Whose culture is being represented?

 

For whom? By whom?  

Indigenous artists and the impact of white settlement.

Click on the photos to enlarge them.

  • Read the poem 'Desolation' by Aboriginal poet Jack Davis in the light of these images here.

  • 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)

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.

 

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