Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen review – a stunning scalpel wielded through Australian myths

Araluen’s first collection repurposes Biblical themes, Australiana kitsch and settler-colonial tropes to astonishing effect

Some 200 years after invasion, in 1991, a vision of Australia was offered by poetry: Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann’s Australian Poetry in the Twentieth Century.

The anthology was typified not only by the complete absence of Black poets, but the glowing approval of Les Murray on the cover and dutiful inclusion of Barry Humphries’ smiling zinc cream kitsch in Edna’s Hymn, whose balancing act of “mockery and affectionate nostalgia” (“All things bright and beautiful – Pavlovas that we bake,/All things wise and wonderful – Australia takes the cake”) apparently meant no room could be found for Oodgeroo Noonuccal or Lionel Fogarty.

What did your ruin want with us anyway? Sydney is soft and

humid and dying, your ghosts lingering and unsettling ash

as they trace too close to the fire’s edge. Your god was dead

before the nails, and the cross was bored of waiting for a

word, and what for?

you do wrong you get wrong

you get

gobbled up

Related: First Nations people have faced moments like this before. We can learn from the poems that sprang from them | Alison Whittaker

I go the tree-lined road and drive slow for the dusking roos bounding into the ironbarks. Every few seconds is a flicker of scribbly gum, white and stark and inscripted in the distance.