#Poetry Blakwork (title poem)
- Author: Alison Whittaker
- Title: Blakwork
- Published: 2018
- Publisher: @MagabalaBooks
- Trivia: 2019 shortlist Victorian Premier’s Award Indigenous Writing
- Trivia: 2019 WINNER Mascara Lit Review Avant-garde Award for literature
- Trivia: 2019 shortlist ABIA Small Publishers’ Adult Book of the Year
- List of Challenges 2019
- Monthly plan
- #AWW2019
- @AusWomenWriters
- Trivia: Review: poem Cotton On (pg 15)
Cover:
- I was staring at the book turning it front to back.
- Why the choice of a bird on the cover?
- Perhaps if you live in Australia you know what it means.
- I had to find out more about the metaphor of a blackbird.
- Difficult to read….
- Origin of the term ‘blackbirding’:
- The term may have been formed
- …directly as a contraction of ‘blackbird catching’.
- ‘Blackbird’ was a slang term for the local South Pacific indigenous people.
- It might also have derived from an earlier phrase,
- ‘blackbird shooting’, which referred to
- …recreational hunting of Aboriginal people by early European settlers
Title poem: Blakwork (pg 3)
- The sun rises 0530 am on this side of the world.
- No matter how hard I try…I’m wide awake at 0600 am.
- My eyes are not yet focused so I use a magnifying glass to
- …read the first poem in the chapter Whitework.
- Blakwork: 41 words that pack a punch.
- I didn’t realize that today (26 May) is #SorryDay in Australia
- This poem sums up the sentiment of
- …reconciliation from an other perspective.
- Type of Poem: poet-in-conversation (present tense)
- Who is speaking? Alison Whittaker the poet
- Who is ‘you’ in the poem? White Australia
- Title: Blakwork
- Australia’s slavery started because other countries abolished it.
- Aboriginal people were used in
- the pearling, sugar cane and cattle industries.
- They suffered terrible abuse and were denied their wages.
Conclusion:
- There is an energy…tension in this poem.
- I tried to discover the starting subject and
- …then the discovered subject in a poem.
- There is always a door to be opened the
- will lead you down another path
- …in this poem a ” cynical path”.
- Starting subject:
- blakfella works –> payment callous hands –> profit to white Australia
- Door: words “white guilt”
- Discovered subject:
- Blakfella works –> payment now bound by contract (indentured)
- profit –> white Australia can have “soothing” feeling of reconciliation
- “nine to five forgiving you.”
- #powerful
BLAKWORK
- Fresh blakwork; industrial complexes
- hands with
- smooth and flat palm callouses.
- Soothing re —
- –conciliation
- That dawdling off-trend meme
- white guilt. To survive it; well,
- it’s naff to say, but compul–
- –sory to do. Indentured blakwork, something like
- nine to five, forgiv–
- –ing you.
- Words I had to look up for a clear meaning of the poem:
- industrial complexes – (self-interest ahead of the well being of the Aboriginal people)
- dawdling – wasting time, idle, trifle
- meme – behavoir
- naff – clichéd, unstylish
- indentured – bound by contract
I haven’t read this poem Nancy, but I loved seeing the list of words you had to look up. It’s always interesting to see what non Aussie-English speakers find unusual, because I don’t always know what is “ours” and what is more general English. Like “naff”, and “dawdling”.
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