On the Killings at Bondi, Sydney, and in Providence, Rhode Island

We wish to send our support and care to all those who were injured or affected by the massacre at Bondi Beach and to remember those who were killed.

We also wish to send our support in the same way to those affected by the mass shooting in Providence, where we have dear friends. As I was writing to my friend Kwame Dawes, he was experiencing what was happening at his place of teaching. It was horrific.

 

It is deeply distressing to see political point-scoring taking place when people are suffering such physical pain and emotional trauma. What is obvious is that psychologies of hatred lead to death and misery, and that bigotry has many manifestations. The availability of weapons is a disgrace, and until a central part of the discussion becomes the complete disarming of the world in all capacities — private, military, individual, nation-states and so on — then hatred will find its means of inflicting the most harm it can.

 

Regarding the massacre targeting Jewish people celebrating their faith at Bondi, it is brutally insensitive and bigoted to correlate this with what has happened in the destruction of Gaza. Both are crimes. Both deserve to be understood for the indefensible crimes they are. It seems to me even inappropriate to draw them together in this lament, but others are doing so, will do so, and the situation will be manipulated to suit different agendas and beliefs. But people have died. People have had their loved ones taken from them. Community has been shattered. Our care should be for every person lost, every person affected, and for the broader community. This cannot happen. We are all culpable for failing to nuance social interactions on broader scales to help play down aggression while remaining committed to just causes. Life is the most just of causes, and life has been taken. Every person of Jewish heritage in Australia will feel threatened and vulnerable. This matters. This cannot be, any more than it can be the case for people/s of any heritage.

 

The objectionable correlation of Jewishness with the behaviour of the Israeli military state has become a mode of bigoted convenience for anti-Semites — that’s obvious to anyone who is active in pro-Palestinian causes. To support the Palestinian people does not equate to being anti-Jewish, and yet for some it is a contradictory vehicle for their own hatred. The focus on ‘race’ rather than heritage, on ideology rather than faith, has led to disturbing divisions in the common humanity we all share. We are all humans, we all wish to live decolonised lives, we all wish to survive without physical threat. To kill is the most colonial of acts. Colonialism occurs in shadow as well as overt ways. A murder is a murder.

 

So, our love and care to all those affected and damaged. Society’s purpose is to be non-violent. It’s the world’s purpose, too. Let’s start now. Totally.

 

Proliferating Elegies

 

And this morning we woke

to hear of friends at risk

in Providence, of a scene

unfolding, of a live situation

when there were already deaths.

Across the curve of the world

the news — we are safe

but it is still happening.

The heat was rising

and I went outside

to feel how heavy

the air was already.

Before the storm arrived

I saw a kookaburra

with lightning draped

from its beak. I have written

to seven people over

the last twenty years

to see if they’ve survived

mass shootings.

 

We read that it had been a beautiful day in Sydney

while it was storming here, fire in the forest.

Then people were crying and calling

across time zones, unable

to reach the end of day. We stretch

out a hand as lightning reaches

inside the house into us.

We talk in the dark, waiting

for the lights to come back on.

We learn that the killers

were father and son — that

one of them had held a gun

licence for ten years. That he

had six weapons, all legal,

all accounted for. A father

and son who went to work

killing. A spree. A targeting.

Organised, specific. A ‘mass

casualty’ event. Their family

home is being raided to find

details, to find evidence

for what remains. The hospitals

are full, transfusions

taking place. The sea tests

the beach, as always, as always.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Poem in memory of Mags Webster

By Tracy Ryan

Another Persephone

 

There are too many.

Daughterly, you leave us,

still picking flowers,

descend not gingerly

but all at once

before we realise.

Darkness never knew

one so luminous,

flourishing, in each hand like

torch, like blossom, a poem –

our bond was through

poetry only and yet

I take this personally:

that Hades dares

to think he has you,

could quench that glow,

a voice no chthonic

silence could swallow.

 

Out of bleak earth, the bloom.

