Book chapter
"Dressed in Native Trees": Plants as Figures of Anti-National Resistance in Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Poetry
Global Perspectives on Nationalism, pp.243-259
Routledge, 1
2022
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Abstract
A prevailing impulse of Australian nationalism has been the appropriation of plants and other non-human life forms as symbols, icons, materials, and commodities in service to the ideals of the state. In particular, botanical nationalism places value narrowly on the beauty and serviceability of vegetal life. In contrast, the botanical knowledge embedded in Aboriginal Australian poetry provokes the human senses, encourages bodily participation, and recognises the significance of emotional identification with plants in dissolving the human-vegetal divide reinforced by nationalism. In this way, plants occupy a prominent place in the dissentive poetics of Aboriginal Australian writer-activists Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Lionel G. Fogarty. As literary ethnobotany, their poetry reclaims the transformative value of longstanding human-vegetal traditions based in Country and the Dreaming. In developing incisive critiques of Australian nationalism, Noonuccal and Fogarty look towards ancestral understandings, perceptions, and practices related to native plants, including trees, flowers, and herbs. Their botanical anti-nationalism recognises that plants and other beings belong to ancient kinship networks that vastly predate nationalist intrusions. This chapter argues that, in the form of literary ethnobotany, their anti-national poetics of dissent proffers a corrective to the erosion of plant-based cultural knowledge that attends the local and global loss of floristic diversity.
Details
- Title
- "Dressed in Native Trees": Plants as Figures of Anti-National Resistance in Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Poetry
- Creators
- John C. Ryan
- Publication Details
- Global Perspectives on Nationalism, pp.243-259
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Edition
- 1
- Identifiers
- 991013055104802368
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Business, Law and Arts
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Book chapter