Complicit: A Visual History of ‘Australia’ Since Invasion is my first foray into what I am calling text art.

I've been thinking about Australia's history and the way it and any history warps and shifts over time depending on who is telling the story.

When I was in primary school the official history was that the settlers discovered a fertile land inhabited by nomadic hunter gatherers who didn't farm or manage the land in any way. Those same settlers couldn't believe how fertile the soil was and I was taught that we got rich 'on the sheep's back'. What I wasn't taught was that the Australia's Indigenous Peoples had the world's oldest surviving Cultures and that they used sophisticated land management techniques to live in harmony with and care for Country. I also didn't learn at school about the massacres, the stolen generations and the brutal and bloody Frontier Wars.

This poem was an attempt to rewrite the history I had been taught in a concise format. There are many layers to any story and I decided that a visual representation would carry what I was trying to say. I wanted the poem to look like it could hang on the wall of an art gallery so I also wrote design notes like you see hanging next to paintings at the NGV. 

Axon: Creative Explorations is an online journal published by the University of Canberra and I was so excited when the guest editor, Caren Florance, choose this poem for Issue 13.2. I am huge fan of Caren's work and I own her poetry collection, Lost in Case, which was published by Cordite Books. Working with her to refine my poem and write the Contextual Statement that appears at the end of the poem was a wonderful experience.