From a Book that Opens on Aboriginal Land: New Approaches to Difference in Creative Writing

Innovative in its stance on presentational form in scholarly research outputs, the article comprises two transcribed dialogues, a short photo essay, four poems, and a series of Non-Traditional Research Output (NTRO) statements on the package’s contribution to knowledge. It starts with a dialogue recorded during a trip to Collis’s tribal Country in and around Bourke, outback Australia. Collis is a Barkindji man, novelist, and poet. Poets Crawford and Magee travelled with him, tape-recorder in tow. The initial dialogue is an account of the tow truck driver who unsettled Collis and Crawford with the distressing and weirdly postcolonial ghost stories Collis’s Aboriginality seems to have sparked in him, driving the two back from their broken car while Magee hitched. The second dialogue is with Rina Kikuchi, a Japanese poetry academic who came to visit the team once there in Bourke. Kikuchi talks about water imagery in Japanese poetry and also about Japanese imperialism and misogyny on the banks of the Baarka (aka Darling) River, which is flowing by her as she does so. The whole is about the white/black conflict at the heart of the Australian nation, but it is also about the ways multiculturalism speaks in and around that, particularly in poetry.