The physical/hard copy version of P76 issue 9: Poetries of place / displacement / diaspora / odyssey will be launched as part of the 2024 Sonic Poetry Festival. In parallel, Rochford Press will publish an online edition of P76 for the first time during the weeks of the festival. Publishing an expanded collection of poets and poems online allows us to highlight a wider scope of work discussing the themes of Poetries of place/displacement/ diaspora/odyssey. Intentionally, there will be minimal duplication of work between the physical and virtual editions.
Rochford Press/Rochford Street Review is thrilled to support Sonic 2024 and to launch P76 issue 9: Poetries of place/displacement/ diaspora/odyssey. Mark and I wish to acknowledge the amazing Sonic Festival Organising Team and to formally thank Angela Costi who collaborated with us to organise the launch/reading at the Bergy Bandroom on 27 August 2024.
It is an honour to be part of a grassroots poetry festival where voices from different communities are heard and appreciated. After a deeply troubling year, in which rifts have appeared in Australian society, not to mention the global situation, respectful conversations and truth telling have never been more necessary.
The theme of 2024 Sonic Poetry Festival 'Poetry that sounds like all of us! welcomes poets to share, listen, and put diverse points of view. Similarly, Rochford Press invited submissions that responded to Poetries of place / displacement / diaspora/odyssey and we were bowled over by the submissions which came in from writers from a range of communities, both here and internationally. We received some two hundred submissions, which included prose poems, familiar forms such as haiku, villanelles, as well as free verse, and ranged in subject from reflective memoirs, accounts of trauma or grief, to rallying calls for an awareness of truth telling and pleas for environment action. We are excited to be presenting works, both online and on paper, that address notions of belonging, isolation, displacement, and which underline the importance of sharing and listening to voices from culturally and linguistical diverse backgrounds.
A contemporary gathering of poetic voices in these contested times, should not be glibly celebratory and, I believe, it is timely to commemorate a crucial event in history that has been largely ignored by unproblematised colonial narratives. This month marked the 200-year-anniversary of the declaration of Martial Law on 14 August 1824 which unleashed brutal frontier violence around Bathurst. Governor Brisbane's declaration authorised Commandant Major James Morrisset to deploy soldiers against the Wiradyuri people whose traditional lands west of the Blue Mountains were overrun by sheep graziers from 1822. Most Wiradyuri casualties were innocent women and children killed by armed white settlers and militia, or poisoned by colonists, in what today we would recognise as war crimes. The Sydney Gazette reported in August 1824: 'Bathurst and its surrounding vicinity is engaged in an exterminating war'.
The anniversary of the Declaration of Martial Law and the Wiradyuri war of resistance was commemorated by a series of events called Dhuluny (a Wiradyuri word pronounced Dhu-loin meaning 'truth'). It included a brilliant conference at Charles Sturt University convened by the Wiradyuri Traditional Owners Central West Aboriginal Corporation. Membership of the corporation includes Elders and Knowledge Holders with ties to Apical Ancestors who were involved in the Frontier War / Wiradyuri War of Resistance. The conference included presentations by leading academics, historians, writers, curators, as well as activists, and allies, with sessions that promoted Truth Telling, despite the defeat last year of the Voice referendum. As a mark of respect, the first poem in P76 issue 9 and which we share on line is After the Silence the Echo by Dr Jeanine Leane, a Wiradyuri poet and academic who wrote the essay for the major exhibition Dhuluny: the war that never ended which is at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery from 6 July to 8 September 2024.
Most non- indigenous Australians under the age of 40 know little about this brutal history. They grew up during the 'Great Australian Silence', a systemic denial of any facts which did not serve to further the interests of the British Empire. Even after Federation, the White Australia Policies of the 20th century privileged British interests above all else, with the 1949 Australia Act giving virtually automatic naturalisation to British nationals right up until1984. Critiques of colonialism are relatively recent and are still marginal in much of the wider 'settler' community.
Unlike Aboriginal people who have been here for over 65,000 years, the rest of us 'settlers' share the common history of migration with the main difference being when we arrived to benefit from the privilege of living on unceded Aboriginal land. British colonisation and decades of damaging government policies towards Traditional Owners such as the Stolen Generations and the suppression of traditional Aboriginal languages resulted in displacement and ongoing trauma that is yet to be appropriately redressed by our most powerful institutions.
Relative newcomers, such as myself, owe a debt of thanks and respect to the Traditional Owners, whether our families came seeking refuge from persecution and war from all corners of the globe, or generations ago had little to no choice in where they were shipped. Many of our ancestors arrived as convicts or soldiers, as 'free' settlers, or as refugees fleeing genocide, war, persecution and hunger from Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. In 2024 it is important that we share not only resources, but our stories and listen to each other with Yindyamarra which means Respect in the Wiradyuri language.
I commend this selection to you in the spirit of Respect and gratitude for the privilege of living and working in the Blue Mountains, within the lands of the Gundungurra and Dharug peoples, which are just two of the hundreds of unceded Aboriginal Countries that the contemporary nation Australia colonises.
Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.
--- Linda Adair
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Linda Adair is a poet and a publisher of Rochford Press, and co-editor of Rochford Street Review and a (re)emerging artist. Her many Irish ancestors arrived in the early to mid 19th century, to escape the English occupation of Eire and the politicisation of the food shortage which became a genocide but was rebranded as the Great Irish Famine. Born on Darug Land in the era of the 'Great Australian Silence' regarding what was really done to achieve colonisation , Adair explores the stories of women and men marginalised by history in her poems. Her extended family includes First Nations people and she pays her respect to the Traditional Custodians of the land and Elders past present and emerging.
Her debut poetry collection The Unintended Consequences of the Shattering was published in 2020 by Melbourne Poets Union. Her poetry has been published in various online and print journals, both in Australia and internationally. She has featured at La Mama Poetica, The Bergy Bandroom as part of 2023 Sonic Poetry Festival, Don Banks, Poetry at The Wickham, Cuplet, Reading the River at Brooklyn, Bilpin International Ground for Creative Initiatives, Back to Newnes Day, and at Newcastle Writers Festival.
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