from the editor's desk
Review of ‘Holocaust Island’ by Graeme Dixon
Graeme Dixon. Holocaust Island, University of Queensland Press (First Nations Classics), 2023. $19.99.
Mark Prendergast
‘If You Cried, They Gave You Something to Cry About’: Graeme Dixon’s liberation songs
When Noongar poet Graeme Dixon’s Holocaust Island won the inaugural David Unaipon Award for a manuscript by an unpublished Indigenous writer in 1989, Australia had just finished celebrating the bicentenary of colonisation as the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was continuing its investigations, while the establishment of the National Inquiry into the Stolen Generations was some years away. Now, with the reissue of his collection by University of Queensland Press in the First Nations Classics series, Black deaths in custody recur, while the broader injustices that Dixon wrote of persist, framed in terms of the Closing the Gap discourse. Where publication of this first series of Classics was aimed, hopefully, to coincide with the passage of the Referendum on the Voice, this hope has been disappointed. Thirty-plus years on, it could be argued that instituting the Unaipon Award was one of the most politically significant events of its day and that, as the boon of First Nations literature flourishes, this step by UQP toward forming a canon of First Nations texts may turn out to be just as historically and politically significant. In this moment, Dixon’s voice needs be heard all over again.
As a settler subject in Australia, I have never once thought that the State wants me dead, wants me disappeared: that things would be better if I did not exist. Lucky me. The political intervention that Dixon makes with his poetry is a consequence of having experienced this genocidal intent in his person. After he was removed from family, the brutalisation that Dixon encountered while growing up in state care began. In an interview coinciding with the first publication of Holocaust Island, Dixon described this regime of neglect: ‘You had to learn to suppress your feelings. Their idea of a good kid was one who didn’t complain or cry. If you cried, they gave you something to cry about. If you laughed they would want to know why. A good child was a blank child’ (qtd in Moran 16). By his use of the pronoun ‘our’ in the first sentence of the text, the dedication¹, Dixon asserts a possessive identity to gather in all First Nations people who have died in custody. One of Dixon’s songs of experience, ‘Escape!’, figures carceral death as a kind of blood sport. The poem voices fatalism on the cultural amnesia of settler Australians, ending with a moment of transcendence: ‘Bloody razor-wire glistens / beneath silvery moon / Night, quietly mourning / life escaped too soon’ (11).
‘Yigga’s run’ (12) is like a gone-wrong caper movie in verse, a sustained ballad that can be read alongside the long-ago canonised balladeers of nineteenth-century Australian poetry, telling the other side of history. The pacey narrative is spiced with clever rhymes (‘I’ve got this appeal / due to be heard / it’ll be knocked back / coz the judge is a turd’ (12)), prison slang (‘Bugger this for a joke coord! / I’m hitting the toe’ (12); ‘neither appeared to jerry / that I was on the sleaze’ (15)) and Noongar language (‘“Go like the wind bro!” / a Noongah kid yelled to me / “Spring like the Bungarra / if you want to be free!”’ (17)). The final stanza shifts register, commemorating the cruel realities of its hero’s life, as ballads always have, asking how this could happen and ending with Dixon’s sounding note of freedom. Other poems in this section ennoble the First Nations prisoners who have died in custody as freedom fighters in a war that did not end at the frontier. These touch on not only the sadness of youth lost (‘you were a child / a product of time / a little bit lost a little bit wild’ (23)), but also the terrorising effects of these events. They satirise the readiness of settler Australians to be moved by the struggle for justice elsewhere while lacking empathy for the ongoing genocidal consequences of colonisation in Australia.
An immediate reader response to Dixon’s poetry is to note its simplicity. When Holocaust Island was first published, Kevin Brophy commented: ‘The poems are often not so much poems as anthems, with the simplicity and directness of song lyrics’ (13). Simple: such an interesting word. (My Shorter Oxford devotes a column to its multi-faceted meanings.) As a term of praise, such as in Brophy’s review, it refers to the plain, direct, unadorned forms of expression in the poems. What is more, the simple can be classically graceful. But in addition to its simplicity, some reviews of Dixon’s collection referred to the poems being a hard read. Holocaust Island: two words, hard to read; almost incomprehensible to a settler Australian reader like me. Ali Cobby Eckermann says it well in her introduction to this reissue: ‘These words have no frills. Read the poems slowly. Grasp at the realism of this historical review. Grasp this gift of history with the sincerity in which it was written’ (xii). Dixon’s poems might be said to be out of time, even old-fashioned. True, in ways, perhaps. Ellen van Neerven has written elsewhere of the interconnectedness of culture for First Nations people: ‘Arts and wellbeing are so entwined […] We are people living with the past-present-future inside of us. Our bodies remember. They remember colonial violence and silence, but they also remember the ways we lived lives with purpose, compassion and balance. [… T]hey remember language, dances, music, song’ (208). I don’t have access to this way of reading but the writing of First Nations critics on First Nations literature might enable me to glimpse it in Dixon’s poems, now and then.
