Gawimarra: Gathering
by Dr Jeanine Leane, University of Queensland Press, 2024
A stunning work of poetry from an award-winning First Nations writer, seamlessly weaving the personal and the political.
This superb collection moves from deeply tender meditations on Country, culture and kinship, to experimental archival poems dissecting the violence and destruction of the settler-colony.
Jeanine Leane’s poems are richly palpable in texture, imagery and language, layering the personal with the political, along with a sharp-tongued telling of history.
Cleverly divided into three parts, ‘Gathering’, ‘Nation’ and ‘Returning’, Gawimarra weaves back and forth in a dedication to strong matriarchs, and the core acts of gathering and returning — memory, language, history — resonate powerfully throughout.
This remarkable book is the result of decades of poetic, political, and cultural work and reflection.
Extracts from Gawimarra: Gathering
Blak poetry is
like maliyan — the eagle
unbounded by fences bodies of water
or concrete buildings —
it soars
Black Child
Black child —
born deviant from norms of western culture.
Dispossessed like a refugee in a sea of white
divisiveness where cognitive capabilities
are measured on a colour scale according to
my phenotypic reality.
My Blackness —
marked already by your history.
So much so that you know all about me
before I am even born.
Black child —
thwarted by ingrained white perception.
My life not yet lived, but my existence already
theorised by my Black skin.
Black child —
born already labelled — swimming from
the womb against currents of conformity.
Black cross in white box records
my existence in the nation — statistically
tracked from birth to death
captive o f the white square mentality.
My Blackness —
already confined by your colonial chains
redefined by white rhetoric.
Identity already ascribed from above
by a raceless ruling elite.
Entanglement
the melding shade of river gum
and boughs of weeping willow gnarl
entangled roots deep through creek banks
entwined and curved in an earthy bed
they might almost be lovers in embrace
my bloodlines run deep through this creek
deep under granite veins that climb the hills
as they run across jagged wire fence lines
strung out like dirty tufts of wool on tetanus-barbs
invaded and invader knotted in unbreakable grip
to untangle this story of enmeshment between water,
land and wire to cut through this welded weave
of roots, invasion, blood on the ground
will bleed both gum and willow dry
and crumble the bank that holds their story
Nginhaguliya Ngiyang — These Words
Wiradjuri interpretations provided by Aunty Elaine Lomas
These words cry out and I hear them — learn to mould and shape them like clay.
There should have been a time for such words
for this word — ‘Nginha Ngiyang’
And a word for such time ‘Guwayu’
How clunky these are as I first stumble over them.
Grappling like the child I should have been when I first felt them — ‘Winhangadilinya’, Sang them — ‘Babiyi’,
Spoke them — ‘Yayi’
Now my clumsy tongue struggles over each new syllable my Country ‘Ngurambang’ gives me.
Each one I want to devour like the sweetest thing ‘Wiluray Bang Gula-dhayi’ I ever tasted.
I want to suck every shred of the marrow ‘Dundumbirra’ from each solid sound.
I want to swallow it whole ‘Dharramarra’ to know what it is to eat for the first time
I want to feel like the child born to these words
‘Gudha Dhurrinya Nginha Ngiyang’
There is no logic to what memory holds
or what it releases ...
and what will remain forever
unfinished ...
Sung by Birds
... searching for a poem
I sit on the edge of Country at daybreak
where river meets sea — fresh water and salt
birdsong stuns the winter air
magpies on electric wires staved out like time across
rose-grey canvas
ruby-billed black swans on the river inlet arch their long
slender necks like question marks asking all that is
unanswered of Australia
sooty oystercatchers on the shoreline sit like the black dots
of ellipses
the rest of the story unfinished
floats out on the open sea ...
Your Last River
When a body is sick it lies in a bed.
Shrinks away. Is gone forever. The bed is empty.
When a river gets sick it loses colour. Fades.
Shrinks in its bed. Dries up. Dies.
Water has a perfect memory. The river says:
Remember me this way. Like I am your last river.
Gone is not forgotten but you can't drink
memory, nor will mourning quench your thirst.
Think of me. Like I am your future. Your first and only love.
Like I am your last truth —
because I am.
Like you will die without me —
because you will.
Like I am your last river —
because I might be.