Australia is not a finished product
At the start of this unit, I admittedly didn’t know a lot about Australian literature compared to some of my peers. While I love to read, I haven’t read the ‘classics’, let alone Early Colonial Poetry.
It was with delight that we started with writing by and about Indigenous Australians. Such a wealth of knowledge and deep emotion.
Nothing called to me more in the unit than in this section. This was amplified in the gallery visit we undertook with the beautiful artistry displayed.
My favourite piece from that section was Judith Wright’s “Niggers Leap”. The irony and her opaque writing style highlighted her message for me, making it one of my favourite pieces for the semester.
“Did we not know their
blood channelled our rivers,
and the black dust our crops ate was their dust?
O all men are one man at last.”
Succeeding, the unit formed into Early European / Australian authors. I found it interesting reading literature that was in a way degrading the Australian landscape in its description depicting a barrow and non-providing land. The European mindset came out vividly in this period, which provided an excellent contrast to the subsequent literature we studied.
Fast Forwarding to New Australian Poetry – Oh, how times have changed!
I feel a lot more well versed into how far come Australia has come in its literary identity. However,
Australia is not a finished product
We are a relatively young continent by any means and have a lot of room ahead of us to be ever-changing and use our diverse population to our advantage. Australian Literature shouldn’t pre-maturely stunt its growth into adapting to our supposed Australian Identity. We have such a diverse, cultural populace, that without sounding too cliché’, the sky really is the limit.
Serena's LitBlog 