Sharing stories

Turtles as meat, symbol, and material

Ben Silverstein

Masked Histories: Turtle shell masks and Torres Strait Islander people

by Leah Lui-Chivizhe

The Miegunyah Press

$39.99 pb, 240 pp

Turtles, Leah Lui-Chivizhe shows us in Masked Histories, are at the centre of Torres Strait Islander lives. They follow the Pacific currents and slipstreams, arriving in the Islands in the mating season of surlal, making available their eggs, their meat, their shells. For millennia, marine turtles have provided Islanders with material for subsistence and ceremony – allowing them to practise ceremony with turtle shell masks so evocative of Islander cultures and histories.

One result of more than a century of colonial intrusions into Islanders’ relationships with turtle has been to remove the masks from the islands and from Islander contexts, disrupting social relationships in the Torres Strait and surrounding the masks with colonising story. Today, many of these masks sit in museums in Australia, England, and elsewhere, having been taken by a succession of colonial visitors and collectors. In these museums, with this provenance, the masks have historically been made to speak of social dissolution, of inexorable processes of loss forming a backdrop to the salvage expeditions that gathered them up.

Alice Te Punga Somerville has described the often painful practice of clearing away the accumulated junk of colonial storytelling to catch a glimpse of an alternative future, of a place that ‘allows your people to live in it’. Masked Histories shows us what happens when the story of turtle begins with that glimpse, pushing aside colonial stories conducive to extraction and dispossession in favour of stories of strength and relationship. The book opens with a sensitive and fraught account of two meetings with turtle shell masks now in the British Museum. Picture Alick Tipoti, a Badu artist, dressed formally in a suit for the occasion but taken back, on arrival, to find that the masks were disconcertingly mixed and set out in a research lab. How to approach this jumble of masks of different kinds from different places? In the same room, Lui-Chivizhe had a different encounter, one mediated by her relationship with the masks as both Islander and research student. Following family advice, she introduced herself to the masks before studying them from all angles, examining them under light, measuring, sketching, noting, photographing. Then she thanked the masks and said goodbye.

Both Tipoti and Lui-Chivizhe have since engaged with masks to tell Islander stories. For Lui-Chivizhe, this book is an outcome of that work, placing turtle back in the context of ‘Islander-oriented’ histories. This re-placement and re-storying is not a simple return to a time before colonisation but represents a reorientation, working across an array of sources to reconnect these masks with their human and more-than-human histories.

Masked Histories shares stories of turtle in the Islands. It begins by mapping Islander–turtle relationships; providing a deep history of practices of hunting, butchering, and preparing, carried out by people for whom turtle is meat, symbol, and material. In chapter two, we learn that turtle were attractive to those outsiders who intruded with increasing frequency from the late eighteenth century onwards.

Chapter three turns to the story of a large turtle shell mask, adorned with human skulls and seashells and coated with red ochre, which was stolen from Auridh in 1836. Lui-Chivizhe narrates its theft and the way it was made to stand in imperial thinking as proof of the ‘murderous savagery’ of Islanders, licensing the destruction of the village from which it was taken. Clearing away this framing, Lui-Chivizhe provides a nuanced reading of the mask, not as a ‘gruesome trophy’ but as an espe- cially significant and living ritual object once stored carefully in a ceremonial keeping place, where it would help relate sea and land, living and dead, across time and place. Masks, we learn in chapters four and five, represent enduring histories. They have the power to connect Islanders today – as they did 150 years ago – with cultural heroes and with the wisdom of ancestors. They hold and communicate valuable knowledge about Islander (and colonial) pasts. The masks themselves have agency: the Auridh mask’s power, perhaps, explains how it has survived almost two centuries in exile, through multiple fires, while its thief faced a spiral of bad luck, incapacity, and ‘depression of spirits’.

This story culminates in a wonderful final substantive chapter that shows how Islanders engage with masks today to re-story them, to become turtle, to enliven relationships between themselves and the more-than-human world, to connect with and through their history. These are different ceremonies, of creative expression, of curatorship, of social research. Frank David of Iama, for instance, devoted hours to closely examining images of turtle shell masks, carefully reading them to uncover their stories. Rosie Ware of Moa/Mer was inspired by images of ancient masks to carve their likeness into lino, printing them onto fabric. The illustrations of these and other Islander artistic responses in Masked Histories are stunning.

