Walk Back Over

Book excerpt: This work is about listening to the past and walking back over it, step after step, to see what you missed the first time. It speaks to what has been left out of official records, recordings and documents--the emotions, the other sides of paper--and what is not said. These poems engage with the ongoing, interventionist nation-state and the crime scene that is Australia in the lives of Aboriginal people. In contrast to state archives, museums, libraries, universities and collection agencies--and their methods of 'recording the lives' of Aboriginal people--my work explores the body where memories are stored as an archive; anchored and etched. Writing is an act of remembering a dismembered past.