Speaker 1 00:00:09 Hello, and welcome to the special poetry edition of the Freemantle press podcast. In 2022. Today, we are recording in Wally in wa Jack NOA butcher. And I would like to acknowledge our first storytellers along with NOA elders past present, and future sovereignty was never seated. My name is bro Bateman, and I'm the author of, of memory and furniture and blue Ren. Both of which are published by Freemantle press. My guest is the author of second fleet, baby Nadia Nadia is a non-indigenous historian and poet born in Nam, Melbourne, and currently living in Blu Perth. She has a PhD in history from Latrobe university and lectures in history and indigenous studies at the university of Western Australia. Nadia has published widely on linguistic and medical histories of Southeast Australia and is passionate about creative translations of history. Nadia's collection boots was released by UWA publishing early in 20, 20 weeks before she became a pandemic mother. Second fleet baby is her second poetry collection. Nadia Ru, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2 00:01:39 Thanks so much bran. It's lovely to be here with you.
Speaker 1 00:01:43 Now. I would like to start by giving our listeners a taste of your work and we've chosen settlers swim in water, watering water wa water. Would you mind reading that for us now?
Speaker 2 00:01:57 I'd love to settlers swim in watering water wa water. Here we celebrate that we are toward the end of our brief history. Still visitors. The caravan wheels are chopped for the summer. My grandfather wakes at sunrise to sit on the pier and watch the tides rise and fall rod in hand bucket at feet, his skins, his catch in the caravan annex. There's nowhere to hide from the smell Nana crumbs and fries to fill it golden fruit of the sea oil running into carefully folded paper towel, crinkle cut potato fries in the pan. We swim until our bathers are scratchy with sand. When the sun dips, we shower in the cubicle with sisters and cousins and laugh at the clumps of green and brown plants stuck to our bellies. The fresh hot water is bliss. Not because it's fresh and hot, but because it's a stingless imitation of the salt river meets ocean water.
Speaker 2 00:03:01 We've reluctantly left for the day, years later, 350,000 kilometers west on another country. My mother and my Outlaws and my love and die play in the Indian ocean. After we lie on grass to air dry, then drive inland to a new home and laugh about the piles of sand tucked into bathers. We dump them onto the bathroom floor, messy, unplanned sand castles, our life to showers us with childhood, the place where land and sea do not need to be the same thing. Do not need to be gentle, do not need to submit to each other in order to exist in the same word, a disease is spreading unevenly across the world, and there's something bigger than Australia about swimming together in this ocean highway to England back road to Monte Verde, we struggle to push nostalgia down. It's so buoyant now always bobbing on the mine's surface, the caravan, the pier, the seaweed clinging to belly the nostalgia floats until the next wave arrives beach visits, Mihir over and again, rocks me fetus to sleep.
Speaker 1 00:04:20 Thank you, Nadia, for reading that beautiful poem. I was struck when I read it about the importance of country and recognizing country, which it seems to be a recurring motif in this collection. Also, you mentioned the menace of the encroaching virus and pandemic and how family and traveling together acts as bull works against incipient danger. The thread of family and familial relations runs through this collection like water through a landscape, I think. And tell us about the significance of this poem from your perspective.
Speaker 2 00:04:57 Uh, for me, I guess on one level, this problem is simply precious memories of swimming with, with family in two bodies of water, separated by geography and time in Bowen heads on water, around country, home of sea change. Some people may be familiar with that place and Fremantle wa Jack water near where we are, the water is kind of this aqueous cradle in this poem and the collection. Uh, something very comforting and the memories were even more precious to me during the pandemic when I was separated from my family for long lengths of time. And there was this, this time when both my, my Outlaws and my mother were in Perth and we all swam together, just seemed amazing for me. Memory and nostalgia is kind of the third place, a kind of resting place beyond those two geographic places in this, in this poem, you know, know nostalgia is important, I think as, as a, as a place of comfort in memory.
