AustLit

'Tossed Up by the Beak of a Cormorant is a poetic collaboration between award-winning poet Nandi Chinna and Aboriginal elder Professor Anne Poelina. It explores the politics and the culture of one of Australia's last great unregulated waterways, the Martuwarra Fitzroy River.

'Martuwarra Fitzroy River is Australia's last great unregulated waterway. It is also a significant element of Australia's largest Indigenous heritage site and, for some, it also represents untapped revenue. When in flood, the river has the power to destroy communities and livelihoods. But above all, to Professor Anne Poelina, the mighty river is a venerated living ancestor who must be protected. This collaboration between award-winning poet Nandi Chinna and Anne Poelina - the elder who guided Nandi's
own relationship with the river - takes the reader on a journey of absorbing immersion and growing understanding as a conversation in poetry reveals the mighty river's beauty and vulnerability.' (Publication summary)

'AN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIAN who is a Nyikina woman, and a man and a woman from European backgrounds – all writers and cultural theorists – ponder the meaning and power of a River that has flowed for thousands of years, in northern Western Australia’s Kimberley. We ponder and share understandings about Australia as a colonised nation, the permeable boundaries between non-­fiction and fiction and the interconnected contemporaneous qualities of culture, people, history and the environment. Still thinking, worrying and talking about Martuwarra, regularly known and mapped as the Fitzroy River, Anne Wagaba Poelina tells how well she knows the River from Nyikina stories, experience, cultural life and knowledge handed down to her from family and past generations. Each of us conversationally and experientially understands that stories will always be transferred to those learning about Martuwarra from Wagaba and other Aboriginal people in the Kimberley’s Fitzroy Valley with deep-­time connections to the River. Each of us also knows from individual learning and collaborative research that the realism of the River’s creation and its life-­giving qualities are meant to be for all human and interrelated life.' (Introduction) 

'Dinah Norman a-Marrngawi explained that her Country cannot hear English, it can only hear Yanyuwa. We support Dinah’s position – because the English language underpins the Australian colonial project, and has been used to separate, ignore and take from Country, her peoples and their knowledges. Country responds to people, however, for example when there is empathic, creative communication and engagement with landscapes, and when liyan and wirrin is the basis for human and ecological wellbeing. We propose a practice for people new to this participation; of ‘becoming family with place’. It integrates four ways of knowing, to celebrate an ontopoetic for Country that is experiential, creative, propositional and participative – a post-conceptual knowing for human flourishing. It is for coming home to Country, and is for learning and educational purposes.'

Source : Introduction