I'm Telling You This
Alice Bellette on First Nations lyric essays
‘I wish I could write like a white poet,’ writes Mununjali author, editor and educator Ellen van Neerven of a text message to their best friend. The layers articulated here by van Neerven, co-editor of the anthology Shapeshifting: First Nations Lyric Nonfiction with Wiradjuri writer, academic and educator Jeanine Leane, resonates with a deep familiarity that I had been circling around for some time, yet unable to articulate myself.
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True to its title, the perspectives and experiences in Shapeshifting are as multitudinal as the contributing authors. Leane and van Neerven state in their introduction that they have ‘thought about the writings in this collection through cultural metaphors, such as gathering, weaving, tracking and backtracking.’ As a reader, I bring my own gatherings with me: I am a palawa descendant, and my doctorate was on Aboriginal literature. While these do not necessarily make me an expert, they are lenses through which I use to move through my life and work.
There are many parallels throughout the collection. For instance, Natalie Harkin’s ‘Come Inside Into My Kitchen’, Charmaine Papertalk Green’s ‘Sifting Thru Colonial Archive Violence to Find Family Love’ and Neika Lehman’s ‘Imagining Beyond the Archive’, all find a way to broach the haunted darkness of the colonial archives to find their ancestors, to revitalise those held prisoner within through tenderly cultivated creative and critical practice and methods. Meanwhile, Timmah Ball, in ‘A Selfish Act of Rebellion’ and Ellen van Neerven in ‘The Unexpected’, navigate the fraught tensions at the junctures where race and class intersect with creative practice inside the capitalist machine. For Ball, there is pressure to ‘re-examine the relationship between artists, poverty and the city,’ while for van Neerven, there is the ‘suffocating pressure of ‘market’, a ‘public’ perception that felt impossible to change.’ Both writers’ critical analyses recognise that colonialism underpins all of the above and the extent to which their Indigenous identity has potential to leverage economic and cultural capital. In the middle section, consecutive pieces ‘Bundjalung for Queer’ and ‘Around the Waist’, Daniel Browning and Alison Whittaker respectively reckon with queerness as it intersects with embodiment. Browning describes a facet of this embodiment as an ability (or lack thereof) to articulate inhabiting a body that is both Bundjalung and queer, saying that with regards to his ancestral tongue, when ‘we speak them [words in language] out loud and with the utter conviction of knowing, we are re-formed. It’s like magic, to feel the tessellations of a story that unfurls forever.’ Whereas Whittaker, still acknowledging the limitless potential for a body/mind/spirit’s infinite and coalescent transcendence, recognises the violent capacity of containing multitudes when fatphobia and racism is turned inwards, saying, ‘my body is fascinating and horrible to me. And as endlessly as I could turn inside out like a möbius strip, my body is ultimately a dull and narcissistic thing to expect a reader in a book of Indigenous essays to be interested in.’ The anthology is rare in the sense that it features the multiplicities that make up a subjectivity, where being Indigenous represents only one facet of many rich dimensions. Its rarity is perhaps also due to the market forces—as Ball and van Neerven write of—that typically reflect a settler readership desiring to surgically remove the Indigenous parts of oneself to present separately for consumption.
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While reading van Neerven’s essay ‘The Unexpected’, I had the adjacent thought, ‘I wish I could write like a white critic.’ I cast my mind over the frivolous and myopic discursions that pass before my eyes every day, unlimited by subject (or subject positioning) and where nothing is too mundane to be off-limits. What freedom! I thought, to write for writing’s sake—to be unmoored by the responsibilities that writing as an Aboriginal person carries with it. I thought about my experiments with submitting poems to journals, where I’ve found that anything that could not identify me as an Aboriginal person seldom makes the cut. I’m not ashamed to admit that some of the earliest were deeply embarrassing and tacky laments on unrequited love (isn’t everyone’s?), but as my practice has expanded over the years, other verse submissions have covered topics like Soviet space animals, Amy Winehouse, responses to twentieth-century male modernist literature, swans and sharehousing. Yet I’ve noticed that when a marker of positionality is strategically made legible, the poem is worth publishing. Of course, it could simply be that my poetry just plain sucks—a reality I have remained open to—but it has come to feel as though the only valuable parts of my practice are the bits that can be extracted for consumption.
