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Word ecology

Plumbing the mystery of inheritance
by
July 2022, no. 444

Words Are Eagles: Selected writings on the nature and language of place by Gregory Day

Upswell, $29.99 pb, 288 pp

Word ecology

Plumbing the mystery of inheritance
by
July 2022, no. 444
Gregory Day (Image: Supplied)
Gregory Day (Image: Supplied)

Across Australia today, exciting work is being done to strengthen and renew Aboriginal languages and their deep associations with Country. In those parts of the continent where the history of dispossession has been most traumatic, language regeneration calls for research and reconstruction, for the rediscovery of the old words for places, features, and life itself. Gregory Day’s new book is a distinguished and discerning quest for the lore and language of his beloved place. It eloquently reflects on what it means for a non-Indigenous fifth-generation Australian to seek to live ‘in a properly symbiotic way, in this soil’. Words Are Eagles is more than a book of ‘selected writings’: it is a sustained manifesto for how to think and feel one’s way into Australian nature, place, and history following invasion and at a time of global environmental crisis.

Tom Griffiths reviews 'Words Are Eagles: Selected writings on the nature and language of place' by Gregory Day

Words Are Eagles: Selected writings on the nature and language of place

by Gregory Day

Upswell, $29.99 pb, 288 pp

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