AustLit

'In March, two months before the national constitutional convention at Uluru, the Nobel Prize-winning Saint Lucian writer Derek Walcott passed away. The singular poet’s work defined my adolescent search for identity as I clumsily navigated the privileges and anguish of walking between “two worlds”. Walcott’s epic poem ‘Omeros’ provided me with a luminous and challenging account of this antecedent struggle. His poetry made me feel not so alone in that dawning realisation of the dilemmas facing cultures like mine. In those exhausting weeks leading to Uluru, Walcott’s prose about the colonial experience was often in my mind, and the themes of ‘Omeros’ - displacement, coexistence and redemption - resonate in the Uluru Statement from the Heart.' (Introduction)