Reading Kevin Gilbert: Nuclear Weaponry, Media Ecologies and a Community of Memory
Keywords:
Kevin Gilbert, nuclear, poetry, media ecologiesAbstract
Situating the poems ‘Won’t You Daddy?’ and ‘Seeds of Thought’ against Gilbert’s contribution to Imagining the Real, this essay will critique nuclear threats to Country as intertwined with racial power-structures, and as dependent upon the same genocidal logic as Australian colonisation. The nuclear imaginary, as identified by Gilbert, corresponds to a death event which is informed by and itself substantiates relations of subjugation for Indigenous people. It is the contention of this paper that the thematic focus on nuclear weaponry and the nuclear imaginary as present in Kevin Gilbert’s poetry—as well as his contemporary, Kath Walker—has contributed to a poetry-based, media ecology through which nuclear threats to Country are an inherited focus of Australian Indigenous poetry.
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