#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:

1. I was staring at the book  turning it front to back.
2. Why the choice of a bird on the cover?
3. Perhaps if you live in Australia  you know what it means.
4. I had to find out more about the metaphor of a blackbird.
5. Difficult to read….
6. Origin of the term ‘blackbirding’:
7. The term may have been formed
8. …directly as a contraction of ‘blackbird catching’.
9. ‘Blackbird’ was a slang term for the local South Pacific indigenous people.
10. It might also have derived from an earlier phrase,
11. ‘blackbird shooting’, which referred to
12. …recreational hunting of Aboriginal people by early European settlers

 

Title poem:      Blakwork  (pg 3)

1. The sun rises 0530 am on this side of the world.
2. No matter how hard I try…I’m wide awake at 0600 am.
3. My eyes are not yet focused so I use a magnifying glass to
4. …read the first poem in the chapter Whitework.
5. Blakwork: 41 words that pack a punch.
6. I didn’t realize that today (26 May) is #SorryDay in Australia
7. This poem sums up the sentiment of
8. …reconciliation from an other perspective.

 

1. Type of Poem:  poet-in-conversation (present tense)
2. Who is speaking?  Alison Whittaker the poet
3. Who is ‘you’  in the poem?    White Australia
4. Title:   Blakwork
5. Australia’s slavery started because other countries abolished it.
6. Aboriginal people were used in
7. the pearling, sugar cane and cattle industries.
8. They suffered terrible abuse and were denied their wages.

 

Conclusion:

1. There is an energy…tension  in this poem.
2. I tried to discover the  starting subject and
3. …then the discovered subject in a poem.
4. There is always a door to be opened the
5. will lead you down another path
6. …in this poem a ” cynical path”.

 

1. Starting subject:
2. blakfella works –> payment callous hands –> profit to white Australia
3. Door: words   “white guilt”
4. Discovered subject:
5. Blakfella works –> payment now bound by contract (indentured)
6. profit –> white Australia can have “soothing” feeling of reconciliation
7. “nine to five forgiving you.”
8. #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.

 

 

1. Words I had to look up for a clear meaning of the poem:
   
2. industrial complexes – (self-interest ahead of the well being of the Aboriginal people)
3. dawdling – wasting time, idle, trifle
4. meme –  behavoir
5. naff – clichéd, unstylish
6. indentured – bound by contract