awaba
//
when the rainbow imprint of an ancient snake
etched itself on a dusty grey sky
women carved coolamon from muddy banks
to fill with salt and song
that back-of-the-throat retch of tiddalik
like waves of thunder
and a sixty-thousand-year-old song was sung
in more than just whispers
//
here hearts build homes that hands tear down
dissidence fills the ashes
elders sit under wisdom trees, pretend words
don’t hurt eternally
and longnecks soothe superficial wounds
seep down to darker tragedy
//
where fish will break to ocean and bull sharks
will come when waters grow warm
we’ll weave waves like braids and ochre will stain
our second skin
children will cut teeth on foreshore baths, cut feet
when rock-bottom catches up, and tomorrow will flow
into yesterday flow into today and today
will be everlasting
Vidya: Tell us about your current artistic practice.
Raelee: I’ve always used poetry as a way to explore my identity. First as an Aboriginal woman, and now as a queer Aboriginal woman. Playing with words on a page is exciting and it helps me learn more about myself. I feel like my writing is very fluid, though. One minute I’m writing about something really heavy and the next I’m writing about kissing girls in a fishing boat.
I never studied writing at uni and I’ve only been taking writing seriously for the last two years, so I feel like I’m still finding my voice and my purpose, and I’m having great fun doing it.
What prompted you to write awaba?
I grew up in the Newcastle/Hunter region, in a town in Lake Macquarie called Toronto. I didn’t have the best experience growing up there, but I always loved living by the lake. I’d escape there all the time; it was incredibly peaceful. I never learned about the rich culture and history in that region until I moved away and now, I often find myself missing home.
I wanted to pay homage to that area, but I wanted to do so with hindsight—it’s a beautiful place but there’s an underbelly of intergenerational trauma, addiction and racism there. Now felt like a good time to tell this story as a wave of gentrification is beginning to infiltrate this area and a lot of those memories are being lost.
I love how the poem plays with collapsing time on a sentence by sentence level. Can you speak about the relationship with time in the poem, and in your work?
I knew I wanted the Dreaming to play a part in this poem, and how the Dreaming interacts with the present. At first, this was very subtle—almost too subtle—and then you and I had our initial chat about the poem and it made me see that making time more prominent might actually be a good thing. I was cautious about it at first; I don’t interact with time in my poetry often because it seems like this big, wild thing that’s out of our control. At the same time, it was fun using something so chaotic to structure the poem.
This poem went through a lot of changes, from the change in POV to breaking the poem into three parts instead of it being a single stanza. My favourite change was using time to structure the poem and building up the imagery of the poem by drawing from different points in my own timeline.
Who are some poets you commonly turn to? Who are you reading nowadays?
I find comfort in the works of Ali Cobby Eckermann, Evelyn Araluen, Ellen van Neervan, Lisa Bellear, Natalie Harkin, Jeanine Leane. When I want to feel inspired, I turn to the works of Shastra Deo, Mindy Gill and Alison Whittaker. One of my favourite poems that helps me break out of a writing block is Mindy Gill’s August Burns the Sky like Rubber which won the Tom Collins Poetry Prize in 2017.
I don’t read as much as I would like to at the moment, but I’ve become really invested in local Brisbane poetry zines like The Tundish Review, Pastel, Concrescence and anything that Rae White is sending out into the world. Going to zine launches and emerging writers’ salons and spoken word events nourishes my spirit and it’s so incredibly heartening to see young people—particularly young people of colour—finding their voice and speaking their truths through poetry. Joella Warkill, Meleika Gesa Fatefehi, Anisa Nanduala and Sachem Parkin Owens come to mind especially.
About the author
vidya rajan is a writer, editor and performance-maker. she currently lives in melbourne and is a writer in residence at the malthouse theatre. you can get in touch on twitter.