Masked Histories does not toy with a kind of decolonising representation in which a return to a pre-colonial past is possible. Nor does it imagine that period as a moment of authenticity prior to colonising influences. Rather it sits seriously with the life of these masks when they were in the Islands and since their removal. It imagines a future in which Islander representations can shadow imperial networks, in Tracey Banivanua-Mar’s phrase, disposing of the idea of an essential authenticity in favour of inexorable relationality; not erasing but working through the past century of dislocation to connect across place and time.

This work, in turn, transforms the stories imperial institutions tell of masks. When Alick Tipoti met the kodal krar – a turtle shell mask representing his totem, the crocodile – in that lab at the British Museum, he lowered his body and became a crocodile, making his way on all fours across the room to introduce himself. For a moment, Lui-Chivizhe writes, the British museum ‘became an Islander cultural space’ in the heart of empire. That moment endures. Tipoti’s fibreglass re-creation and response to the kaigas krar – a turtle shell mask of the giant shovelnose ray, incorporating four other totemic animals – now sits alongside the original, which was acquired by the British Museum in 1886.

Tipoti’s mask enacts relationships with ancestors and with natural and spiritual worlds. In ‘Living on Stolen Land’, Ambelin Kwaymullina describes a decolonised future based in the ‘places where different worlds meet’, when those places are refigured as sites of ‘connection, enrichment and transformation’. In gifting us glimpses of this future, Masked Histories shares with us new stories and new possibilities. g

Ben Silverstein is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in History and Lecturer in Indigenous Studies at the Australian National University, and author of Governing Natives: Indirect rule and settler colonialism in Australia’s north (2019). ❖

Tumult and poise

Sarah Day’s ninth poetry collection

Jennifer Harrison

Day

Slack Tide by Sarah

Pitt Street Poetry $28 pb, 107 pp

This is Sarah Day’s ninth collection and one of her most thematically diverse to date. She brings to the poems a thoughtful mix of environmentalism (particularly the unruly yet quiet presence of Tasmania’s natural beauty), her British roots (some of the best poems in the collection refer to the poet’s grandmother’s incarceration in an asylum), and a teacher’s precision with free verse. The poems are not overly experimental in terms of lineation, metre, language, or punctuation, and yet freshness of perspective and authenticity arise inevitably from the poet’s liquid observational engagement with the world’s affairs, whether this be with landscape, the global pandemic, racism, or science (planetary, oceanographic, microscopic).

While reviewing Slack Tide, I was reading the New Collected Poems of the late Irish poet Eavan Boland (1944–2020). I felt uncanny resonances between Day’s and Boland’s fine, linguistic intelligence, the pure melody of their poems, and their feminism’s intense engagement with the world and its histories, as filtered through the lens of mythic reinvention and domestic experience. There are some wonderful ekphrastic poems in Day’s collection (a favoured form of Boland’s). For instance, in the poem ‘House like a Folktale’, a mysterious house in Glenbrook – ‘The bowed house / rests comfortably on earth / itself a resting hen’ – assumes the qualities of a Chagall painting where a rhetorical, surreal conversation takes place between locale and visual imagery, and the poet muses, ‘Rules are what people think, / they aren’t a law of nature.’

Day shares with Boland a wonderful aptitude for situating local intuitive concerns into a dialogue with the larger world and its histories. Lockdown is imagined as an Edward Hopper interior. Four-hundred-year-old Neopolitan music on the radio (‘In the Air’) unpacks thoughts of environmental degradation, yet the poem leaves us with lingering hope, ‘notes were made on a score – / the compassionate moment hangs in the air’. Even the collection’s smaller observational sketches – such as ‘School Strike for Climate’, with its opening lines ‘They held our planet in their hands / the way that I once held an orange or a ball’ – coolly and compassionately reflect a kind of looking forward into the generations. Here, also, are some lines from ‘Penstock Lagoon’, a reflective poem about the Ukraine war, selected by editors Jeanine Leanne and Judith Beveridge for Australian Poetry’s Best Australian Poems 2022: ‘Up here, in the tent at night / by an effort of will, the world’s troubles / shrink from the mind’s large screen …’ The poet continually hears an indecipherable sound in the silence, which is finally identified: ‘it is not a falling pearl but a musk duck’. The poem then widens its perspective:

Mirror-like, on its ancient glacial plateau, the lake is non-partisan in its view of civilisations.