I realise that through this project of intention, curiosity and experimentation with legibility, which may be a generous way to describe what is ostensibly throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks—this is shapeshifting. To any degree that I may be legible in a de-identified submission form, I am writing from the same embodied subjectivity.
Shapeshift—intransitive. To undergo a transformation in appearance or form, esp. through the exercise of supernatural or magical powers. Also more generally: to undergo change; to alter or transform. (Oxford English Dictionary)
In my mind, one who shapeshifts is fantastical, only existing in fictional spaces, even to the extent that they appear in Indigenous American stories like the enigmatic skinwalker, a figure embedded deep in Navajo cultural story traditions. I went searching for what kinds of shapeshifters appear in other mobs’ Law closer to home, and found the Bininj story of the yawkyawk, a female freshwater spirit similar to a mermaid, who changes form by growing legs to walk on land. While such figures have been carried through millennia of First Nations’ storytelling traditions, the essence of a gathering of stories under the umbrella of shapeshifting—a broad and slippery category, a kind of autology unto itself—felt illegible at first glance; it seemed too wide of a net to have cast out. But in their introduction Leane and van Neerven state explicitly their intent, which is to collect stories with intentionality:
Its contributors also evoke many things that shift and change in shape—such as rivers, clouds, seasons—natural and spectral phenomena that move, and morph and shift with the cycles of Country. Country shifts shape in cyclic time and so do its stories. We move in tandem with Country and are formed and shaped through telling its stories and throughout telling/s and retelling/s of intergenerational stories and our telling of new stories as we make them through living on and with Country. These practices, taken as cultural metaphors for and methodologies of writing, can be powerful tools for resisting, defying, challenging and redefining the limits of western education, research and writing conventions that have previously restrained and constrained our storytelling practices.
What is it to ‘collect’ with intention? I hadn’t realised how conditioned I had become to anticipate the market-oriented gaze of white-settler publishing’s desire and impulse to ‘collect’ —‘a western practice that collects material objects of a particular theme or category’—and consume, as bell hooks writes in ‘Eating the Other’.
In her essay ‘Glue’, Aunty Jennifer Kemarre Martiniello expresses the power that story has in defining one’s sovereign identity. She fortifies the intentional qualities that inform the anthology by contrasting the ethos with the settler-invader methods, whereby ‘collecting, bundling and labelling “the other” for sociopolitical, scientific, economic and sociocultural convenience is the practice through which sociocultural mythologies are created and maintained.’ Conversely, a method of gathering makes all the difference—‘gathering’, to excise writing from a possessive impulse—which Aileen Moreton-Robinson has long stated in The White Possessive that ‘[t]he dehumanising impulses of colonisation are successfully acted upon’ because of being ‘predicated on the logic of possession’—that has, at least in the colonial timeline, held cultural production under duress to perform to an arbitrary measure of Indigenous ‘authenticity’. This is not to imply any lack of trust in the editors, but to recognise their deliberateness in breaking open the long-ossified and outdated mode, to spearhead change in ‘the shape of Australian writing and […] the shape of the discourse about us.’ Indeed, Aunty Jennifer describes such methods of quiet resistance as ‘the slow, ever-present, soft abrasion of water against rock.’
In the next essay, Natalie Harkin demonstrates a version of this quiet resistance in ‘Come Inside Into My Kitchen | Archival-Poetic Witnessing’, where her writing and archival transcripts—consisting of records that detail colonial appraisals of girls removed from community and placed into indentured domestic service, as well as the embodied experience of ‘witnessing’ the record—are arranged to run parallel in two columns on the page. As Aunty Jenny describes in ‘Glue’, the political power of the written word, where ‘they can’t see the colour of your skin through a postage stamp’, so too does Harkin illuminate the quiet resistances across time through her archival research creative practice. ‘There is no official denying when the state’s colonial archive box is open, and we demand a right to access our records with a right of reply,’ Harkin writes. The effect of the archival transcripts and Harkin’s own words placed side-by-side is twofold: she positions herself as the descendent of the archive’s hostages, while at the same time the juxtaposed texts indicate this right of reply, each text mirroring the other through the circularity of time. Elsewhere in Shapeshifting, in her essay ‘Sifting Thru Colonial Archive Violence to Find Family Love’, Charmaine Papertalk Green states plainly her fraught relationship to the archives, to their commandeering of ‘truth’ as they embody history through their mere presences: ‘The colonial archives were not made for Yamaji people. They were a racist and colonial tool to control and manage Yamaji.’ Aboriginal writers who reckon with the archive—whether directly or indirectly—while drawing attention to its perversity also serve to liberate ancestors from its deficit narratives. This is a crucial step in making futures real.
