Cambria Press Publication: Giving this Country a Memory – Featured Author: Romaine Moreton

Romaine Moreton is a member of the Goernpul Jagara people of Stradbroke Island, which is off the south coast of Queensland, and the Bunjalung people from the coastal area of southern Queensland and northern New South Wales. Her three books of poetry, The Callused Stick of Wanting, post me to the prime minister, and Poems from a Homeland, have attracted international critical attention.

Excerpt from Cambria Press Publication
Giving This Country a Memory (Chapter 2: Romaine Moreton)

“The global trajectory of civil rights and revolutionary discourse introduced a new lexicon in which to politicise indigenous identity and action in Australia. Aboriginal separatism, militancy, and the reinvestment of Aboriginal activists in their history and culture, were framed within a new rhetoric of black pride, will, and solidarity modelled in part on movements in the United States. (This transnational relationship is ongoing. Moreton talks about how the American black women’s a cappella group, Sweet Honey in the Rock, similarly provided inspiration and a role model for her in the 2000s.) The rhetoric of blackness provided a powerful meta-regional category which facilitated indigenous organisation across the nation and the formation of a collective indigenous public.” (p.67)

Giving This Country A Memory: Contemporary Aboriginal Voices of Australia by Anne Brewster is part of the Cambria Australian Literature Series, headed by Susan Lever.

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