On Evelyn Araluen’s The Rot (UQP, 2025)

'The girlshaped thing' refuses manhandling in the rejection of imperial capital and the affirmation of those whose lives are unable to complete themselves because of colonial tyranny. It's a bookwork of wounds which refuses platitudes of repair. As capitalist militarism works to remove agency from the world, Evelyn Araluen rewrites the corrupt circuitry to insist on a poetics of justice. It seeks to staunch the flow of blood from wounds inflicted by global capital. This bookwork is the next move in the erosion of the oppressive state apparatus, a move that will, with support and persistence, take us into the classless, just and equitable world we know should be all of ours. Respect for Country is absolute, as is the personhood of all those who are denied rights by aggressive capital. This is a bookwork that has the scale, intensity, linguistic versatility and critical acuity to become a turning point, a marker in the commitment to repair the damage. Alive with the tension between information and psychology, between the journal and the anti-lyric, The Rot is a pathway we might all share, might all take while questioning the consequences of our every step. This is a bookwork for the 'girls' that reroutes confessional poetry into public discourse. Out of personhood we acquire responsibility, and herein we feel the fragments of hauntings that not only look back, but to what they will be and become. This is a bookwork that shatters any preconceptions about 'poetry and form' and 'poetry and theme': the language morphs to avoid capitalist fetishisation and meaning becomes increasingly intricate as it arcs back to stark realities, absolute truths. An unforgettable journey that not only leaves its own marks of protest but clarifies the poison of archival erasure while questioning the manipulation by the state and capital of the  archive itself, exposing the rot of empire. The Rot is a set of points we might move through and find a way to justice.

 

            John Kinsella, in a place made safe for the possums

Speaking for the Jarrah Forests and Celebrating Noongar Boodja

I am reading poetry at the wonderful Mandoon Bilya Festival run by the Bibbul Ngarma Aboriginal Association tomorrow and have specifically written the protest poem below for the occasion. The festival celebrates Noongar boodja — the river, wetlands, forest and earth... a sacredness that should not be under constant threat from the ecocidal activities of companies like Alcoa and South 32:

Let’s Talk About the Shining Future of the Jarrah Forests

 

Alcoa and South 32

wish to carve up

thousands upon

thousands of hectares

of jarrah forest

to extend their already

devastating mining operations.

This is the bauxite

gambit which seems

a fait accompli —

the complete package

of ‘jobs’ (an immediacy),

‘rehabilitation’ (employment

for graduates of conscience credits),

and ‘growth’ (the state, like dieback,

clinging to the roots of the companies).

 

Alcoa and South 32

wish to carve up

thousands upon

thousands of hectares

of jarrah forest.

This is an adjunct to being

‘waterwise’ (who needs

a water catchment when

there are desal plants

excoriating the coast?);

to ‘preserving the state’s

heritage’ (on boodja

there are prisons and smelters);

and the ‘green future’

meltdown that even AI

has trouble over.

 

Alcoa and South 32

wish to carve up

thousands upon

thousands of hectares

of jarrah forest.

It’s worth tracing

what precisely those

company profits

end up doing,

but even if we don’t bother,

then simply bandy around

the word ‘security’

and count the millions

of animal deaths the process

will incur, inflict, and spin

as a positive outcome

for the entire state,

country, traditional owners,

planet, solar system, universe,

mirror universes.

 

Alcoa and South 32

wish to carve up

thousands upon

thousands of hectares

of jarrah forest.

Let’s name every species,

then every member of that species,

of plant and animal that will be

annihilated in this process.

We’re all too busy for that.

We all have lives to lead.

Let’s talk about country.

Let’s talk about what has

already gone and how

its existence in spirit

is not enough, how it needs

to be present in all states

of being, part of all stories.

How a forest needs

to remain a forest —

leaf, wing, paw, air, water

and earth.

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

 

Poem in Memory of 'CPG'

Eradu

            in memory of ‘CPG’

 

1.

 

It’s not what’s written

on a sign to mark

 

where a town was.

And it’s not the railway

 

gleaming, or the bridge

that carries it over the river.

 

It’s not the vast acreage

under crop nor the twisted

 

metal uprights of a forgotten

tennis court. Nor, across

 

the line, the single mandarin

tree with its startling fruit

 

in a bed of dried mud

and herbicided grass.

 

Nor is there a space

within the space for litotes,

 

a trick of colonial expression.

It’s not this then that —

 

it’s not permission to walk

your own country,

 

your own birth. And this

is not the explanation

 

you don’t need, but a way

of remembering. It’s loss. Loss.

