Unsettling the Land

by Suzanne Bellamy, Susan Hawthorne

Overview

Unsettling the Land is a relection on the plight of the land in drought-stricken times, conjuring through both text and illustration, the complex relationships that create and sustain our unique Australian landscape in all its majesty, tranquility, and its present suffering.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781742194769
Publisher:	Spinifex Press
Publication date:	08/18/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	16
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Suzanne Bellamy is a studio artist and writer working in mixed media, clay, printmaking, canvas and performance. Developing a form she calls “the visual essay”, she has combined ideas of text perception and image to explore the idea of visual thinking. Based in research on Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and early Australian modernist ideas, she brings together notions of dual creativity and synaesthesia in the art of ideas. Susan Hawthorne is the author of six collections of poetry including Bird, The Butterfly Effect, Unsettling the Land, Earth’s Breath and Cow.She has worked in the publishing industry for twenty-five years and is also known as an aerialist. Two books, Bird and Earth’s Breath have been broadcast on the radio program, Poetica. In 2009 she was an Asialink Literature Resident at the University of Madras, India and she is Adjunct Professor in the Writing Program at James Cook University, Townsville. Her poetry has been published in Best Australian Poems anthologies on several occasions and Earth’s Breath was shortlisted for the 2010 Judith Wright Poetry Award.

Read an Excerpt

Unsettling the Land

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By Suzanne Bellamy, Susan Hawthorne

Spinifex Press Pty Ltd

Copyright © 2008 on poems Susan Hawthorne
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74219-476-9

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CHAPTER 1

    i
    Birdlife

    What we have lost–
    I grew beside the Murrumbidgee

    its great highway of water
    rumbling with us through each day

    we played discovery–my brother
    and I–imagining different lives

    in which we were the first to name
    certain corners, small islands

    to memorialise ourselves–taking
    no account in our teens of those

    who'd been here so many
    thousands of years. It is Wiradjuri

    country, and on its banks sits the
    town named for its crows.

    Birds and water–a pair that
    indicates vitality, a dynamic system,
    a system

    that changes season by season.
    But in our unsettling of the land
    we have

    removed the seasons and the
    birds–water flow is constant in the
    irrigating

    rivers–who ever heard of this before
    the gouging out of dams, the
    displacement

    of earth to block water, to release it
    at our want and whim and will.

    Who will join with me to recall the
    birds–the wetland birds back to

    country–dancing brolgas, jabiru,
    pelican and ibis–and the crow to

    welcome back its dispossessed
    cousins–a kind of Native Title for
    the birds.


    ii
    Drought, 1967

    Mother, you and I walk across
    the bladeless paddock, kicking dust

    Oh, it breaks my heart so, you say–
    a sentence exhaled with sadness.

    Only now, do I really feel what
    you said and how you said it.

    I'm now a little older than you were
    when dust and sighing mixed with


    those words. It is thirty years and drought
    is here again. There is something about

    the air, the layering of dust, the loss
    of grass, the particular sway of old

    eucalypt branches and their browning
    leaves. I feel my chest fill to breaking

    I'd like to ask if you too think it's worse
    this time–How long for recovery?

    Every grief is simply layered
    on top of the last. And the last.

    Does the earth feel that way too?
    How many griefs must we ply and

    plough? How many layers before
    the sadness breaks the earth's heart?


    iii
    Flood, 1974

    There's a roar that a river makes as
    it breaks its banks–a sound that grumbles

    deep into the body, unearthly, I think,
    but earthly is what it is. We watch the

    sun rise over the front paddock,
    our bodies absorbing the flood's power,

    a shuddering that is later taken up
    by the muscles in a great release.

    It is a day of contrasts: we children
    sent to round up cattle, our unkitchened

    mother bakes a loaf of bread, our father
    is trapped in a tree for thirteen long hours

    while we sleep, eat our mother's
    bread, talk of the sky, the land,

    the height of the river. Late afternoon
    he is delivered in a boat, rescued by men

    bearing sandwiches. None of us knew
    of his ordeal until it was over. In the days

    that follow we gauge the level of the river,
    walk again the reduced banks, watch

    the swirl of snag-driven water,
    thrilling to the sudden birdlife.


    iv
    Water, 2008

    Water fits land like a glove fits a hand.
    It follows the lay of the land, pools

    in hollows and flows between inclines.
    Water and land are intimate,

    they shape one another. Water seeps
    through the soil, jumps down cliffs;

    rocks bounce through streams,
    clatter along shorelines.

    In this time of separating land
    from water, glove from hand

    drought scrapes the surface
    but it is our unsettling

    that chops out the fingers
    to claw at earth's innards.


    v
    Earth's pod, 2008

    Earth's pod is broken opened
    forced plied mined broken open

    in this land where the banksia seed
    opens in fire in this land where

    rivers run dry for years and years
    in this land the earth is no

    longer caressed by the tread of soft
    footed animals the best land

    of all is cut into suburban grids
    for Big Mac houses cheek by jowl.

    And so I plant, tree after tree after tree
    more than I'd ever earn on frequent

    flights. I refuse the corporate tithes
    to assuage my ecological guilt.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Unsettling the Land by Suzanne Bellamy, Susan Hawthorne. Copyright © 2008 on poems Susan Hawthorne. Excerpted by permission of Spinifex Press Pty Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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