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Two Tongues
by Maria van Neerven

From the 2023 David Unaipon Award winner comes this powerful, poignant poetry collection that celebrates and reclaims Indigenous voices and language.

A$24.99

(Trade paperback)

Ships on 3/02/2026

Overview

Written with a tender love for her Yugambeh language, Maria van Neerven reflects on the legacy of colonisation and racism, and the aftermath of intergenerational harm. At the same time, she shines a light on the importance of family and culture, celebrating the Indigenous women who guided and taught her – extraordinary women filled with resilience and strength. In this way, van Neerven reclaims the stories of her ancestors, giving a voice to those who weren’t allowed one in the past. Two Tongues regathers what has been stolen to reassemble a life of compassion and – above all – love for family and Blak pride.

Details

Maxine Beneba Clarke

‘Two Tongues is a stunning, masterful debut. Tender and fierce, exacting and generous, these poems herald the arrival of an important new voice. In soulful poems that sing of family, culture, love and community, van Neerven deftly unpicks the brutal colonial stitches that bind this place to history’s lies, and lays bare searing, healing Blak truths.’

Andy Jackson

‘With defiant truth-telling and with immense heart, Maria van Neerven's poems are generous, uncompromising, humane songs that invite the reader to “surrender to the clay and ash / of this landscape” and to listen deeply. Unpretentiously inventive and utterly real, Two Tongues brings family, culture, politics and art into revelatory conversation.’

Mary Anne Butler

‘Maria van Neerven’s Two Tongues holds great loss and grief, joy and humour, sorrow and anger. But what pulses most powerfully through this collection is great love: of family, of community, of each other. Van Neerven reminds us that the shameful history of this country is always wound into the present, yet her poems resist the cliché of division, choosing instead to interrogate with intelligence and empathy.’

Judges' Comments, 2023 David Unaipon Award

‘This collection connects the reader into the world of the author in an incredibly visceral way whilst illuminating the broadest structures and attitudes that have impacted on Aboriginal people throughout colonisation, shown through exploration of generations of an Aboriginal family. The themes within the work of growing up, injustice, protest and forgiveness are crafted to provide a rich narrative thread.’

Maria van Neerven

Maria van Neerven is a Mununjali Yugambeh woman from south-east Queensland. She is a retired library technician who loves reading and writing poetry. She has been published in The Lifted Brow: Blak Brow (2018) and In Our Hands (2022), a collection of poetry from Elders and knowledge keepers. Maria was one of the four inaugural winners of the Mascara Varuna Writers’ and Editors’ Residency for her poetry in 2023, and also a 2024 Next Chapter Fellow at The Wheeler Centre. She has performed her work on stages across Alice Springs, Brisbane and Tokyo. Two Tongues is her first poetry collection.