Speaker 2 00:06:04 So there's that, but at the same time, the title recognizes well, we're swimming in indigenous waters in, you know, in occupied country. What does that mean? And in her book, the white possessive, the great gunk scholar alien Morton Robinson has a chapter called bodies that matter on the beach. And after you read that book, you never see lifesavers the same way. Again, you won't necessarily think of yourself as a, a white body on the beach. What's your potential to be, to kind of symbolize and enact possession in your presence. But, you know, the beach is actually a densely political site in the Australian consciousness. Memories are precious to me, but yet what does it mean to revisit these memories in the space of indigenous sovereignty?
Speaker 1 00:07:01 I really understand and appreciate that idea of history and possession and the Alliance that that has with memory as a poet, you engage with history. I presume because you are and historian can the study of, and writing about academic history be enhanced or improved by storytelling techniques.
Speaker 2 00:07:28 Historians really remain very bound to our records and very, very careful when it comes to using, um, literary viruses as well as speculation or imagination. Um, and this tendency to empiricism has really been reinforced, unfortunately by the history wars and this kind of race to the bottom of the page, this race to the footnote as the ultimate source of authority. Um, and Tom Griffis writes about this, that before the history was, there was a momentum to value imagination as a resource. So historians like Greg Denning and interlining were arguing for the importance of imagination to really know and connect with the past. So I think poetry and story can really, um, not only enhance our study of the past, but can counter some of the hyper attentions to, to the records, which we know are often very misleading and full of lies. Anyway, you know, my supervisor who was in a story in the light Traci, Ben Numa taught me in all her students that using a metaphor when we write history can be a really important powerful thing.
Speaker 2 00:08:49 So in my PhD, I used the grid as a metaphor, but it was the real grid, the street grid of Melbourne, but it was also a structuring grid that ordered people ordered bodies in space. It could sort of be a metaphor for a structure, but it's also a real structure using metaphors. Using literary devices, gives us a truer articulation of history. And that's something I've only really been able to articulate recently in why I kind of moved away from the journal article from those conventional forms of history to just give myself the freedom to say, no poetry is my way, images matter, metaphors matter. Similarly, EB all those poetic devices, they actually make history, truer, and it's actually taken me a long time to give myself permission to say such things out loud. So thanks for that question.
Speaker 1 00:09:47 You're welcome. That was such an amazing answer. And in the sense you're embedding yourself in the, in the narrative of the historic event. And I think it's really interesting that you are both an academic and a poet. I'd like to know a little bit more about how these multiple strands of your career work in parallel.
Speaker 2 00:10:12 Um, because it's also always been important to me to find ways to share my research outside of the academy. You know, it just, isn't interesting to me. Um, if only at fellow academics are reading my work soon after I finish my PhD, I thought, oh, you know, it's hard to get a job in academia. If nothing else, it would be really nice to have an exhibition with my work and just emailed this the city of Melbourne library and ended up having a public exhibition there. Um, also developing a walking tour. So through that public facing this, I began to think about story more and stripping some of the scholarly stuff away and just letting the stories shine through. And then from there, I've moved in into poetry, which is another different medium to me to understand the past, to connect with the past. Um, yeah, also these different modes that walk towards exhibition poetry. I find a lot of pleasure in, in those modalities. Um, and I think they have sustained me to keep going with, with being an Astorian and kind of with one foot. So always trying to keep one foot in the academy and one foot firmly out of it as well.
Speaker 1 00:11:33 Speaking of a foot in the academy and one foot in the story, the collection looks at your ancestors' experience on the second. Can you give the listeners some historical context about the second and who your ancestor was?
Speaker 2 00:11:51 Yeah. The first section, um, is a lot about my ancestor, Susanna Mort and her daughter, Susanna screech, Susanna Mort was, uh, charged and convicted of stealing a sheep. Um, she lived in England. Um, she was sentenced to transportation and traveled on the lady Juliana in 1789 from Portsmouth to aura land in what's now called Sydney. So the lady Juliana was a really interesting ship. It was debatably part of the second fleet. It actually came after the first fleet, but before the second fleet, um, and it was an all female transport ship. So it was very lucky for my ancestor that she was on that ship because it had a much lower mortality rate than most ships in the second fleet, which was also known as the death fleet. The government had just transferred responsibility for those ships to a private slave trading company, actually Candon Kelt and king.
