Gawimarra: Gathering (Jeanine Leane, UQP)

In Gawimarra: Gathering, Wiradjuri poet and educator Jeanine Leane expresses her Country with poetry that overflows with celebrations of culture and acts of Blak resistance. Arranged into three sections, the collection begins with ‘gawimarra gathering’, and an appreciation of the women who gather stories, memories, people and food—evoking images of the hips, hands, voices and minds that work to nurture and sustain the clan. The second section, ‘Nation’, speaks to the colony with staunch and subversive fury—declaring ‘WE ARE STILL HERE’ in defiance of ongoing colonial genocide. Finally, in ‘ngulagambilanha returning’, Leane completes the cycle of ‘[listening] to the past to speak the future’ as Elders taught her. As an Indonesian on Gamilaraay land who grew up disconnected from my heritage languages, I related to Leane’s later-life language acquisition while reading her reflections on her language journey in poems such as ‘Wiradjuri Dictionary’. My own vocabulary dictionaries haunted me as Leane voiced her desire for a ‘brick-like book’ to ‘speak its words to me’. Though their origins are distinct as clay and cloud, Bahasa Indonesia and Wiradjuri were both willed into contemporary life as a language for anti-colonial resistors. Gawimarra: Gathering continues Leane’s task of making meaning—pushing the Wiradjuri beyond the classrooms, where the seeds of language are being sown. But there’s no glossary here. Leane leaves it up to settler society to learn how to read First Nations literature. In her words: ‘Australia is a violent translation. It’s not my myth. It’s yours.’

Books+Publishing reviewer: Adam Novaldy Anderson is an Australian-Indonesian writer and commissioning editor at Sweatshop Literacy Movement. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Category: Reviews