Writing Australian Unsettlement: modes of poetic invention 1796-1945 (2016)

When Gladys Gilligan wrote 'The Settlement' in early 1930 -her "account" of life at the Moore River Native Settlement north of Perth -she was just fourteen years old.Gilligan was one of the 50,000 'half-caste' children forcibly removed (stolen) from her family and placed on a mission between the 1890s and 1970s.As a child resident of the Settlement, and perhaps because of her flair for writing (in this case, in English), Gilligan was requested to write 'The Settlement' by the Chief Protector of Aborigines, A.O. Neville.There are traces of resistance: resistance both to the idea of settlement/and the Settlement itself, and resistance to the ventriloquism Gilligan must enact in order to write the document.Her text begins as follows: 'The Settlement lies on the bank of a river which is called the Moore River, the hills surrounding it making it look quite a pleasant home' (157).In these lines, the 'slippage' (157) between a pleasant home and something that 'look[s] quite a pleasant home' is resonant.While Gilligan was institutionalised and denied the right to basic freedoms, her voice in 'The Settlement' maintains her independence.In Writing Australian Unsettlement, Gilligan's 'to [o]rder' ( 153) document is just one of the exemplary dozen or so 'unsettled' Australian texts that poet-critic Michael Farrell reads from the 'long colonial era' (4) using a 'counter-lens of "unsettlement"' (10).As Farrell explains, 'the word "unsettlement" is being used with increasing frequency in a range of Australian literary critical contexts' (7).In Farrell's case, it 'refers to the text's relation to settlement as such, and its material negation or resistance' (7).He goes on to point out that unsettlement 'is not guaranteed by antisettlement sentiment' but is 'effected through writing practice' (7).This distinction is important because it emphasises that writing does something.And in Writing Australian Unsettlement, the texts under consideration unsettle notions of literariness, and what we might think of as colonial 'settled' writing.Farrell's work is influenced by Philip Mead's seminal Networked Language (2008), in which Mead makes the case for the unsettlement of language in Australian poetry.Mead avers that the 'breaking up' of language is a key feature of contemporary poetics, and is a move towards an Australian literature that 'comes to terms with the unsettling difference of Indigenous narratives of place and history and the plural knowledges of the multicultural present'. 1Mead considers poetic language in the 'contemporary moment' (2).Farrell, in contrast, retrieves historical texts such as Ned Kelly's The Jerilderie Letter and Bennelong's 'Letter to Mr Philips, Lord Sydney's Steward' and reads them for their 'poetic interest ' (195) rather than simply as historical by-products of colonisation.Farrell is concerned with the agency these writers possess despite -or perhaps because of -their marginal positions, and also the marginal positions of their work.The collected texts here are 'fugitive' (32) texts, either falling outside the canon of Australian literature or unsettling the canon in a myriad of ways.As Farrell