Speaker 2 00:13:06 So these are these ships going around, which are assisting settler colonization, which have been just used for the slave trade. And here's my ancestor in one of these ships. And then I found out that, yeah, she gave birth to her daughter on the way to aura land. So it was really these small details. She stole the sheep, she gave birth at sea. I mean, my imagination just took off from there. I just really wanted to zoom in, um, on those moments, like, what does that mean as a woman in the 18th century to steal a sheep? You know, I'm imagining her chasing, you know, hustling sheep in the middle of the night and what would it have been like to give birth at sea on a ship? And so I began to research a bit around those questions to build up my, my imagination around that history and to connect with this side of my maternal history that I hadn't before.
Speaker 1 00:14:09 Fascinating in second fleet, baby, your own experience of motherhood and modern technology is written alongside your ancestors' experience of motherhood and the technology of her day. What do you think you are saying about the differences and similarities between those experiences?
Speaker 2 00:14:32 This is one of those connections that for me, is probably being there in retrospect more than when I was writing the collection as white women, <laugh> we have in common that part of our desirability, um, or our function in the colony is to reproduce the settler population. And in her time that was very explicit. This is a fledging colony. We need more bodies on the ground to justify occupation, but I still felt that sense when I became pregnant and the way that I was embraced, you know, especially as I was teaching certain histories of war, actually, and thinking about whose bodies get protected, you know, what am I doing? I'm also increasing a settler population on, on indigenous land. What does that mean to, to be involved in that reproduction? So is it there's that side of it, but then we both have sort of those forms of privilege, but we both have had our own struggles as well.
Speaker 2 00:15:38 I mean, she gave birth at sea, possibly. There was a tent pitched in the corner of a deck. She probably had a midwife with her, some basic technologies, perhaps a stool, perhaps some camel T or, um, some herbs to assist with her healing. Um, so there's that, um, simple technologies, but still technologies available to her that may have not been available to women on other ships. And for me, I had the technology of in vitro ization, you know, over 200 years later. So obviously they're radically different technologies, but, um, there's still a lot of privilege in, in becoming a mother in se in that sense, but also some struggle <laugh>, you know, is not easy to give birth ownership. It is not easy to go through IVF. So yeah, that sense of struggle as well as that sense of privilege that I hope runs through the stories
Speaker 1 00:16:41 Definitely does the collection looks at the IVF experience, Nadia, and there's something almost transformative about your description of IVF alongside what I see as a Gothic fascination with the scientific distancing of it. Why was it important to you to give voice to the multiple expressions of that experience?
Speaker 2 00:17:06 Going through that very clinical process? I often felt like I was inside my body in ways I hadn't been before. Like, because you're injecting yourself, you are giving blood samples, your, your insides are rendered visible all the time. And I also felt like I was sort of floating outside my body, watching the scene of this and that medical staff examine me. And so I did have this sort of fascination with how it was this really intimate process in, in some ways quite invasive as well, like literally invasive in terms of egg extraction, for instance. And at the same time, really like scientific, rational distanced. When I was going through IVF, I was looking for representations of it that would provide me just some perspective on it. Just some way to think about it. <laugh> that gave me perhaps strength or perhaps a way to just make sense of my own experience.
Speaker 2 00:18:13 And at the time I couldn't find, I couldn't find any. Um, but you know, if Tony Morrison says you should write the story that you want to read. So I just began writing my own poems about IVF and, um, pushing through what felt like a little bit of a dark and lonely time in some ways, although I'm really grateful that I did, I did have people supporting me, but I needed a narrative. I need a poetic narrative as well. I need, it was, you know, I was making new life. It's a beautiful thing, but what did that mean? Having a lot of needles, you know, waking up at six in the morning to inject yourself like, so I'm really glad then to share these poems. Um, later I became aware of the work of poets, such Asman and Alene Chong, who write about in fertility treatments in really beautiful ways. I wish I'd had read that work earlier. It would've provided a comfort to me. So I don't know what these poems will mean, but I really hope that anyone who needs just to be held a little bit more through that experience may find, you know, some sort of sense of connection, at least in the poems. Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:19:33 I think they definitely will. The IVF experience is one of the many ways you grapple with the awkwardness of narrating the past and present from a position of privilege. How do you keep race and gender in mind in a meaningful and intentional way when writing history either as an academic or as a poet,
Speaker 2 00:19:59 This is something where I'm really grateful for my academic training in, in things like critical race theory, whiteness theory, um, post-colonial studies, intersectionality, all of these big words that actually, um, have enabled me to try to find ways to think about my subject's position as white, as a woman, as a settler. I mean, all these critical theories teach me not to take that for granted, just to keep holding that to account, not to naturalize it because once you naturalize those things, you're letting your power become natural. You're not holding it to account anymore. So it can be cringy though, right? It's perhaps not interesting just to talk about being white all the time. There's always that risk that you just end up reinforcing that, or it's just tokenistic and cringy. But I really think that if privilege is a flip side of oppression and I think everyone knows that oppression is important to think about is definitely worthy of lit literary attention and care then, so too, should privilege be worthy of taking seriously and interrogating.
