The Rot by Evelyn Araluen
UQP, 2025
The Rot is the second collection by Bunjalung poet and scholar Evelyn Araluen. While similarities to Araluen’s earlier award-winning work Dropbear are apparent in style, language, and positionality, The Rot grows out of a different socio-cultural context and a different set of material conditions. Both works though, are radical for what they confront – “stare back at” and refuse to look away from. And for what they refuse to allow to defeat them.
The Rot is a work of hope. Rot is the essential catalyst in any form of change – be it chemical, organic, political, social. It is an impermanent and transitional state from which new forms of growth and life emerge. Rot is always part of a cycle.
Fragmented images of physical rot occur across all three movements of the text from:
decay, putrefaction decline in function and or appearance decomposition in the citadel of life (From the second movement, ‘Fragments on Rotting’, 29)
And,
At least a dozen still lifes of fruit in varying stages of decay (‘(ii) 256GB of Salvaged Memory’, 37)
Rot, apart from its literal meaning, has taken on a new connotation in Millennial and Gen Z social media lingo. Meme culture, short-form content and ironic humour helped popularize rot as a relatable expression of modern stress, especially among younger internet users.
It is not uncommon to hear members of these generations – the digital natives – say such things as: I was going to do my assignment, but I rotted on TikTok/Instagram/X, instead! Or: I was doomscrolling and the day just got away from me! Or: I’m so tired, I just need time to rot in bed! Expressions such as “rotting online” and “brain-rot” reflect an intuitive sense, by these generations of users, that social media is not always healthy.
The Rot is a work of immediacy. It speaks to the angst of generations operating on information overload. Poems such as the trilogy of ‘256GB of Salvaged Memory’ (i, ii & iii) chronicle a fragmented archive of attempting to process the billions of bytes of information from “the saddest song in the world on repeat” (37), to a “reparative reading of the AUKUS invoice” and texts to her father on October 14 – a date that will be ever etched into the minds of First Nations Australians as the day the nation turned its back on us again – “to vote on a constitutionally enshrined mechanism of colonial collaboration” (61).
Through these poems Araluen charts ‘the cartography of violence that girls map between each other’ (62). The angst and overload are poignantly expressed in ‘Girl Work!’:
o girly, who amongst us has not been shaken by the last spluttered breaths of the machine? our mama the internet our papa the technocratic state o girly, who has time to remember? (20)
This poetry is in constant dialogue with the socio-cultural and political climate that the poet is situated within and is responding to. In an interview with Haylee Hackenberg (2026) Araluen spoke of what became The Rot as inspired by an experience at the 2024 Adelaide Writer’s Festival. When reading some new poetry which grew out of a deeper engagement with Marxism, socialist poetry and socialist theory, alongside the ongoing and escalating genocide in Gaza, she was simultaneously heckled and at the same time reaffirmed in response to her reading of the work. Marxism and bearing witness to Gaza drive much of the collection that unfolds.
Araluen’s work exists within a set of material contradictions that are on the one hand necessary for the work to happen, while also being destructive, oppressive colonial, capitalistic neo-liberal forces that should be, and are, challenged from within.
… A shareholder decides our brains are best kept liquid, that the firmness of the world might tempt us to change. (‘Sleep Act Two’, 22)
Araluen is neither blind nor oblivious to dialectic within her own work – “its oppositional yet constitutive force” (‘Terms of Reference’, 32). Nor does she shy away from it. Instead, she writes into it to make the contradictions more obvious and the dilemmas more glaring. Poems such as ‘Uplock Actuator System’ confront the difficult complicity of being an activist for and in solidarity with Palestine, while at the same time residing in a nation-state where tax-payers dollars fund weapons of war used to continue the genocide:
… Empire slaughters generations while colonisers send your wages to the machine. This deserves no forgiveness, is a force to be resisted. (109)
The Rot is a cycle in three seamless movements: ‘Holdings’, ‘Fragments on Rotting’ and ‘Unfoldings’ over which the second person address is used frequently – “you”, “your” and “yours”, or the collective “us” and “we”. This creates a sense of intimacy and familiarity alongside a sense of urgency and directness.
You have no business moralising what you don’t understand, like wind, city planning, adaptive ecology. You get this way when you stop sleeping … (‘Sleep Act One’, 3-4)
Araluen is not just speaking to, of, or about herself alone. She is speaking to, of and about a generation whose health and well-being have been commodified and capitalised on by pharmaceutical companies, tech-giants, property developers and investors, for whom creating unwellness, instability and inequality is big business and maximum profit.
… a few licks of your lover’s seroquel, ibuprofen for the aches, retinol for the lines, three days sobbing into the wikipedia entry for pigeons, theatres of hygiene and fascism in alternating screens … (4)
And,
there’s big business in privatising the clocks, in bottling air, offer it up to the deities of dow jones nasdaq s&p 500 temple complex… (‘Billionaire Liturgy’, 7)
Who wouldn’t feel justifiably angry and sad, caught in a “vengeful wind” (4)? But Araluen refuses to look away.
The final poems of the first movement, ‘Retired from sad new career in geese’ and ‘You’, see ‘no horizon free and safe for the girls’ (24) and remind us – the collective “you” – that:
… We all have histories we forget are still strapped to our backs, your mother is always trying in her broken ways to tell you what was done to her. (24)
The intergenerational histories we all carry – whether articulated or not – weigh heavy here and segue us into the next second movement as, “[a]round us the / world sways, sometimes crumbles” (25), “[i]t will / always have been worth it, we need to / believe” (24).
