the body country

Judges' comments

Wergaia and Wemba Wemba woman Susie Anderson has crafted a moving meditation on the profound links between person, body and Country. The poems in this debut collection show the experience of years. Their words are the words of a quietly confident poet who has taken the time to contemplate the importance of connection and the communal nature of voice. Anderson’s poetic vision draws on all aspects of self and Country; there are meditations on fauna and place, recollections of AFL grand finals and night-time urban street scenes. This is a rich and generous collection, speaking of the often strange particularities of modern life, but always conscious of deeper resonance and meaning. Anderson writes movingly about loss of Country and language: ‘Instead of language we were taught silence’. Within the poems is a sense of striving to find ways through loss and displacement, to discover the voice that is able to speak both the truth of living now, and the truth of embodied history and trauma.

Anderson’s carefully crafted lyrical poems work to meld formal inventiveness and the Wergaia language in a way that is deeply respectful and intentional; the chorus of birds rising from this collection, the gurug and gurn-gurn, speak of futures in which language can be rediscovered and reclaimed. In doing so Anderson begins to suggest better and more genuine ways to perceive self as part of Country and Country part of self. At the heart of this collection is the idea that we are ‘treading the same path, reading the same Country. Spreading out across the land, learning more words to write the place with.’