Speaker 2 00:21:17 I just try to observe in the way I'm treated the way my body is received in the world, in the forms of invitations. I get to take up space to be possessive, to tell stories that aren't my own. I pay attention to that. And I think doing that in a sort of practice way, hopefully it comes through in the poetry, although perhaps sometimes implicitly, I think, but some feminist scholars talk about looking at the way, power materializes in certain bodies over time over generations. And I think if you think of that as a long process, then you can realize how important story is not just giving a label white, but telling a story is it's through the story that we see the process whereby privilege is made and maybe privilege is used in certain ways.
Speaker 1 00:22:11 I'd like to move on. Uh, as you know, Freemantle press works extensively with new and emerging writers and poets. So I wanted to include a section for them. Your poetry appears in various journals and anthologies, including cordite peril, magazine, mascara, literary review, westerly, the enchanting versus literary review and what we carry poetry on childbearing from recent WordPress. How did these experiences help shape or guide your career?
Speaker 2 00:22:51 I guess when you're submitting a, a poem to a journal, whether or not it's published, you begin to think about that poem as part of a bigger conversation as part of a bigger, bigger landscape of language. You can begin to make connections too, between your work and the themes of the journal or the editors or wider conversations that are going on. That was really important to me to read journals and to think about not just like individual poems being published, but what are the conversations that these editors are facilitating? How does my poetry speak to these conversations? Submitting to different journals was an interesting exercise too, in thinking about my politics. So, you know, some journals, they really like explicitly political poetry and other journals seem to want to perhaps not foreground politics. It can be a good exercise. I think, to think about what it would mean to put forward a poem that might have a more coded message for instance, versus putting something up front.
Speaker 2 00:24:07 All of that is valuable. Um, quite early on, I had a poem published in peril magazine, which is a forum for Asian, Australian arts and culture. And that was really interesting in terms of thinking about relationality. How did I identify? I was asked to identify my background. The poem was about, you know, sort of sitting in little Burke street, thinking about Chinese Australian history and how I imagined that in that place and how I related to that. So that, um, made me think about forms of ethics and self-identification that came through publishing. And another important experience that's really relevant for second fleet baby was being published in what we carry, which I think you have a poem in as well. Bra is just a superb collection. It really captures the diversity of experiences of childbearing as well as infertility. And having a poem in there about IVF was really affirming. Having that poem in that collection helped me overcome some kinds of shame, which I didn't have had, but which I had, I think about struggling with infertility about not conceiving so-called naturally. Yeah. It can just be really affirming and also gives you relationship to other people published in that place, which is such a wonderful thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:25:35 It's been such a privilege to bear witness to the matriarchal and feminist historical motif of your work and the parallels of your contemporary experience with that of your maternal for bear. Congratulations two on the publication of second fleet, baby, you've had some amazing reviews date. Lisa Gordon says it's a rare combination of judgment and compassion Alfie. She said it's full of tender, yet piercing stories of nation building and childbearing listeners. You can buy Nadia Brook's poetry collection, second fleet baby in all good book stores and
[email protected] AU. Thanks so much, Nadia.
Speaker 2 00:26:22 Thanks, Brian. It's been such a pleasure speaking with you.
Speaker 1 00:26:26 I'm bro Bateman, and I look forward to catching up with you next time as we explore the wonderful world of west Australian poets and their poetry.
