States of Poetry - Poems

'On Cannibals' by Jeanine Leane | States of Poetry ACT - Series One

States of Poetry - Poems

'On Cannibals' by Jeanine Leane | States of Poetry ACT - Series One

For Patrick White (1976)

When the Badtjala people discovered Eliza Fraser,
her story of cannibals devoured a history.
A century later when the Badtjala people
rescued Ellen Roxborough on the fringes of paradise
White's imagination captured the Aborigine –
the Blacks – for the nation.
When she ate Badtjala woman's flesh,
she swallowed us all and we passed through the
bowels of colonial mythology all over again.
Who are the real cannibals?

Jeanine Leane

Jeanine Leane

Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet and academic from southwest New South Wales. Her poetry and short stories have been published in Hecate, The Journal for the Association European Studies of Australia, Australian Poetry Journal, Antipodes, Overland and ABR. Jeanine has published widely in the area of Aboriginal literature, writing otherness and creative non-fiction. She has won the University of Canberra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Poetry Prize, and the Oodgeroo Noonucal Prize for Poetry twice (2017, 2019). Her second volume of poetry, Walk Back Over, was released in 2018 by Cordite Press. Jeanine teaches Creative Writing and Aboriginal Literature at the University of Melbourne where she has been awarded Australian Research Council Fellowships for her research on Aboriginal writing, cultural history, and storytelling and the archive. In 2020, Jeanine edited Guwayu – for all times, a collection of First Nations Poetry commissioned by Red Room Poetry and published by Magabala Books.