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Dropbear
by Evelyn Araluen

An innovative collection of poetry and prose from a vibrant new Indigenous voice on the Australian literary scene.

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Overview

I told you this was a thirst so great it could carve rivers.

This fierce debut from award-winning writer Evelyn Araluen confronts the tropes and iconography of an unreconciled nation with biting satire and lyrical fury. Dropbear interrogates the complexities of colonial and personal history with an alternately playful, tender and mournful intertextual voice, deftly navigating the responsibilities that gather from sovereign country, the spectres of memory and the debris of settler-coloniality. This innovative mix of poetry and essay offers an eloquent witness to the entangled present, an uncompromising provocation of history, and an embattled but redemptive hope for a decolonial future.

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Judges' comments, The Stella Prize

‘Dropbear is a breathtaking collection of poetry and short prose which arrests key icons of mainstream Australian culture and turns them inside out, with malice aforethought. Araluen’s brilliance sizzles when she goes on the attack against the kitsch and the cuddly: against Australia’s fantasy of its own racial and environmental innocence. She revels in difficult questions like “Can’t be lyric if you’re flora, right/Can’t be sovereign if you’re fauna, right?” And “Humans…did you really think all the Bad Banksia men were deadibones when they went to the bottom of the sea…?” Acerbic, witty, and with no reverence at all for the colony, Araluen remembers those dispossessed and voiceless, just as she predicts a hard-won future for her children – “look at this earth we cauterised/the healing we took with flame/I will show them a place/they will never have to leave.’

Judges' comments, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards

‘This is a fierce debut from Evelyn. Her poetry, prose, and short form non-fiction meticulously unravels the myth-making of modern Australia. This work is a powerful act of sovereign resistance, breaking open the intersections of power, race and colonial fantasy. In this beautifully written and carefully constructed collection, she writes from her own embodied Black experiences offering the reader a demonstration of the power of the Black writer.’

Alison Whittaker

‘You know what to expect of a poet like Evelyn Araluen. Her verse has an unrivalled and merciless clarity of expression and purpose. In Dropbear, she peers through her subjects, right into you – the reader. Evelyn drops her words over gazes and shoulders like a heavy blanket – obscuring or warming, it’s up to you.’

Craig Santos Perez, Professor in the English Department at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa

‘In this collection, Evelyn Araluen lovingly honours ancestors and country, while she relearns the Aboriginal languages of place and home. At the same time, she ardently critiques settler colonialism, Australiana kitsch, and empty acknowledgements. Throughout, her voice rises and falls like the landscape, her sentences carve the page like rivers, and her words burn a pattern across time like fire. “These are the dreamings we have now,” she tells us. Listen closely, reader. “Listen to the end.”’

Jeanine Leane

‘Dropbear pushes genre boundaries and, more importantly, brings a rich intertextuality of entanglement – the messiness of the relationship between us and the history of the country that we can’t change and shouldn’t ignore.’

Billy-Ray Belcourt

‘The rigorous studies of language and colonial inheritance and political refusal in this collection are infused with a grace and ambition that wowed me. Dropbear acts as a testament of what has happened and what is yet to come. An important debut!’

Natalie Harkin

‘Evelyn Araluen dares to conjure old spectres, trope-busting her way through beloved Australian literary archetypes that still feed and sustain hallowed colonial fantasies and fixed-imaginings. This is an exquisite work of (un)reckoning and refusal where lessons and secrets reveal to unsettle and reclaim. A lasting imprint has been cast, storied with unnerving wit and wisdom and a heart so fierce and wide-open that we too love, pain, desire, and rupture through it all.’

Tony Birch

‘Dropbear is a remarkable work. The poems spark with energy and life. Araluen's is a dynamic voice that demands to be heard.’

Michael Williams, Sydney Writers' Festival

‘Evelyn Araluen, right out of the gate with her first book, has shown itself to be a writer of formidable power and grace. You'll never see Snugglepot and Cuddlepie in the same way again. This is an electrifying debut.’

Annabel Crabb

Chat 10 Looks 3

‘Funny, savage and really insightful.’

John Kinsella, poet

‘A book-work of incredible depth and complexity...Dropbear can teach us all if we are willing to learn how to read, to listen, to comprehend.’

Aniko Press

‘A spectacular debut collection’

Kaz Cooke

‘Makes me feel, variously: awed, amused, tickled, confronted, told, envious. So, so smart.’

Evelyn Araluen talks 'Dropbear'

Evelyn Araluen

Evelyn Araluen is a Goorie and Koori poet, editor and researcher. Born and raised on Dharug Country and in the broader Western Sydney Black community, she now lives on Wurundjeri Country where she works as a lecturer at the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts and Cultural Development, as a co-editor of Overland Literary Journal and Chairperson for the Board of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies. Her debut poetry collection, Dropbear, won the 2022 Stella Prize and the Australian Book Industry Award’s 2022 Small Publisher’s Adult Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the premier’s awards of New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. Her work has also received the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize and a Melbourne Prize Career Development Award.