I had been writing on the nature of ‘invasion’ in a military sense when I came to read Elfie Shiosaki’s remarkable new book of poetry, Refugia. Her scholarly archival reading of the nature of ‘invasion’ with regard to the military enterprise that was the ‘settling’ of the Swan River Colony is a remarkable and insightful glimpse into the nature of colonial invasion. And this melds ‘in the stars’ with a profound utterance from self and country that stretches and breaks any idea of the colonial lyric into something much more powerful, much more traced out of country.
With an intense sensitivity to her ancestors’ presence and with a deep spiritual connection to country, Shiosaki considers the colonial impact of the Beeliar hydrology, habitat, spiritual and material architecture of Noongar custodianship in the context of colonial-settler-military overlays and attempts at erasure. In tracing early Noongar protest and attempts at a just agreement regarding this invasion, Shiosaki projects and injects Noongar knowledges (and where they make connection with more northern Yamaji knowledges as well) with the immensity of the cosmos, bringing the stars, black holes and water ways (and the ocean) into a contact that is both generative and cataclysmic.
The reflections and inflections through the experience of the poet in trying to address and commune with wetlands and water pulses around patterns of short and long lines, and staggered-line dynamics on the open form of the page. We journey with the body and spirit of the poet trying to find redress, to find answers from country itself, across ‘bend’, ‘break’, bud, the three sections of the work. Three non-colonial and anti-colonial ‘tellings’.
There is a desire, almost a compulsion, for an end to the grieving of the invasion but there is no real possibility of this as long as that colonial invasiveness continues. Wadjemup, sacred island site of a colonial prison for Aboriginal people is spoken to with fires on the beach just as marches along Riverside Drive in Perth (Boorloo) under the eyes of armed police (of course) connect the statistically staggering reality of Aboriginal people, especially youth, in colonial jails now. Deaths in custody connects with the first months and years of the Swan River Colony.
Spreading an Aboriginal flag in Temple Underground in London is an affirming and contesting moment, but no one really notices. The crowds move on around. This is a cosmological occurrence as well, and actions are witnessed and implicated in the stars: ‘the Whadjuk/ and Captain James Stirling/ those born under the Milky Way/ and those born under St George’s cross, a red rose and the Three Lions’(‘On the Edge’). Captain Stirling (massacre leader) whose presence is murderous, corrosive and entrenched still.
The statement that ‘our understanding was never friendly’ (‘Misunderstanding’) frees the ongoing colonial manipulation of invitation and welcome arising (at least in part) out of certain first-contact accounts that are at the core of a settler sense of justification and reconciliation. If friendship was offered (out of the temporary impression or belief that the invaders were Noongar ancestral spirits returning over the sea) it was under a different set of terms of engagement. There was no friendship in the act of military invasion. In the pivotal poem ‘On the Edge’ we read:
friendship and curiosity
on the edge
a boundary that will be raked over by boots
by a false declaration of sovereignty
and this gives lie to any conceivable ‘legitimacy’ to just and equitable co-existence by the colony with Noongar people. It simply becomes an act of invasion, a process of ongoing theft.
The incredible gift of this book with its search for justice, restitution and redress is that it suggests a healing might come when the colonial invasion mentality is stopped. This cannot be stopped not by exclusion, but by change in the way settler culture addresses its past and also the grief of Aboriginal people in deep and complex ways. In the poem ‘Grandfather’, an ancestor of Shiosaki indicated in a ‘snippet of conversation’ with that colonial ethno-manipulator, Daisy Bates, says that ‘There has never been an attempt to annex neighbouring tribal territory’ by Noongar peoples. Invasion mentality is colonial mentality.
There is a thesis to be written on this book, but in the immediate term it should be read by anyone interested in true paths to justice. And from such works and invitations to response by other Noongar writers, we might understand that the ‘ancient root systems’ will bring the red eucalypt flowers and the Rio Tinto Tower will eventually give way to Noongar people being ‘reunited// in an historic reckoning’ (‘Refugia’). Noongar people will: ‘rise from the ashes// rise above the colony// rise into stars’ (‘Noongar Rising’).
John Kinsella
