AustLit logo
Gaylene Perry Gaylene Perry i(A26537 works by)
Also writes as: Indigo Perry
Gender: Female
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
1 ‘It’s No Gift to Have This Kind of Knowledge’ : Indigo Perry in Conversation with Dani Netherclift Indigo Perry (interviewer), Dani Netherclift (interviewer), 2022 single work interview
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , 15 September no. 106 2022;

'Indigo Perry and Dani Netherclift are sisters living and writing in Victoria. Their father and older brother both drowned in an irrigation channel in 1993. Below is a conversation about the ways that this tragedy has shaped their creative practices both singularly and in dialogue with each other’s work. This exchange highlights how the intangibility of grief potently forms an invaluable insight into a how their experiences are forced upon their understanding of writing and poetics. Such an exchange trusts the reader to embrace their account tenderly when considering how to challenge elegiac traditions.' (Introduction)

1 2 y separately published work icon Darkfall Indigo Perry , Crawley : UWA Publishing , 2020 18830613 2020 single work autobiography

'Darkfall is a potent and unforgettable work of compelling writing about an adolescence lived in an Australian country town in Victoria in the 1970s: desolate, dusty and bleak. Indigo Perry’s narrative is a journey of grief, arranged around a score of music from alternative and post-punk sources, music unavailable outside cities in an age before the internet. This music, she contends, provides an imagined soundtrack, a ballast, for her isolation.

'Darkfall identifies a legacy of extreme toxic masculinity, containing little in the way of justice, and gendered violence. The author’s deep retrospective unstitching of her reality is presented to us with great poetic strength, uncovering the power that resilience can unleash on an adult body. It is an act of recovery.' (Publication summary) 

1 The Give Indigo Perry , 2019 single work short story
— Appears in: Verity La , August 2019;
1 Mallee Triptych Indigo Perry , 2019 single work autobiography
— Appears in: Meanjin , Autumn vol. 78 no. 1 2019; (p. 177-182)

'Inside the wire cage are two small rabbits, eating from a pile of picked grass. One blinks. The girl thinks it's at her but can't be sure as its eyes dart around a lot. The eyes are deep black, almost all pupils. Her mother flicks up the latch on the door of the cage and lets her scoop up one of the bunnies and hold it. She feels its heat through the knit of her school jumper. It scratches her hand with its claws, makes it bleed a bit, but she doesn't mind. The cage comes home in the back of the car and they put it at the side of the house, under the apricot tree with its branches widely outstretched around itself, starting to lean closer to the ground with all the new, tight-mouthed green fruit. She gets the tin lid that's lying among the grass left in the bottom of the cage and fills it up with water and picks more grass for them. Her mother says the grocer can give her boxes of cabbage and lettuce leaves to feed them.' (Publication abstract)

 

1 Pike Position Indigo Perry , 2019 single work short story
— Appears in: Verity La , April 2019;
1 The Party Indigo Perry , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: Long Paddock , December vol. 78 no. 3 2018;
'The sky is dark out of the town: no sign of the moon, stars obscured under the clouds. She soon loses track of the direction the car’s moving in as they leave the streetlights behind and the boy who’s driving starts screeching around corners, the car drifting, headlights shining over the trees instead of the road. The bitumen ends and the car churns up dirt. All turns to black and the girl beside her screams.' (From introduction)
1 Heatwave i "Hydrangeas, wilted like knickers stepped out of and left on the floor", Indigo Perry , 2018 single work poetry
— Appears in: Australian Poetry Anthology 2018; (p. 44)
1 The Butcher in the Moonlight Indigo Perry , 2018 single work short story
— Appears in: Verity La , September 2018;
1 Performing Vulnerability : On Performance Writing and Improvisation Indigo Perry , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: TEXT : Journal of Writing and Writing Courses , April vol. 22 no. 1 2018;

'In this paper, I am reflecting on Entwinement, an improvisational live performance by myself, a writer, and my collaborator, musician Andrew Darling, appearing as a performance art act called Illuminous (Darling & Perry 2015). Performances by Illuminous involve live improvised trumpet playing and poetic text created live and projected digitally in the performance space. Entwinement was included in Spectral Harmonies, an umbrella event of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) Annual Conference in 2015. In documenting and reflecting on the performance in terms of practice-led research, I make observations about improvisational writing and the genre of performance writing, and I suggest that this performance became an experience of performative dissonance and embodied vulnerability for myself and my collaborator. This had cascading effects on the event, inadvertently adding elements of artistic and social dissonance to those that were intentional in the work.' (Publication abstract)

1 The Tea Ceremony Indigo Perry , 2018 single work short story
— Appears in: Verity La , May 2018;
1 Bitter Tastes i "here in time and", Indigo Perry , 2017 single work poetry
— Appears in: Otoliths , 1 November no. 47 2017;
1 Fault Lines i "nights", Indigo Perry , 2017 single work poetry
— Appears in: Otoliths , 1 November no. 47 2017;
1 Calligraphy i "ghost calligrapher I have", Indigo Perry , 2017 single work poetry
— Appears in: Otoliths , 1 November no. 47 2017;
1 Guildford Lane i "Draining silences sinking deep", Indigo Perry , 2017 single work poetry
— Appears in: Otoliths , 1 August no. 46 2017;
1 To Float Before Sinking i "Timelessly", Indigo Perry , 2017 single work poetry
— Appears in: Otoliths , 1 August no. 46 2017;
1 Corrugations Indigo Perry , 2017 sequence poetry
— Appears in: Otoliths , 1 August no. 46 2017;
1 Recurring Dream i "At sea, alone.", Indigo Perry , 2017 single work poetry
— Appears in: Otoliths , 1 May no. 45 2017;
1 Opening the Gorge i "My blood runs in the ink. Making space, swirling torrents of love.", Indigo Perry , 2017 single work poetry
— Appears in: Otoliths , 1 May no. 45 2017;
1 The Rain Inside i "Uneasy wind sending movement through the window", Indigo Perry , 2017 single work poetry
— Appears in: Otoliths , 1 May no. 45 2017;
1 White Like Fire i "From down deep where the cycles are", Indigo Perry , 2017 single work poetry
— Appears in: Otoliths , 1 May no. 45 2017;
X