Ali Cobby Eckermann



Fair Trade: a way to RE/order /imagine /code the world

It was August 2017 and the location was The Tibetan Kitchen on Brunswick Street in Meanjin, Brisbane.

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Weaving Blankets of Story and Hearts of Gold: An Archival-poetics Praxis

My dad was diagnosed with lung cancer on his fifty-ninth birthday and after a fierce battle with his body and mind, he died two years later. In the face of all odds, he maintained optimism and hope.

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Untitled

as if their passion is a shroud against the sun they gather en-masse for the communion, feasting on the body and the blood of the other, those who are denied entry, who know the meaning of fire. the fields of …

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(Kuru Waru) Bushfires Eyes

A response to the appointment of Tony Abbott as Special Envoy of Indigenous Affairs by the newly self-elected Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison 29 August, 2018. There are bushfires burning in my eyes I am burning down the modern world …

Posted in 89: DOMESTIC | Tagged

পেনেলোপে রে কোবি (অপহৃত শিশু) | Penelope Rae Cobby (The Stolen Child)

Translated from the English to the Bangla by Seemantini Gupta দরজার গোড়ায় জড়োসড়ো হয়ে দাঁড়িয়ে, আমি অবিশ্বাসী আর্তনাদ, আমি গাড়ির মধ্যে জবুথবু, আমি বিষাদের রহস্য-স্পর্শ, আমি-ই। যে কাঁথাটি কখনও ব্যবহার করা হলো না, আমি সে বা খালি, ধুলো-জমা পেরামবুলেটারটা টেডি …

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We Need to Talk about Caste: Roanna Gonsalves Interviews S Anand

It was a cool inner west Sydney evening in May 2015, alive with families out to dinner and bookshops open late. It was also one week after four Dalits were sexually abused, murdered, and their homes set on fire in Rajasthan, India, and three weeks before a Dalit girl in a village in Madhya Pradesh, India was beaten up because her shadow fell on an upper caste man.

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Intervention Pay Back

I love my wife she right skin for me pretty one my wife young one found her in the next community over across the hills little bit long way not far And from there she give me good kids funny …

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Review Short: Ali Cobby Eckermann’s Inside My Mother

Celebrated South Australian writer Ali Cobby Eckermann’s fourth volume of poetry, Inside My Mother, is her most substantial and diverse collection to date. Although the book includes a handful of reworked earlier pieces, most of the seventy-three poems are new. Across four sections, these poems enrich and intensify the politically urgent subject matter that Cobby Eckermann’s oeuvre has, over the past decade or so, addressed so effectively. As an Aboriginal descended from the Yankunytjatjara language group, Cobby Eckermann’s chief concern is to express what she sees as the untold truth of Aboriginal people, both in terms of vital aspects of their culture, as well as regarding the (ongoing) detrimental impact of European colonisation. In this new work, Cobby Eckermann’s personal story provides a strong substructure in relation to which these larger issues are artfully explored.

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The Northern Territory Emergency Response: Why Australia Will Not Recover from The Intervention

It was always an exciting time for me, during my time in the role of Art Centre Manager at Titjikala, to escort Aboriginal artists from central Australia to their art exhibitions and forums in Adelaide. On one occasion were two senior Pitjantjatjara / Luritja artists from Titjikala, and they were accompanied by their granddaughters.

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Grave

inside the clearing of the bush cemetery I sit surrounded by a stark equality every grave is marked with a plain white cross the landscape is a post modern dirge stretched in the aftermath of Christian law the plastic flowers …

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A Parable

Interventionists are coming, interventionists are coming cries echo through the dusty community as the army arrive in their chariots Parents and children race for the sandhills burying tommy axes and rifela hiding in abandoned cars along the fence line One …

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Love Magic

there is ilpintji in the wind by the singing rock down the river by the ancient tree love in malu ngintaka and kalaya love when spirits speak no human voice at sacred sites watch walawaru soar over hidden kapi find …

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Review Short: Outcrop: radical Australian poetry of land

As I write this review, sunlight filtered through a pall of smoke casts a dull orange glow over my kitchen bench. The Blue Mountains are burning. Sydney’s haze resembles downtown Beijing’s and it’s only October. Such an apocalyptic scene – part of the ‘Australian experience’ I am assured by our Prime Minister – provides context for the world into which Outcrop and its ‘radical poetry of land’ emerges. This is not to suggest that the anthology’s outlook is primarily environmental, but that alternative ways of examining land are sorely needed.

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Proteaceae: A Chapbook Curated by Peter Minter

In January 2013 I visited the inaugural exhibition of the new Blue Mountains City Art Gallery, an eclectic and compelling collection of works curated by Gavin Wilson and entitled ‘Picturing the Great Divide: Visions from Australia’s Blue Mountains’. I stood for what seemed like an hour before John Wolseley’s wonderful ‘The Proteaceae of NSW and Argentina 1996’ – a water colour and pencil work that is part of his ongoing creative enquiry into geological and biological temporalities, and one which advances an intensely felt and thought aesthetic of deep trans-historical and trans-biological emergence.

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At Knowth

we are all just passing through this place of tabernacles and tombs scripted in a language we can no longer read do the concentric circles carvings freeze the breath of your sentimental heart? are the zigzag lines accounts of storms …

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At Giants Causeway Northern Ireland

Lets falsify the census to topple the popular And drift enmasse to Burrup Peninsula With pride to protect the petroglyphs whatta we got to stay home for? eating snags on toast ‘cos we got no chops fish and chips on …

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At Glendalough Ireland

What is this obsession to tourist the dead? I can’t understand if it is to prove A history of belonging Or a pride of invasion. The rapunzel tours have failed To pierce the blue velvet of sky The graveyard is …

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Tina Giannoukos Reviews Ali Cobby Eckermann

Ali Cobby Eckermann’s work offers us a compass to our past and present. In poetry, memoir and verse novel, she maps a journey of Aboriginal identity and the historical and contemporary challenges to its integrity and resilience. What emerges is a profound engagement with healing and the articulation of Aboriginal space as always present, alive, intruded upon but utterly felt. She renders legible how ‘Footprints don’t fade / Culture / Kami May’ (‘Mai’, Love dreaming & other poems).

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Sam Byfield Reviews the APC New Poets Series

I read the four New Poets chapbooks with a high level of curiosity and expectation. Published by the Australian Poetry Centre, these collections represent the rebirth of the Five Islands Press New Poets Series, which published the first chapbooks of approximately 75 Australian poets until its cessation in 2007.

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