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To begin and end with the voices of Elders consolidates the collection’s wide range of voice, style, perspective and experience. Where Aunty Jennifer opens by mapping the sites of instinctive psychic resistance to ‘prescribed colonial interventions’ and ‘careful curriculums for the indoctrination of separation,’ she also names the binding agents—the glue—of stories, Law, Elders and family that hold together a collective solidarity that also resists these forces. Uncle Jim Everett / puralia meenamatta on the other side, closes Shapeshifting with a direct and lucid piece that invites the reader in as a participant, much in the same way as a yarning circle might. A prolific writer across genre and form, Uncle Jim gathers the wisdom learned from a richly lived life and distils it into a timely and potent analysis of the state of affairs—particularly as Victoria enters into its Treaty negotiations, here where I live on Kulin Country—and frames it through some hard questions regarding the practical administration of a truly self-determined future. As a note to end on, we are oriented to look towards the possibility of what a creative imagining of such a future could bring about.
In their introduction, Leane and van Neerven state that ‘colonial/western methods of telling stories […] are often counterintuitive to First Nations cultural styles of storytelling.’ The editors suggest that the categories of such literatures are ‘restricting and containing,’ which, as someone who had worked as a bookseller, I have seen firsthand the limitations that the categories that organise a store, for example, fail to accommodate the textual production that falls outside of it. Where would Shapeshifting be placed, I wonder? A cursory glance sees it categorised as ‘Australian studies’, ‘Ethnic Studies/Indigenous Peoples’, ‘Cultural studies’, ‘Literary criticism & Theory’ and one online seller captures it across four: ‘Poetry anthologies; Literary essays; History; Indigenous peoples.’ In this way it is an exciting time, to be seeing the cracks form in literary containers that have sought to contain First Nations writing for centuries. As Leane and van Neerven posit, intentionally attending to such considerations ‘will shift the shape of the Australian literary landscape and the ways in which the whole of genre nonfiction and its craft and construction is considered and expanded into the future.’ For the editors to make visible the boundaries that western literary production imposes upon the written word, its rules and structures and consequently its inability to waterproof itself from more fluid styles and practices. As a collection, Shapeshifting confidently breaks through to demonstrate a snapshot of possibilities beyond the restricting space of the frame imposed by a ‘national-settler consciousness’.
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Later in their piece, van Neerven—drawing on their co-editor’s staunch, vast and articulate body of work—writes, ‘the settler literary imagination is limited by what it knows and desires to know.’ Settler desire is, as Eve Tuck has suggested, at the core of research methods and practices that seek to extract. Tuck names this phenomenon as ‘damaged-centred’; when seeing through this lens, it illuminates the necessity of gently but diligently carving space for renderings, experiences and voices that turn away from—or refuse—the ‘noble savage’ trope through rehashing trauma porn narratives. Similarly, the paradigm of the ‘native informant’, as Spivak discusses, inverts the extractivist gaze to present an Indigenous perspective that furnishes colonial confirmation bias and furthermore invites the transfer of Indigenous knowledge as a method of legitimising the occupation of stolen land. Shapeshifting’s editors echo this: ‘research is an un-storied collection of disconnected objects and information extracted from others, rather than a gathering of diverse and intersecting stories of being.’
