Eliza Hamilton Dunlop's 'the aboriginal mother': romanticism, anti slavery and imperial feminism in the nineteenth century

This paper positions the work of colonial poet Eliza Hamilton Dunlop amongst international Romantic poetry of the period, and argues that Dunlop’s poetry reflects a transposition of Romantic women’s poetry to Australia. Dunlop’s poetry, such as ‘The Aboriginal Mother’, demonstrates the relationship of Romantic women’s poetry to early feminism and Social Reform. As with the work of Felicia Hemans, Dunlop was interested in the role of women, and the ‘domestic’ as they related to broader national and political concerns. Dunlop seems to have been consciously applying the tropes, such as that of the mother, of anti slavery poetry found within American, British, and international poetic traditions to the Australian aboriginal context. Themes of indigenous motherhood, and also of Sati or widow burning in India, and human rights had been favored by early women’s rights campaigners in Britain from the 1820s, focusing on abolition of slavery through the identification of white women with the Negro mother. Dunlop’s comparative sympathy for the situation of aboriginals in Australia has been given critical attention as the aspect which makes her work valuable. However, in this essay I hope to outline how Dunlop’s poetry fits in to the international context of the engagement of Romantic women poets with Western Imperialist models and colonial Others.

Imagined terrain: literary nomadism in Venice and the Veneto

Many poets and writers have used Venice and, to a lesser extent, the Veneto as a creative topos. There is both the writing that might be said to belong to the Italian/Venetian literary tradition, as well as the non-Italian tradition of writing Venice, a phenomenon that spans English literature, in particular, from William Shakespeare’s time, to the Romantic period and into the present day. This paper explores my relationship to this creative topos and the writers and writing that are associated with it. In particular, it focuses on the notion of literary nomadism: a method for interacting with the literature of Venice and the Veneto that allows me to find intersections between my own work and that which already exists in a broad historical and literary terrain. Moving between and across the literatures of this region, I argue that it is possible to find multiple points of reference that guide and inform my own poetic responses to it, and which reflect my own subjective nomadism and in-between-ness. By taking such an approach I am able to map my hybrid, transnational and transcultural identity into this space, in order to locate myself—and my writing—in the ‘imagined terrain’ I have chosen as a creative topos.

Exhumed [book of poetry]

Unpredictable and boisterously entertaining, Cassandra Atherton’s Exhumed is a collection of interconnected prose poems exploring the reanimation of canonical texts against a backdrop of popular culture references: William Carlos Williams, Nabokov, Stevie Smith and Emily Dickinson are paired with ‘Happy Meals’, Hill’s Hoists, Bonds t-shirts and the Moonee Valley Bistro. Divided into two parts – ‘Inter’ with its play on intertexts and ‘Disinter’ where the references are unearthed, these prose poems are fractured moments centred on love, betrayal, abandonment and death. Atherton’s appeals to l’humour noir and the politicisation of the poet’s private spaces make for an exhilarating and intoxicating read.

Grand designs

The turnrow Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poetry, edited by John Kinsella, features the work of 123 poets.