There is no room for censorship of the arts, not ever. We are a community of difference/s, and communities of difference are necessary to creating safe, just and caring communities at large. Nor is there ever a supportable reason for cancelling, as the New South Wales government has done, the right to protest, to marching for a cause in a peaceful way. Shutting down conversation does not bring healing.
And I also want to voice our complete opposition to the actions of the Trump administration in attacking Venezuela under its 'Donroe' doctrine of western imperialism, its abuse of the land and people in its oil theft and usage, and its blatant attempt to enact yet another colonialism on the people of Greenland. One does not have to search very hard to find Australian undercurrents in the mining grab for Greenland rare earth and uranium deposits. In all of this we are dealing with a growing capitalist oppression, exploitation and tyranny.
John Kinsella
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
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.
'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
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
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
