Araluen. Watego. Norman. Whittaker: these are some of Australia’s most exciting voices in literature you need to read right now. Through poetry, essays, and short stories, these authors are fearless in form and voice, and fearless in their storytelling and reporting. Our culturally rich and expansive collection at YPRL can often be hard to find new writers and voices if you’re not sure where to start or who to look out for.
May this spotlight on four writers help you on your reading journey to discover something new and open your world.
Evelyn Araluen
Drop Bear (poetry)
About the book:
“I told you this was a thirst so great it could carve rivers.
This fierce debut from award-winning writer Evelyn Araluen confronts the tropes and iconography of an unreconciled nation with biting satire and lyrical fury. Dropbear interrogates the complexities of colonial and personal history with an alternately playful, tender and mournful intertextual voice, deftly navigating the responsibilities that gather from sovereign country, the spectres of memory and the debris of settler-coloniality. This innovative mix of poetry and essay offers an eloquent witness to the entangled present, an uncompromising provocation of history, and an embattled but redemptive hope for a decolonial future.”
Araluen’s debut poetry collection, Drop Bear, has been described as a ‘scalpel through twinkly visions and phantasma that treat the Australian landscape as empty necropolis: the Peters ice-cream white suburbs and grey-lapel metropolises; the interior as vacant object of “sunburnt” affection; women quietly tending logpiles at the homestead while men trek across the frontier and sheep and rabbits destroy the topsoil.’
This incandescent, remarkable, brutally beautiful, and instantly iconic (and at times funny) collection recently won the 2022 Stella Prize. As Araluen, a descendant of the Bundjalung nation, told the Guardian of her win, ‘“A lot of contemporary settler writing has an anxiety about the Aboriginal writer speaking against it […] But even in that there isn’t a strong sense of thinking about an Aboriginal reader.” How many authors or publishers consider “what an Aboriginal reader might take from the book”, or how it might “be understood and interpreted by them”? This too is an erasure, and an important one.”
We highly recommend you read Drop Bear.
About Evelyn Araluen
Evelyn Araluen is a poet, researcher and co-editor of Overland Literary Journal. Her widely published criticism, fiction and poetry has been awarded the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, a Wheeler Centre Next Chapter Fellowship, and a Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund grant. Born and raised on Dharug country, she is a descendant of the Bundjalung Nation. Evelyn’s debut collection Drop Bear won the 2022 Stella Prize.
Chelsea Watego
Another Day in the Colony (Essays)
About the book:
The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards judges sum up the ground-breaking work that is Another Day in the Colony:
“In this collection of deeply insightful and powerful essays, Chelsea Watego examines the ongoing and daily racism faced by First Nations peoples in so-called Australia. Rather than offer yet another account of ‘the Aboriginal problem’, she theorises a strategy for living in a society that has only ever imagined Indigenous peoples as destined to die out.
Drawing on her own experiences and observations of the operations of the colony, she exposes the lies that settlers tell about Indigenous people. In refusing such stories, Chelsea narrates her own: fierce, personal, sometimes funny, sometimes anguished. She speaks not of fighting back but of standing her ground against colonialism in academia, in court and in the media. It’s a stance that takes its toll on relationships, career prospects and even the body.”
When Black women are accused (often by polite White women) of being ‘too angry,’ Watego turns this argument on its head. Writing for Indigenous X about the audacity of anger, she explains that, “Black women have long been using anger as compost to fertilise our garden. Black women have long carried the weight of the multiple, intersecting oppressions of race, class and gender, along with the responsibility to make some good from it – for the sake of our children and our community.”
Anger and the necessity to bring forth the points of view of Black women, of highlighting Australia’s history many white people don’t want to hear about, is a driving force for this powerhouse collection of essays. When told by white women to abandon her anger and instead, look to hope as the answer to combating racism in Australia, Watego says:
‘We don’t need to be told to have hope. Hope is for white people (and some Black men) – hope doesn’t actually get Black women anywhere (certainly doesn’t get them books or television shows). Hope is as passive as the social world we occupy insists we have to be. Tone-policing of Black women, whether it be from Black men (*coughs* Uncle Warren) or the white women who love them (*coughs* Uncle Stan), functions to maintain their position on the ladder, ensuring that we don’t get ahead of ourselves or them. They tell us not to be angry, to have ‘hope’ by simply re-imagining ourselves out of our location.”
Another Day in the Colony is no reimagining. It is a critique of hope being a form of complacency, a force to bring the voices of often ignored First Nations voices, especially Black women’s voices, to the forefront. These essays, part memoir and philosophy, also examines the the continued violence against Aboriginal people for standing their ground and the affects this has on bodies, on Black lives, on lands, while exposing the effect of Australia’s cultural amnesia. Most importantly, these essays are a powerful call of self determination.
About Chelsea Watego
Associate Professor Chelsea Watego (formerly Bond) is a Munanjahli and South Sea Island woman born and raised on Yuggera country. First trained as an Aboriginal health worker, she is an Indigenist health humanities scholar, prolific writer and public intellectual and academic at the University of Queensland. She is a founding board member of Inala Wangarra, an Indigenous community organisation within her own community and co-director of the Institute for Collaborative Race Research. In 2022, Chelsea's groundbreaking work, Another Day in the Colony was longlisted for the Stella Prize and shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (non-fiction).
SJ Norman
About the book:
“This brilliant collection of short fiction explores the shifting spaces of desire, loss and longing. Inverting and queering the gothic and romantic traditions, each story represents a different take on the concept of a haunting or the haunted. Though it ranges across themes and locations – from small-town Australia to Hokkaido to rural England – Permafrost is united by the power of the narratorial voice, with its auto-fictional resonances, dark wit and swagger.
