AustLit

'Jeanine Leane and I met in the Spring of 2022 to plot this interview over coffee. Jeanine has a quick, ferocious intelligence that moves associatively, while her fingers make languid circles in her hair. She is fine-boned and extremely upright. The day we met, she wore a fitted, double-breasted greatcoat with military detailing that flared at the waist. She told me she picked it up in Cambridge, England, on a day she was there as an invited speaker. After the talk, she said, while walking along the rigidly manicured paths of the Cambridge campus, she stopped to gesture at a flowering bush and was instantly policed by a porter, one of those grounds-guards in bowler hats who keep non-fellows from walking on the grass. ‘Do you know what day it is?’ Jeanine said to the porter. ‘It’s invasion day today, in so-called Australia. I’ll point at any flower I please.’' (Introduction)

'Rooted in nationally defined conditions and primarily addressing its immediate audience of Indigenous and white Australians, Australian Indigenous literature performs an important role in the articulation of Indigenous peoples’ protest, constituting an indictment of white Australian colonial ideology, recuperation of neglected Aboriginal history, and a call for redefining blackness. However, despite its preoccupation with local and national, this literature is also a component of world literature in the sense that it raises ethical questions about societal, political and cultural violence and abuse that continue to haunt all societies in the 21st century. Focused on the poetry collection of Wiradjuri poet Jeanine Leane (2010) Dark Secrets: After Dreaming (AD) 1887–1961, this article demonstrates how Leane confronts assumptions about the irreducible division between empowered and disempowered cultures. It argues that, despite the plurality of cultural responses to colonial pressure, Leane’s verse deals with wider themes and provides spaces for cross-cultural relationality.' (Publication abstract)