 

 

(ii)

 

We are before the explosive wattle

with rabbit diggings at its base.

 

We are descending the steep

gravel road towards the river crossing.

 

We hesitate. We walk under the railway

bridge with its sensors, its elevation.

 

Gambusia are darting in shallow,

algal waters and sand speaks imprint.

 

Saltbush and river redgum utter

their true names and the sun

 

questions photographs. This your

birthplace, this our presence.

 

Water over the road. Water fading.

Honeyeaters define renewal.

 

 

(iii)

 

Divided by the road of quadruple

trailered mineral-carrying trucks,

 

Eradu North and South, nature reserve

and broadacre farming, outcrops

 

and river bed, blue lupin flowers

wavering in bush enclave, on paddock edges.

 

Listen closely to vocalisations of insects

across the fringed lilies’ stereocilia.

 

I know the red-capped robin is angry

while excited, is hyped up on other matters

 

but also letting me know where I do

or don’t stand. In the biblical incursion,

 

it might be imitating a jeremiad. An

old campfire at the lookout, the river

 

working wet and dry towards

its ocean mouth, the sandbar.

 

Between ‘Greenough’ and Mullewa.

Not between country and ‘explorer’.

 

Out of time, I will stand before

the cathedral altar under stolen

 

sacred stone and silently ask,

‘Will you hear my friend’s call

 

for justice? Will you undo yourself

into the sacred, the ancient country?’

 

 

            John Kinsella

 

Curtin creative writing: Festival of Writing, and Library Illuminates: Storytellers of the West exhibition

 By Tracy

We were at Curtin University yesterday because I was reading poetry alongside a wonderful line-up of Western Australian writers all with a connection to Curtin, as part of the university's Festival of Writing to mark 50 years since the "first graduating class" of their Creative Writing course (the course actually started in 1972). The festival included workshops and panels all day and concluded with a session of readings from Chemutai Glasheen, Caitlin Kotula, Caitlin Maling, Khin Myint, myself, Kim Scott, and Thomas Simpson. 

I first went to Curtin (then called the WA Institute of Technology, or WAIT), as an undergraduate in 1983, majoring in Literature and minoring in Creative Writing, but after my first year I went off to do other things, returning to Curtin on & off until I graduated in 1990. 

In 1993 and 1994 I taught there on the Literature course (poetry units, the reading-of and analysing rather than the writing-of!), and then again to teach creative writing, both poetry and fiction, in 2000 and 2001. So my connection with Curtin not only began a long way back, but spanned quite a number of years. 

A highly memorable writing teacher I had there in the 1980s (and there were many such) was the late Julie Lewis, biographer and fiction writer, whose lessons were so intensely inspiring that groups of students would spill over into the café afterwards to continue conversations begun in her classes. I remember Julie as a phenomenon of energy and especially gifted at teaching as well as at writing.

The venue that hosted yesterday's events, the TL Robertson Library at Curtin, is also holding an exhibition this semester covering the history of Creative Writing at Curtin from its inception under the late Brian Dibble through to the present. Library Illuminates: Storytellers of the West also features displays about six of us alumni who have published books across a range of genres. In addition, they have gathered a collection of books by Curtin-connected writers to borrow and return — over 100 of them!

John Kinsella also features in the Curtin creative writing timeline as he spent some years as staff at Curtin where he is now an Emeritus Professor.

Especial thanks to Jayne Cleave, Caitlin Maling & Rachel Robertson.

Here are some photos from yesterday, mostly taken by John:

Khin Myint, John Kinsella & Reneé Pettitt-Schipp

Tracy Ryan beside alumni display in library exhibition

Tim Kinsella enjoying book corner featuring 100+ works by Curtin-related authors

Tracy Ryan with Curtin Creative writing timeline

The full exhibition display featuring 6 Curtin writer-alumni

Tracy Ryan reads poems as part of afternoon event "50 Years of Writing at Curtin"

Storytellers of Curtin "Read & Return", some of the shelves,
with wonderful bookmarks on top, featuring writers!