Whether recounting the confusion of a child trying to decipher their father and stepmother’s new relationship, the surrealness of an after-hours tour of Auschwitz, or a journey to wintry Japan to reconnect with a former lover, Permafrost unsettles, transports and impresses in equal measure.”
Lauded as a literary genius by the likes of Hannah Kent, SJ Norman’s collection of Queer ghost stories explores desire, loss, and longing with each story being a different take on hauntings and being haunted. Shortlisted for the Stella Prize 2022 and winner of the inaugural Kill Your Darlings Manuscript Award, Permafrost took 20 years to finish which Norman described the process as ‘Scary. And Spooky. And daunting.’
When reviewing Permafrost, Jessie Tu, author of A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing, stated, ‘I picked up the book during a week of torturous insomnia, and found myself entering this wild, thrilling, almost sickening narcotic haze. I wanted more. Each story left me lingering and thirsty. I was like a child waiting with her mouth open for the heaped spoon of food to be delivered again.’
In a recent Archer interview, Norman explains:
‘In terms of my cultural identity, I’m Koori. Wiradjuri on my mother’s side, English on my father’s, born on Gadigal country. On occasion I’ve described my Indigeneity as “diasporic” – an ill-fitting choice of word to describe the displacement experience that is woven into Koori identity, but the only word I’ve had available at times when trying to communicate the nuance of my cultural positionality and experience as an Aboriginal creative working internationally […]
I’ve always been into spooky stories. As a Blakfella, you grow up hearing spooky stories. It’s part of our culture to talk about hauntings, ghosts, metaphysical encounters. It’s part of the quotidian lexicon of Blak experience in Australia. The discussion of literal spectral presences and ancestral presences in the home was an ordinary occurrence.”
Being in between spaces, both geographically, culturally, and physically speaks to the intensity and brilliance of Permafrost which shifts the literary expectations of Gothic and Romantic literary tropes as well as pushing the form of the short story in Australia. This astounding collection of short stories is a must-read.
About SJ Norman
SJ Norman is an artist, writer and curator. Their career has so far spanned seventeen years and has embraced a diversity of disciplines, including solo and ensemble performance, installation, sculpture, text, video and sound. Their work has been commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney, Performance Space New York, Venice International Performance Art Week, and the National Gallery of Australia, to name a few. They are the recipient of numerous awards for contemporary art, including a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship and an Australia Council Fellowship. Their writing has won or placed in numerous prizes, including the Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award, the Peter Blazey Award, the Judith Wright Prize and the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. In 2019, they established Knowledge of Wounds, a global gathering of queer First Nations artists, which they co-curate with Joseph M Pierce. In 2022, their debut book and short story collection, Permafrost, was longlisted for the Stella Prize. They are currently based between Sydney and New York.
Alison Whittaker
Lemons in the Chicken Wire (Poetry)
About the book:
“From a remarkable new voice in Indigenous writing comes this highly original collection of poems bristling with stunning imagery and gritty textures. At times sensual, always potent, Lemons in the Chicken Wire delivers a collage of work that reflects rural identity through a rich medley of techniques and forms. It is an audacious, lyrical and linguistically lemon flavoured poetry debut that possesses a rare edginess and seeks to challenge our imagination beyond the ordinary. Alison Whittaker demonstrates that borders, whether physical or imagined, are no match for our capacity for love.”
Whittaker’s astonishing poetry collection, BlakWork, is a favourite of quite a few YPRL staff however it’s her first collection of poetry, Lemons in the Chicken Wire, which we encourage readers to revisit right now.
This collection focuses on love and death and Queer Aboriginal women and the way in which these themes are woven through the fabric of landscape, resistance, and bodies.
Book + Publishing highlighted how ‘[Alison’s] poetry speaks to those who share an interest in redressing the inequalities that undermine the social cohesion of Australia.’ What often makes poetry exceptional is its ability to deftly capture big moments, ideas, life, and emotion succinctly, allowing you to revisit poems and be completely immersed in syntax and imagery, in rich language and mood, in ways that often feel more immediate than other forms: a poem sings the layers of its DNA to you throughout the course of a night while a novel often insists you sit with it quietly until it’s ready to reveal itself.
For those of you looking to venture out of your reading comfort zone and embark on a discovery (or rediscovery) of bold, urgent, timely, and creative voices in Australian literature, Cordite Poetry Review reminds us that, “Whittaker’s is a visceral poetics, calling to mind feminist literary theory on the intersection of the female body and aesthetics, especially in terms of the role of the wound or the bleeding body. This context meets with the queer aspect of her work in fruitful ways. In The Promise of Happiness Sara Ahmed defines the moment of queer pride as ‘a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you.’”
About Alison Whittaker
Alison Whittaker is a Gomeroi multitasker. Between 2017–2018, she was a Fulbright scholar at Harvard Law School, where she was named the Dean’s Scholar in Race, Gender and Criminal Law. Alison is a Senior Researcher at the Jumbunna Institute at UTS. Her debut poetry collection, Lemons in the Chicken Wire, was awarded the State Library of Queensland’s black&write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship in 2015. Her latest poetry collection, Blakwork, was published in 2018 and was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and won the QLA Judithe Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection. She is the editor of the anthology Fire Front: First Nations poetry and power today. Alison was also the co-winner of the 2017 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for ‘Many Girls White Linen’. She was the Indigenous Poet-in-Residence for the 2018 Queensland Poetry Festival.