism, forced migration, the legacy of American nuclear testing, and the impending threats of climate change.
Buy it here
Walk Back Over
by Jeanine Leane
In Walk Back Over, Wiradjuri woman (read: poet, academic, historian, teacher) Jeanine Leane takes off our wallpaper to reveal the personal and political layers of a nuanced history.
Buy it here
False Claims of Colonial Thieves
by Charmaine Papertalk Green and John Kinsella
From well-known poets John Kinsella and Charmaine Papertalk-Green comes a tête-à-tête that is powerful, thought provoking, and challenges what we think we know about our country, colonisation, and how we understand our land.
Buy it here
Mullumbimby
by Melissa Lucashenko
When Jo Breen uses her divorce settlement to buy a neglected property in the Byron Bay hinterland, she is hoping for a tree change, and a blossoming connection to the land of her Aboriginal ancestors. What she discovers instead is sharp dissent from her teenage daughter Ellen, trouble brewing from unimpressed white neighbours, and a looming Native Title war among the local Bundjalung families.
Buy it here
—Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen (University of Queensland Press) is out now.
Dropbear
I told you this was a thirst so great it could carve rivers.
This fierce debut from award-winning writer Evelyn Araluen confronts the tropes and iconography of an unreconciled nation with biting satire and lyrical fury.
Dropbear interrogates the complexities of colonial and personal history with an alternately playful, tender and mournful intertextual voice, deftly navigating the responsibilities that gather from sovereign country, the spectres of memory and the debris of settler-coloniality...
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