Mayflies are hatching on its surface for their single day of life.

I hope these lines convey something of Day’s superb skill in layering and contrast: here, the ordinance of the natural landscape is stilled against the brutality of a distant war. The poem moves continually between time perspectives.

Freshness of perspective and authenticity arise inevitably from the poet’s liquid observational engagement with the world’s affairs

This collection seems to embrace the struggle of belonging to both a local and a global culture. There are few answers (the poems work best when lightly questioning what to make of our times). Early on, the book introduces us to the concept of ‘slack

Research Centre, further notes: ‘although the surface of the water may appear almost to be stationary, it is no indication that the same is true beneath the surface; the various competing forces may give rise to a diversity of currents, some even flowing in opposite directions.’ This is a collection, therefore, that holds unseen tumultuous experience in conflict with surface poise. Again, the poet looks to make sense of the chaos ‘behind things’ and, in this way, the titular poem ‘Slack Tide’ holds the landscape close:

Water’s insistence grips the thighs, disturbs and pacifies; deep mud reminds us we were never invulnerable; silver eels with intelligent faces examine ours, assess our aptitude. The swoosh of waders draws us into a primordial past, and, in the watery iridescence, towards a vision of sorts –

Many poems grapple with contemporary meaning-making, including ‘Transhumanence’: ‘the air smelt / different, birds and all winged / things were the first to notice’; ‘Light Boats’: ‘It’s my own silence that is confused’; ‘Aldinga Cliffs, South Australia’: ‘At all times / there is this living with what some of us have done, / there is this under-the-skin knowing.’ A sense of discomfort shadows many poems. For instance, ‘Aral Sea’ begins bluntly, ‘The loss of a sea somehow reminds me of my missing kidney’, yet ends remarkably, ‘nor have I been to Uzbekistan. This does not mean the Aral Sea / has not lived in my imagination or that I have not felt its loss.’

Although some poems intimately address asylum seeker experience and the power imbalance between rich and poor communities, underpinning all experience is the planet. In a poem such as ‘Utopia’, the observer tries to fathom the rules of nature’s imperfect perfections: tide’: ‘the brief lull in the body of tidal water when the tide is neither coming in nor going out’.

Sea foam’s behaviour is flawless, each macaroon island waits its turn to break from mass and form a line, no shove or jostling to join the slipstream where the tannin creek runs full tilt at the blue sea.

This singular metaphor resonates throughout the collection, embracing wider dissonances, which question how best to live an ethical life. The definition of ‘slack tide’, quoted from Dr John R. Hunter, from the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative

The slack tide’s hidden turbulence is, surely, how global warming, the pandemic, the impact of colonialism increasingly affect voice, language, the essence of poetry making. I was moved, particularly, by Section 4, which references the mysterious mental health history of the poet’s ‘missing grandmother’, Alice (‘Standish’). The poem’s final lines – ‘I write these words in anger / and in tenderness. A harm was done’ – allow the poet full inhabitation of familial lived experience, as ‘The ear’s stylus / follows the rise and fall of accent’. Another turbulence is identified beneath the surface of familial history and, as in all these masterful poems, le travail humain does not dominate the natural world, but is explored compassionately in all its non-romanticised actuality, with it. g

Jennifer Harrison’s latest poetry collection is Anywhy (Black Pepper, 2018).