Holding these perspectives on the timeliness and/or timelessness of Dixon’s poetry in mind, I wish to bring forward a reading of the title poem of the first section of the collection, ‘Prison spirit’ (26). Its four stanzas consist of mostly monosyllabic, two-stressed lines. The first two stanzas create a scene that is not particularised but described from a perspective, as it were, above or outside, in which a person-spirit contemplates pain and death: miserable, deplorable, pitiable. And then, unshackled, grinning, a voice from this nowhere place speaks:
Kick me he said
I am not dead
I can still cope
there will always be hope
while my mind
has its freedom. (26)
We know from other poems in the collection that there is nothing metaphorical in Dixon’s testimony here, nor in this poem’s voicing of the deep desires that live beyond death which find expression in it. Sometimes I read about the poems that people say have ‘saved’ their lives. This is a poem that has that power. There is no other poem like it in Australian poetry. It ought to find many readers.
Other poems in Holocaust Island are celebratory, joyous or bitingly satirical—the carnivalesque atmosphere of what used to be ‘Pension day’ (38); the systemic barriers that lock people up in disadvantage outlined in ‘To let’ (59); the passing glory of the boy (or near-future girl) from the bush lauded for their sporting skills in ‘Black magic’ (62); and that different kind of freedom ride, hitting the road and heading north in ‘Broome bound’ (76). But I will end this review by noting another aspect of Dixon’s poetry, an adjunct to his straightforward diction: its readiness to be anthologised and, what often follows, its potential use as a teaching tool. This is something which was also said about Holocaust Island when it was first published. Many of these poems are eminently suited for placing on educational syllabuses, both within and beyond the formal education system. ‘Noongah girl’ (70) is a diamond of a poem that belongs in any anthology of Australian love poems. The first stanza describes a particular place through four analogies that connect this place with love. The second stanza operates in the same manner to knit together a particular woman and this particular place with the feeling of love, and concludes by repeating the refrain:
Beauty of nature
puts my head
my heart
in uncontrolled whirl
reminds me of you
Earth’s eldest daughter
Raw sugar
Wild honey
Sweet Noongah girl (70)
Given Dixon’s formative life experiences, there is something I find profoundly mysterious and miraculous about his ability to write like this. I suppose to survive you need to find the sweetness in life somewhere. Is there too much essentialising going on here? Is the representation of gender in this poem questionable? Are these interesting questions? In what other modes might this poem be read? ‘W.A.S.P. / S.W.A.T.’ (31) is a bitterly didactic poem that addresses the systemic violence of white legality. Describing this poem as still ‘relevant’ sounds a bit feckless, a bit limp. It could be better said that the search for justice it expresses is as strong as ever. The poem outlines the frustration of First Nations people in following the rules of a legal system constructed by settler Australians, and the experience of being demeaned and dehumanised for pointing out that the playing field is lopsided. It ends with Dixon directly addressing the genocide that implicates all settler Australians and, while its strong language provides potential ground for disallowing it in some settings, it might be availed to increase knowledge about the workings of white supremacy and whether or not this is a term that applies only to race relations elsewhere, in countries such as the United States. If this poem could be the basis to address the question: ‘Is it possible for a democracy to perpetrate genocide?’, then we would be in a different country.
Craig Santos Perez has written of his oceanic poetics:
An individual book is an island with a unique linguistic geography and ecology, as well as a unique poetic landscape and seascape. The book-island is inhabited by the living and the dead, the human and the non-human, multiple voices and silences. The book-island vibrates with the complexity of the present moment and the depths of history and genealogy, culture and politics, scars and bone and blood. (214)
The singular eruption that is Holocaust Island has resurfaced. This is a collection the reader could skip through, but simultaneously it is one that rewards rereading and even memorising and reciting. A collection that won the inaugural Unaipon Award and is now a volume of the first series of UQP’s First Nations Classics cannot be ignored. It is, indeed, remarkable. Poets come and go but Dixon is here to stay. Reconciliation has many aspects but one of its meanings is perhaps to gain credit by acts which induce friendly feeling. In part, that is what I am hoping to do in writing this review. But here’s the thing: Dixon’s report from the front line cannot be reengineered into the reconciliation project. He demands that the reader face the facts. That is what, for settler Australians, makes his poetry such a hard read.
Mark Prendergast’s poems and reviews have been published in various journals including foam:e, PN Review and Rochford Street Review. His conversation with the Koniag poet Abigail Chabitnoy was published in Tears in the Fence.
Note
1 The full dedication reads: ‘To all our Brothers and Sisters / who died in custody / May their souls R.I.P.’
Works Cited
Brophy, Kevin. ‘Exploring a Black Identity’, Australian Book Review, November (1990): 12–13.
Moran, Rod. ‘They Give Your Cell to Someone Else’, Australian Book Review. 117, December-January (1989–1990): 16.
Santos Perez, Craig. ‘On Writing from the New Oceania’, The Poem’s Country: place & poetic practice. Ed. Shara Lessley and Bruce Snider. Pleiades Press, 2017. 213–218.
Van Neerven, Ellen. Personal Score: sport, culture, identity. University of Queensland Press, 2023.
