“NUCLEAR CONSUMED LOVE”

Abstract

This essay will examine the polemic and poetic means through which three Indigenous Australian writers discuss the repercussions and risks associated with nuclear power, waste and weaponry as an existential and material threat to the mythopoeic creation stories, totemic systems and landforms which sustain Indigenous Australian belief. This essay will follow the establishment of a media ecology through which discourses of technological harm in Oodgeroo Noonuccal's “No More Boomerang” lay the foundation for Australian Indigenous anti-nuclear activist poetics and highlights the relationship between language, belief and technology. Oodgeroo's [Kath Walker] “No More Boomerang” will be read as a precursor to the experimental expression of Lionel Fogarty's “Foot Walking and Talking – Atomic Confusion” as well as the procedural methodologies behind Natalie Harkin's “Zero Tolerance.” It will be argued that Indigenous-led representations of nuclear weaponry as an ontologic-existential threat can only be properly critiqued when framed through the constructs of race, nationhood and the history of colonization in Australia.

Keywords:

• nuclear poetry
• Indigenous poetry
• Indigenous Australian poetry
• ecopoetics
• activist poetics

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

This research and the writing of this paper were completed without government or university funding sources. This work was undertaken with the cultural approval of the Moondani Balluk Centre at Victoria University. This essay aims to explore the (poetic, philological, theoretic) potentialities in the text and produce a generative set of reading outcomes which can lead the reader towards engagement with the ideas of Indigenous scholars, both locally and globally, which might further their knowledge. Third-party material has been reproduced with Fogarty's and Harkin's permission. The reproduced fragments of Oodgeroo's poem fall under fair use guidelines.

1 Philip Mead, Networked Language (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008) 400.

2 Natalie Harkin, Dirty Words (Melbourne: Cordite, 2015) n. pag.

3 Debra Bird-Rose, Nourishing Terrain (Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996) 7, 8.

4 Peter Minter, “Transcultural Projectivism in Olson’s ‘The Kingfishers’ and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri’s Warlugulong” in Contemporary Olson, ed. David Herd (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2015) 259–71 (260).

5 Ibid. 260. As Minter notes, “Dreaming is not a straight-forward translation of an aboriginal word,” but one which was invented in 1896 by anthropologists Spence and Gillen “to denote a complex set of transhistorical and religious concepts” (ibid.). Minter argues, in relation to Australian Aboriginal art, that the creative act “represents nodes of cosmological and semiotic intensity that were created in the Dreaming, are still present today and indeed are substantially present in the objective artwork itself” (ibid.). John Ryan, “‘No More Boomerang’: Environment and Technology in Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Poetry,” Humanities 4 (2015): 938–57 (941).

6 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Triste Tropiques” in Caribbean Discourse, by Édouard Glissant (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1989) xxix.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid. xxiv.

9 Judith Wright, “The Poetry: An Appreciation” in Oodgeroo, by Kathie Cochrane (St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1994) 163–86 (168).

10 Peter Minter, “Kath Walker and Judith Wright and Decolonised, Transcultural Ecopoetics in Frank Heinman’s Shadow Sister,” Sydney Studies 41 (2015): 61–74 (74).

11 Wright 178.

12 Ryan 948.

13 Edith Wyschogrod, Spirit of Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger and Man-Made Mass Death (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990) ix.

14 Katherine Russo, Practices of Proximity: An Appropriation of English in Australian Indigenous Literature (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010) 119.

15 Ibid. 118.

16 Ryan 949.

17 Adam Shoemaker, Black Words White Page (Canberra: Australian National UP, 2003) 217.

18 Ibid. 218.

19 Lionel Fogarty, “Nuclear Ambitious War Whites” in Kudjela (Springhill, QLD: Buchanan, 1983) 154.

20 Sean Gorman, “Politics of Indigeneity in Lionel Fogarty’s Poetry,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.2 (2011): 1–8 (5).

21 Kate Rigby, Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives and Ethics for Perilous Times (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2015) 161. Rigby discusses “songlines” as “understood to arise from country and to be active in its ancestral and ongoing (re)creation, encode the Law of right relationship among fellow ‘countrymen,’ human and otherwise. Country extends into the sky, out to sea and beneath the ground” (161).

22 Ryan 940.

23 Ibid. 951.

24 Minter, “Transcultural Projectivism” 260.

25 Evie Shockley, “Going Overboard: African American Poetic Innovation and the Middle Passage,” Contemporary Literature 52.4 (2011): 791–817 (804).

26 Ibid. 804–05.

27 Minter, “Transcultural Projectivism” 268. The definition of “totemic geography” is derived from Howard Morphy, Aboriginal Art (London: Phaidon, 1998) 103.

28 A.P. Elkin, The Australian Aborigines, fully revised ed. (London and Sydney: Angus, 1974) 381.

29 Bird-Rose 17.

30 Minter, “Transcultural Projectivism” 258.

31 Natalie Harkin, “(Re) Writing the Local” in Bound and Unbound: Sovereign Acts, ed. Gus Worby (Adelaide: Flinders UP, 2015) 20–21.

32 Natalie Harkin, “Preface” in Dirty Words n. pag.

33 Ibid.

34 Here I am choosing to use the Brathwaite phrase “nation language” as preferential to “dialect” considering the negative connotations often imposed on dialect. “Nation language,” I believe, also foregrounds the sovereignty of Indigenous groups in the establishment of their customs, law, lore and language as existed before colonization.

35 Natalie Harkin, “Zero Tolerance” in Dirty Words 40.

36 Natalie Harkin, “Domestic” in ibid. 6–7.

37 Shoemaker 108–09. See also Bain Atwood and Andrew Markus’s The 1967 Referendum: Race, Power and the Australian Constitution (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies P, 2007).

38 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1983) 219.

39 Marjorie Perloff, Differentials, Poetry, Poetics and Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2004) 336.

40 Michael Farrell, Writing Australian Unsettlement (New York: Palgrave, 2015) 175.

41 Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: U of California P, 2003) 11.

42 Minter, “Transcultural Projectivism” 260.