On the Construct of ‘Whiteness’ and its Inherent Racism: Against the Anti-Immigration Marches in ‘Australia’

John Kinsella

‘Whiteness’ is essentially a pseudo-scientific imperial-colonial construct and an ideology. Or, given the ideology-driven nature of much of the science of hate/privilege/exclusion and self-validation via arrangements of ‘evidence’ and ‘proof’, one might just say ‘scientific’ construct with ‘scientific’ inside quote marks. 

Whether drawn out of the Blumenbachian ‘Caucasian’ racialism (such as there being a so-called ‘white race’) or any other categorisation of separateness and uniqueness, there is no such thing as ‘whiteness’. People have many origins, many forms of being in the world, and for ‘whiteness’ to be separated off is a political move to create a power base against other ‘categories’. So-called ‘white people’ are not actually ‘white’ in a way that makes them somehow separate and definitely not ‘special’ — it’s a false category. For those who have experienced the toxicity and imposition of ‘whiteness’, it is understandable they might set it up as an antithetical force, something to be wary of and ‘resisted’, but ‘whiteness’ as ideology thrives on being perceived as separate. So it needs to be non-violently resisted, of course, but not valorised in that resistance. Such a disturbing slippage happens more easily than is sometimes realised.

Those who identify as ‘white’ in order to valorise themselves, to make themselves ideally separate, are using the construct as a device for control and suppression of ‘others’. We can’t let this happen. Even within poverty, ‘whiteness’ potentially becomes a means of differentiating forms of poverty in a desperate search for validation and empowerment when the real causes of poverty are being ignored, or feel beyond rectification. The grotesquely unfair distribution of ‘wealth’ across the globe and within different communities (and between different communities) and hierarchical movements of capital are the cause, and so much of that wealth-accumulation is at the hands of and controlled by those who encourage and enforce a ‘white ideology’ as an idealism and reality. ‘Whiteness’ is a meaningless word given horrendous power by capitalism and colonialism, by greed and false and specious ‘belief’. 

I believe in the rights of people to be who they are and I celebrate multiculturalism and pluralism. When I say that I think ‘whiteness needs to end’, I mean that the thinking that whiteness is somehow something separate, exclusive, significant in itself and ‘special’ needs to end. It is damaging and corrosive thinking and harms the world’s wellbeing. I personally found the recent anti-immigration marches in ‘Australia’ threatening, frightening, disgusting and worrying. And extremely wrong on every level. The disgust many anti-immigration ‘citizens’ expressed about the presence of overt self-labelling neo-Nazis in these marches reeked of hypocrisy — the very values that are being espoused around anti-migration and the covalent ‘re-migration’ are fascist ideologies that connect with core values of neo-Nazi ideology. Make no mistake, theirs is a racist, ‘white-ist’ ideology wishing to reify (to force, in fact) a new White Australia Policy. The ideals of 1901 Federation were born out of white supremacy ideology, economic control, and a religiously-underpinned ‘secularism’ of theft of Indigenous country.

I feel we need to be many people and many persons in ourselves. I feel that we all have a right to live fairly and justly and equitably. And I know that in ‘Australia’ (a name that perpetuates Indigenous dispossession) all people live on Indigenous country and that needs to be respected in itself in all ways. 

‘Australia’ is not a ‘white country’ and never was. ‘Whiteness’ is an ideology of divisiveness. Too often, surveys for demographic stats — designed to ensure fairness and pluralism across identity difference — risk forcing an unintentional categorisation and sadly in turn actually reinforce a pernicious ideology of ‘whiteness’. This is one of the processes of rectifying injustice and supporting minorities that can potentially reinforce the control of the majority. As someone who feels that ‘majorities are by their nature oppressive of minorities, I feel it essential that any sense of a ‘white’ majority is deconstructed conceptually and dismantled as a reality. 

So, I argue for all of us to be different as we are in ourselves, and for ideas of a ‘white’ majority to be seen for the falsehood it is. There is no ‘whiteness’ outside the toxic construct of racists and bigots. The very same racists who opposed Black Lives Matters protests, which arose out of systemic violence in not only the USA but across ideologically ‘white’ colonial political structures around the world, who questioned the veracity of a united position against systemic racism, also claim a systemic plot against their ‘whiteness’ due to open and inclusive immigration policies. As always, the ideology of ‘whiteness’ adapts to suit its own needs, to push its own agendas of oppression, exclusion, exploitation and ‘uniqueness’.