Closing Plenary
Friday 1 December - 14:00
Building 25, Main Room
Story Ground
- Jen Crawford. Paul Magee & SJ Burton
University of Canberra and Australian National University
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Paul Collis, Jen Crawford and Paul Magee’s A Book that Opens explores a form of writing that brings indigenous story-telling to the fore. The idea is to create a whole book by speaking it. Spoken on Barkindji and Nyempa country by a Barkindji academic and poet, in dialogue with two white poet-academics and six local indigenous interlocutors, recorded and transcribed, the book constitutes a popularly accessible archive of orally-transmitted counter-knowledge about river management and culture along the Baarka / Darling River in outback New South Wales. The fish traps at Brewarrina—possibly the oldest human structures on the planet (Heritage NSW 2014)—served to maintain gatherings of up to 5,000 people in their flourishing, and did so sustainably (Dargin 1976). Yet over-irrigation of the Baarka River that flows through them has not only led to emptied river-beds, salination and homogenised fish stocks (Humphries 2007), the trauma of witnessing its effects causes deep damage to the social fabric. Giving voice to this vital heritage and urgent political challenge, the book also tries to shift understandings of what scholarly work is. One of the key ways our institutions act as gatekeepers to indigenous knowledge is by attributing excessive significance to written knowledge reports (Yunkaporta 2019, Philips and Bunda 2018), blithely ignoring the fact that oral dialogues at venues like academic conferences constitute a key, in fact irreplaceable, driver of new ideas (Jakobson and Pomorska 1988). Witness the rush to develop forms of online conferencing and teaching to maintain academic orality during COVID. Documenting the power of oral intellectual practice, the book we are literally speaking into being will feature the transcribed texts of the three poets’ real-time dialogues with Barkindji, Kunya and Nyempa people along the Baarka. This abstract is being written from the Bowls Club in Richard st, Bourke. We spent today in Brewarrina returning transcripts to their speakers for approval, and are heading back to Canberra tomorrow. For this plenary panel session, Collis, Crawford and Magee will be joined by poetry academic, S.J. Burton, who studies the interactions of the unique community of poets gathered in Boston in the late 1950s (Lowell, Plath, Sexton) and is the Graduate Attribute Lead, Indigenous Knowledges and Perspectives in the College of Arts and Social Sciences, ANU. The four will chat about how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of knowing, speaking and telling can be made more central to knowledge production in this country, with specific focus on the unique role creative writing and literary studies can play in turning the university back into Story Ground.
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Jen Crawford was born in Patea, New Zealand, and spent her early years in New Zealand and the Philippines. In 2000, Five Islands Press published her poetry sequence Admissions, which was shortlisted for the Anne Elder and Dame Mary Gilmore awards. Her other poetry publications include bad appendix (Auckland: Titus Books, 2009), Napoleon Swings (Auckland: Soapbox Press, 2009), Pop Riveter (Auckland: Pania Press, 2011), Koel (Cordite Books, 2016) and Lichen Loves Stone (Tinfish Press, 2016). With Rina Kikuchi, Jen co-edited and part-translated Poet to Poet: Contemporary Women Poets from Japan (2017), an anthology of 10 contemporary female Japanese poets. Her poetry works with invented and felt spaces and with language as instrumental sound. She is a member of the advisory board for Poetry New Zealand, and is a contributing editor to Axon and the Journal of Poetics Research. Jen’s scholarly work focuses on the poetics of place, on ecological imagination and on cross-cultural engagements in various literary contexts. Jen is Associate Professor in Creative Writing and Head of the School of Arts and Communication in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra.
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Paul Magee studied in Melbourne, Moscow, San Salvador and Sydney. Paul has published two books of verse, Cube Root of Book and Stone Postcard, the latter named in Australian Book Review as one of the books of the year, 2014. Paul's monograph Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought was published in Rowman and Littlefield’s Performance Philosophy series in 2022. Paul is CI with Paul Collis and Jen Crawford on We Come from the Past: Indigeneity, Orality and the Flow of Culture, which is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the UK Global Challenges Relief Fund (GCRF), under the auspices of the multi-disciplinary research project, Imagining Futures Through Un/Archived Pasts (IF). Paul’s research focusses on the relationship between conversational speech and the composition of poetry and prose. He is Professor of Poetry and Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra.
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Sarah-Jane Burton is currently working as the Official Historian for the New England Poetry Club in Boston, Massachusetts and her research has been funded internationally by several universities. In 2019, she was a Research Fellow at the Houghton Library, Harvard and she has also been the recipient of an Visiting Fellowship at the Lilly Library, Indiana University and a Dissertation Grant from the Schlesinger Library for the History of Women in America, Harvard. She has served in both academic and professional roles in the tertiary sector, including in the English department at Macquarie University, Sydney and the Library division of Western Sydney University, having previously worked as a journalist and a communications executive, with research published and presented in both academic and mainstream media channels. Sarah-Jane is a postdoctoral research fellow and is the Graduate Attribute Lead, Indigenous Knowledges and Perspectives, in the College of Arts and Social Sciences, at the Australian National University in Canberra.