"White Nativity"

Reinscribing Aboriginal Land in the poetry of Araluen and Whittaker

Abstract

In a chapbook of poetic responses to Dorothea Mackellar’s ubiquitous verse ‘I Love a Sunburnt Country’, Alison Whittaker, in her contributing poem, names the settler literary appropriation of her Gomeroi homelands as a ‘white nativity’. Two recent collections by young Aboriginal women – Dropbear (2021) by Evelyn Araluen and Blakwork (2018) by Alison Whittaker – challenge the pastoral renderings in settler literature by writing back into them – or reinscribing – from an embodied writing practice.  This essay closely reads poems from the collections to honour and explore the refusal of the literary legacies of the settler imagination – a legacy that has denied First Nations peoples’ sovereignty of narrative, story, life and bodily autonomy. I also contend that the literary continuum of reinscribing practices – of which Whittaker and Araluen are only its contemporary iteration – make visible the paradox of settler relationality to Country, where Aboriginal land is a vessel for the conjuring of a national identity but is extracted for its natural resources with impunity. More crucially, however, a reinscribing method attends to histories covered over by the colonial gaze. This gaze, I suggest, is the ‘appropriating’ of Country, and a method that seeks to naturalise the settler on stolen land.