Indigenous artists and the impact of white settlement.
Click on the photos to enlarge them.
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Read the poem 'Desolation' by Aboriginal poet Jack Davis in the light of these images here.
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How might a reading of non-indigenous poet Charles Harpur's poem (below) be informed by these images?
This Southern Land of Ours (Circa 1865) |
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With alien hearts to frame our laws And cheat us as of old, In vain our soil is rich, in vain 'Tis seamed with virgin gold: But the present only yields us nought, The future only ours Till we dare to be a people In this Southern Land of Ours.
What would pymean statesmen but Our new-world prospects blast, By chaining native enterprise To Europe's pauper past, With all its misery for the mass, And fraud-upholden power; But we'll yet have men - like Cromwell, In this Southern Land of Ours.
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And lo, the unploughed future, boys, May yet be all our own, If hearts that love their Native Land Determine this alone: To sow its years with crops of truth, And border these with flowers, Till we have a birth of heroes In this Southern Land of Ours.
[emphasis added]
On to The Task |