First Nations poet Evelyn Araluen wins the 2022 Stella Prize with a 'wild ride' skewering colonial mythologies
- Written by: Camilla Nelson, Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame Australia
First Nations poet Evelyn Araluen has won the 10th annual Stella Prize with a debut poetry collection that confronts the cultural evasions of an unreconciled Australia with a tender fury.
Australian poetics is the target of Araluen’s dark satire in Dropbear. Her poetry deftly dismantles the literary mythos that conjures the Australian landscape as ghostly, haunted and empty, or else reproduces it as a cultural commodity in the guise of “Australiana” kitsch.
In Dropbear, Evelyn Araluen unravels the mythos of Australian kitsch.
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Or “Bad Taxidermy”, a tour de force of cuddly kitsch, in which the reader encounters images of “Kylie Minogue in hotpants and a hot pink koala knit” that generates a “bidding war on eBay”, alongside an “Instagram ad for Australian Native Birthflower charms”, a Tasmanian Devil with a “faintly otter-like lift of his small dark paws on the acrylic shelf”, and a “lungfish nailed to a birch board”.
None of this is innocent. For non-Aboriginal readers, these cultural commodities may present themselves as an ironic coming to terms with Australian identity. They may appear to offer a paradoxical way of being at home in an alien landscape, a supposed resolution of guilt, cringe and crisis. But for Aboriginal people they are part of an ongoing invasion – a reinvented colonial mythos that appropriates and silences the history, culture and languages of First Nations people.
In Araluen’s poems, these cultural commodities are not being ironically replayed but clinically dissected, and shredded. “Bad Taxidermy” finds Araluen shouting at “the man laughing in the anthropology museum” and “Angling my reflection out of photos of cabinets with drawings of my ancestors rubbing sticks”.
But there is also love, warmth and care in this collection, in its evocations of family and in tender poems for the things, places, experiences and peoples that have been “erased, exploited or violated in the short but haunted history of Australian literature”.
Dropbear reaches down into everyday lived experience, in essays such as “To the Parents” and the poem “Moving Day”, a reverie on the meaning of moving home when home has been stolen or destroyed.
Dropbear offers a poetics of resistance. It is, as Lucashenko points out, “a playful beast, a prank, a riddle, a challenge, and a game”. But like the mythical creature for which the collection is named, it is not gentle and can be “dangerous”. It offers no easy or cosy reconciliation with history.
Read this collection, and it may change the way you see. Or else, as Lucashenko says, “If you live here and don’t acquire the necessary local knowledge, the dropbear might definitely getcha!”
Authors: Camilla Nelson, Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame Australia 