The pleasure of reading such work is truly a breath of fresh air and I relish in witnessing firsthand the most deadly writers, editors and publishers who have painstakingly cracked open the brittle constraints of western literary conventions. I have written elsewhere about this, but imagining futures beyond the one (of extinction) prescribed by coloniality and writing it into being is a powerful and sovereign tool. It’s worth mentioning here that within this paradigm of rupturing literary containments that a lot of First Nations writing that is published is done so predominantly in English, the language of the coloniser invader. Yet limitation breeds creativity, and First Nations writers have been utilising strategies to encode layers of legibility since this linguistic imposition. English can be a tool of resistance and refusal, which the writing in Shapeshifting also seems to imply. Although my first and only language is English, I remain wide open to imagining what it would feel like to know that writers had the agency of choice. While mobs are undertaking the labour of love to reclaim—or reconstruct—dispossessed languages, what capacity does English have to creatively resist its own status as default? To portray a lived reality in this way is an opportunity to be seen or recognised, and at the same time accounts for the multitudinous and holistic subjectivity—in which being an Aboriginal person constitutes one part.
In this mode of tactical writing there is now space afforded for each contributing voice to articulate both the experiential and political. Indeed, while all contributors are writing from their embodiment as First Nations people, there is now an absence of precondition of requiring to perform to a settler audience’s gaze; there is a tacit right to opacity in this safe(r) space, when one knows their editors and peers are Blak like they are—a particularly important point in Australia’s historically conservative publishing industry, where most editors are, even in 2025, non-Indigenous. As such Shapeshifting represents a tenderly-held gathering that transcends the settler-industrial complex of ‘Indigenous writing’ particularly rampant on this colony. This centre of gravity is held staunchly by the distinctness of each writer, their voice, their story and their autonomous creativity in telling it. The distinct textures and threads of the fabric collectively woven bloom in the hands of such care as this. It is a blanket woven of blak love that I wrap myself in.
And so, on the other side of the same coin of wishing for the freedom to ‘write like a white poet/critic’ is the immense privilege of engaging First Nations writing on its own sovereign terms. Lisa Fuller has articulated the imperative for a shift in the wider literary readership—in Australia and abroad—towards one able to attend to cultural awareness. By using the reception of her book Ghost Bird by non-Indigenous readers, she noticed that broadly speaking, readers of her work are not adequately equipped to critically respond to the cultural beliefs presented and woven through a novel written from a First Nations perspective. Nonetheless she sees an opening for the possibility: ‘It whispers gently of change to me. Like the scent of rain, the potential is there. I ache for it.’ Elsewhere, Leane has also written on this, advocating for a healthy and rigorous critical culture to accompany the resurgent and mainstream production of high quality First Nations writing, suggesting that ‘self-representation by First Nations authors challenges colonial images of deficit discourse and disrupts the settler lens familiarity.’
It occurs to me that the settler desire that casts its gaze over First Nations’ writing is one that seeks only to see its own reflection looking back, not unlike Narcissus leaning across the water’s edge. In her creative-critical contribution to the anthology, Leane herself invokes the synchronousness of numerology’s pattern making, its entanglement with astrology’s symbolisms and the latent residue that washes up in dreams: ‘the Greeks, and later the Romans, believed that if a swan appears in your dreams, it can symbolise many things. A white swan can represent positivity in your life.’ A white swan appears on the landscape (and bed end) in Peter Weir’s 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock, but instead of inspiring awe and majesty, it strikes fear and horror into the heart of the young white man haunted by the disappearance of the boarding schoolgirls. Leane continues, by contrasting that ‘a black swan can represent something mysterious. A black swan also represents something that you’re not supposed to do, but you’ll do it anyway.’ Perhaps this provides some explanation to the way I feel drawn to the black swan, especially after being split asunder by Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, which invites itself into Leane’s essay as a paratextual spectre, where the transcendence of Wright’s style and practice embodies the spirit of resistance that informs its authenticity. Instead of being cast as the inversion of the innocence and purity embodied by the white swan, Wright’s black swans are harbingers of reckoning and represent resistance to pejorative, antipodean symbolism. Or maybe the black swan rests atop the water, a silent siren call to settler self-centredness. Perhaps it should follow then that we as Aboriginal people are the fish below, in this body of water with its reflective surface, darting amongst the flourishes of dancing silt, disrupting the reflective surface tension of the water with a small splash and a ripple, glimpsed only momentarily before slipping out of sight again.
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Alice Bellette is a writer, researcher and Palawa descendant who lives and works on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Boonwurrung Country. She holds a PhD in Australian literature. Her writing has appeared in Sydney Review of Books, Griffith Review, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Arena Quarterly and ACMI Stories & Ideas.