Squares and rectangles

Shapely poetry in three new volumes

Prithvi Varatharajan

Paul Hetherington’s Ragged Disclosures (Recent Work Press, $19.95 pb, 112 pp) choreographs its prose poems carefully, which is unsurprising from the co-author and co-editor, respectively, of a scholarly book on prose poetry and Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (both 2020). His new collection employs a lyric-dramatic mode, which Fernando Pessoa described as ‘lyric poetry put into the mouths of different characters’. It features a ‘he’ and a ‘she’ with a ‘shared / Australian vernacular’, in a long, glancing dialogue. These appear most direct in nine ‘Ragged Disclosures’, each comprising three square poems which are bordered and interlinked. ‘Ragged Disclosures 1’ offers a clue to the text: ‘Their ragged / intersections make an unjoined, / searching rapport.’ The poems between these seem to represent this ‘searching rapport’ through shared experience in Rome, Venice, and various other locales, with pronominal shifts to ‘I,’ ‘we’, and ‘you’. The language is introspective and brims with feeling, as here in ‘Snow’:

They read Chekhov. Words bring snow and a view of a tangled orchard. Ghosts haunt the trees, their own speech fails to catch, the air is chary of sunshine. Someone is playing backgammon as centuries weigh …

It can be vivid, as in ‘Sidling’, which shows the text’s preoccupation with (often ‘unjoined’) time: ‘A flight of birds; an updraught of air. I watch the estuary / fade; handle my arms, feel your touch on my skin like / drapings of silver water – a few hours, a decade ago.’ Square and rectangular poems, columns of text bordered left and right, and poems within encompassing ‘walls’ – likely connoting restriction – abound. One anomaly is ‘Francis Bacon Triptych’, where a stanza’s walls don’t meet, suggesting aesthetic/emotional ‘slippages’ (the section title) or ‘disclosures’. Another is a sequence of square prose poems with a disorderly final two lines, skittering abruptly out of bounds. It is hard to recall another collection where material surrounding the text felt so important to meaning. The afterword, echoing the blurb, states that Ragged Disclosures explores the prose poetry sequence in relation to ‘the current climate emergency and the COVID-19 pandemic’, focusing on ‘intersubjectivity’, ‘human intimacy’, and ‘the meshing of time and space’. This would have been better as a foreword, to help any intimidated readers grasp the formal and thematic contexts. While I have no illusions about the budgets of small poetry presses, a graphic treatment of sections (like the section pages in Bella Li’s Theory of Colours, 2021), or the use of extra blank pages, would have better supported the sustained reading that this complex work requires.

Much of John Foulcher’s Dancing with Stephen Hawking (Pitt Street Poetry, $28 pb, 79 pp) is crafted meticulously, with care given not only to sound but to the weighting of each word. The final stanza of the first poem, ‘Facing Medusa’, is exemplary:

If I’m quick, perhaps I’ll slip from her stare and catch the world spinning forever, see always the wind-driven trees, the silk, crumpling ocean, convulsions of rain, sunlight salting the waves, the birds like an ink-spatter. No matter, I am here. I will turn, take one step.

Note the tight confluence of imagery and sound (soft and hard phonic contrasts, and assonance, in the vivid ‘silk, crumpling ocean, convulsions’; the alliterative and graphic ‘sunlight salting’) and its delicate but effective binding (e.g. half-rhyme ‘forever’ / ‘matter’; internal rhyme ‘ink-spatter’ / ‘matter’; the assonant echo in ‘matter’ and ‘step’).

The collection’s subjects are various, but memory is a constant. This is the work of an older poet, reflecting on a life’s experience. The end of the final poem, ‘Revising Casuarinas’, addresses this aphoristically: ‘I think of my poems, how time will burn them. / What’s gained, other than all that I’ve learned?’ Several refer to pop culture: David Bowie; Jurassic Park; the astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Mike Collins, and Bill Anders; the titular Stephen Hawking. Foulcher consciously blends the ‘high’ culture of poetry, Greek mythology, and the Bible – in one instance via Nietzsche – with the (televised) ‘low’: a method I now associate with an older generation.

‘Running Towards Elizabeth’ and ‘The School Band’ represent adolescence awkwardly. The latter recalls a cool bass guitarist friend leaving a party, ‘his arm around the busty girl / who tinted us with just a glance.’ The dated language results in unintentional kitsch.

The middle section, ‘The Theory of Anything,’ contains prose poems in an ekphrastic sequence, written in response to Gregory Crewdson’s 2017 photography exhibition Cathedral of the Pines These are interspersed between short lyrics titled ‘Standing’, ‘Sitting’, and ‘Lying’. The prose poems respond obliquely to these

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