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Notes
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Epigraph: 'Only one female and her child got away from us.' - Evidence before the Supreme Court.
(Note: This epigraph appears in the Sydney Monitor and Commercial Advertiser, 27 October 1841.)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Introduction
2024
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry 2024; (p. 1-18)'The new millennium has witnessed a resurgence in poetry as its condensed form, attention to feeling, and capacity to capture the zeitgeist attracts more readers than ever before. Australia has been at the forefront of experimenting with emergent and hybrid forms such as the verse novel, prose poetry, digital poetries, and poetic biography. Among the first to realise the potential of the Internet to create a vibrant cross-cultural dialogue around poetry and poetics, Australians initiated online journals that reached out globally like Jacket and Cordite Poetry Review. Australia’s poets have increasingly garnered international recognition. Les Murray was dubbed “one of the superleague that includes Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Joseph Brodsky” by the Independent on Sunday (quoted in Davie) while Dan Chiasson discerned in The New Yorker that Murray was “routinely mentioned among the three of four leading-English language poets.” In 2017, Australian poet Ali Cobby Eckermann was the first Indigenous writer worldwide to be awarded Yale University’s prestigious Windham Campbell Prize.'
Source: Abstract
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Eliza Hamilton Dunlop — The Irish Australian Poet Who Shone a Light on Colonial Violence
2021
single work
biography
— Appears in: The Conversation , 17 June 2021;'Eliza Hamilton Dunlop’s poem The Aboriginal Mother was published in The Australian on December 13, 1838, five days before seven men were hanged for their part in the Myall Creek massacre.' (Introduction)
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The Metropolis or the Bush?
2020
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature 2020; (p. 25-33)'This chapter explores the contradictions and fallacies inherent in popular literary representations of the metropolis and the bush. It examines the way the representation was constructed retrospectively, ignoring the range of perspectives and lack of a dominant popular portrayal of the bush in the nineteenth-century periodical press. The Bulletin encouraged the simplified representation to advance its agenda of ‘Australia for Australians’ and used the popular poetry of A.B. Paterson and Henry Lawson to support this agenda. This chapter uses examples of the writing of four nineteenth-century women to challenge this simplified representation of the ‘city or the bush’ with this underlying thesis that the true Australian character somehow derives from the strength of the lone bushman.'
Source: Abstract
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'The Aboriginal Mother' : Poetry and Politics
2018
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Remembering the Myall Creek Massacre 2018; -
Settlement Defiled : Ventriloquy, Pollution and Nature in Eliza Hamilton Dunlops' 'The Aboriginal Mother'
2016
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Text, Translation, Transnationalism: World Literature in 21st Century Australia 2016; (p. 137-151) Eliza Hamilton Dunlop : Writing from the Colonial Frontier 2021;
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Giving the Indigenous a Voice : Further Thoughts on the Poetry of Eliza Hamilton Dunlop
2004
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , no. 82 2004; (p. 85-93, notes 187-189) 'This article expands the existing critical discussion [of Dunlop's poetry], focusing on Dunlop's best known poem, "The Aboriginal Mother", and on the fragmentary but pioneering transliteration and translation work that Dunlop performed after she moved to the Hunter Valley in 1840. Dunlop's poetry will be explored, firstly, in relation to the contemporary newspaper debate about the humanity of Indigenous people and, secondly, in relation to the literary traditions of expressive women's poetry and romantic primitivism, both of which influenced her verse' (85). -
'Unlocking the Fountains of the Heart' : Settler Verse and the Politics of Sympathy
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Postcolonial Studies , March vol. 13 no. 1 2010; (p. 55-70) Nineteenth-century settler verse about indigenous peoples has received relatively little critical analysis; what there is has sometimes been negative, judging it as complicit in the evils of colonization. This essay sets out to show that settler poets were capable of producing powerful poems designed to enlist reader sympathy for the sufferings of indigenous peoples, as a prelude to political action aimed at ameliorating their condition. The essay considers three 'crying mother' poems from the 1830s, locating them in their period's contentious, highly-charged debates about race, morality and national destiny. (Only one of the poems is by an Australian writer, Eliza Dunlop.) -
Speaking the Suffering Indigene : 'Native' Songs and Laments, 1820-1850
2009
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Kunapipi , vol. 31 no. 1 2009; (p. 47-59) 'This article considers the many short poems published by settlers in British colonies and the United States in the early decades of the nineteenth century in which settlers voiced their concern about the suffering of indigenous peoples in the face of colonisation. Though the indigenous peoples in question were very different from one another, and the nature of colonisation in the various colonies and states by no means identical, this verse shows a remarkable homogeneity of style and tone, being an expression of a common evangelical tradition and a shared fascination with the indigenous Other. The article argues that while these poems were certainly conditioned by an ideology of European superiority, and raise issues of paternalism and agency, they were sincere expressions of outrage and sorrow, and should therefore be accorded more weight than they are usually granted by postcolonial critics.' Source: The author.
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Nathan's Subscription Concerts
1841
single work
column
— Appears in: Australasian Chronicle , 25 September vol. 3 no. 294 1841; (p. 3) -
The Aboriginal in Early Australian Literature
1980
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Southerly , March vol. 40 no. 1 1980; (p. 45-63)'The depiction of aboriginals in early Australian literature, i.e., that written before 1850, resembles in many respects their pictorial depiction as outlined by Bernard Smith in European Vision and the South Pacific. Writers who attempted the longer literary forms on Australian themes — the epic poem or the novel — usually, like the landscape artists, placed the aboriginal to one side. He was part of the exotic background, representing for the post the old order which was rapidly giving way to the march of civilization, or, along with bushrangers, fire and Rood, providing the fiction writer with the necessary "adventures" to break up the drab monotony of outback life. Certain shorter pieces of prose and verse focused more directly on the aboriginal, In these he was often either refined and classicalized along the "noble savage" lines of Blake's engraving of an aboriginal family, or caricatured as a comic specimen of brute creation. During the eighteen—forties there are signs of a third, more realistic and anthropological, approach with the incorporation of aboriginal words into poems and attempts at detailed descriptions of their customs in prose, though still with traces of the old simplifications in the directions of refinement or comedy.' (Publication abstract)
