“No More Boomerang”: Environment and Technology in Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Poetry

John Ryan

doi:10.3390/h4040938

Abstract

Based in oral traditions and song cycles, contemporary Aboriginal Australian poetry is full of allusions to the environment. Not merely a physical backdrop for human activities, the ancient Aboriginal landscape is a nexus of ecological, spiritual, material, and more-than-human overlays—and one which is increasingly compromised by modern technological impositions. In literary studies, while Aboriginal poetry has become the subject of critical interest, few studies have foregrounded the interconnections between environment and technology. Instead, scholarship tends to focus on the socio-political and cultural dimensions of the writing. How have contemporary Australian Aboriginal poets responded to the impacts of environmental change and degradation? How have poets addressed the effects of modern technology in ancestral environments, or country? This article will develop an ecocritical and technology-focused perspective on contemporary Aboriginal poetry through an analysis of the writings of three significant literary-activists: Jack Davis (1917–2000), Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–1993), and Lionel Fogarty (born 1958). Davis, Noonuccal, and Fogarty strive poetically to draw critical attention to the particular impacts of late modernist technologies on Aboriginal people and country. In developing a critique of invasive technologies that adversely affect the environment and culture, their poetry also invokes the Aboriginal technologies that sustained (and, in places, still sustain) people in reciprocal relation to country.

Highlights

Based in oral traditions and song poetry [1], much of which bears a more than forty-thousand-year-old lineage, contemporary Aboriginal Australian poetry is replete with references to the natural world: plants, animals, earth, sky, wind, water, creation beings, ancestors, and living communities of people [2]
In Australian literary criticism, Aboriginal poetry has been the subject of scholarly studies and numerous collections [7,8,9], especially since the seminal anthology Inside Black Australia from 1988
The examples from Davis, Noonuccal, and Fogarty are by no means intended to represent the full spectrum and ecocritical possibilities of contemporary Aboriginal poetry

Summary

Introduction

Based in oral traditions and song poetry [1], much of which bears a more than forty-thousand-year-old lineage, contemporary Aboriginal Australian poetry is replete with references to the natural world: plants, animals, earth, sky, wind, water, creation beings, ancestors, and living communities of people [2]. What is more, weighted toward life writing and fiction, the collection A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature, edited by Belinda Wheeler and published in 2013, includes only one chapter devoted to traditional and contemporary poetry through Western critical discourse [6]. How have contemporary Australian Aboriginal poets responded to the cultural impacts of environmental change and degradation? The cultural perspectives presented by these poets implicate both colonial-era and high modernist technologies in the devastation of country and the disruption of traditional lifeways, including intertwined cultural, spiritual, and ecological practices. The examples from Davis, Noonuccal, and Fogarty are by no means intended to represent the full spectrum and ecocritical possibilities of contemporary Aboriginal poetry. These examples, of food and fire, are precursors to what theorists today refer to as “sustainable technology” vis-à-vis solar, wind, geothermal, and other renewable energies [26]

Song Poetry

Jack Davis’ Critique of Modern Technologies

Oodgeroo Noonuccal and the Displacement of Aboriginal Technologies

Lionel Fogarty’s Anti-Pastoral Realism

Conclusions