The Conversation
On birds – feathered messengers from deep time
'Once, in the botanical gardens of Melbourne, a boyfriend laughed until he almost cried at the mechanical, eager hopping of the tiny fairy wrens, a fact that only made me like him more. A friend tells the story of her uncle who ordered quail for the first time at a restaurant and cried when he saw it on his plate.'
The book that changed me: I’m a historian but Tony Birch’s poetry opened my eyes to confronting truths about the past
They’re questions that resurfaced for me when I first read Tony Birch’s collection of poetry, Broken Teeth, in 2016. I had been working on a history of Australian History, which sought to tell the various ways Australia’s national story had been imagined. But in contemplating Birch’s work, I was forced to reimagine the scope of the project.
To me, his poetry felt as powerful as any of the history books I had been studying, not only with its commentary on 'what happened', but as a statement on historical practice.
This grandmother tree connects me to Country. I cried when I saw her burned
In this essay, Vanessa Cavanagh beautifully illustrates the interconnectivity of all things (the land, plant humans, celestial beings and animals). There is love within these relationships, but also obligations of reciprocity. Cavanagh calls for the centring of Indigenous knowledges as we face the impacts of climate change, and in this way articulates the all-encompassing nature of Indigenous love – love for community, the future and for the land and all things.