Lecture by Anne Brewster

Professor Anne Brewster (Distinguished Visiting Professor, UNSW)

Violence and secrecy: the gendered turn in contemporary Aboriginal 'protest' writing

This paper investigates the various discourses and political imperatives which have informed the rhetorics of Aboriginal ‘protest’ poetry. It briefly sketches the politico-aesthetics of a tradition of Aboriginal ‘protest’ poetry from the 1960s onwards and the diversification of styles and thematics to argue that this tradition has taken a gendered turn the last decade and a half, with an upsurge of Indigenous women’s poetry prominently addressing the issue of multiply-inflected forms of violence and the ways in which they have impacted upon Aboriginal women.