An Incisive Indigenous Voice
Ali Cobby Eckermann. little bit long time. Australian Poetry Centre, Balclava, 2009. 

Reviewed by Terry Whitebeach

Ali Cobby Eckermann has burst onto the literary scene as yet another rapidly ascending Indigenous literary star.  She took the recent poetry festival at Castlemaine by storm with her strong, compelling, hard-hitting and heartful poems. Bob Adamson writes: ‘When I first heard Ali read these poems I wanted copies immediately so I could spread the word.’

little bit long time, Ali Cobby Eckermann’s first poetry collection, takes as its subject the difficult history of Indigenous people since colonial times.  Both the four decades of her own often hard and confronting personal experience, and the lives of Indigenous people over the last two hundred years are the furnace in which the steel of Ali Cobby Eckermann’s incisive poetic voice has been tempered.  Her language has the sureness of one who both knows her subject matter intimately and is able to speak authentically, having reached some sort of resolution in both life and in art. 

These poems are ‘the song of a soul that came through’, the distillations of one who has been as relentless in finding the true home of her particular voice and striking exactly the note to convey meaning and feeling as she has been in her search for identity and true home and family.

Witness the almost implacable strength of following lines:

and gain my strength

by skin,

What I need, the way we grieve, proper way out bush

kill hide hit deny

speak to that man, even that one

Grey bitumen

lies

dead

under galah

pink sky

These are the offerings of a writer who has journeyed with great determination through apparently irretrievable loss, through chaos, disintegration and desolation, who has harvested the gifts of insight and emotional and spiritual intelligence and compassion, and who now reveals these insights to the eyes and ears of others through lucid images and punchy language.  Nowhere is the cost of the personal journeys Ali Cobby Eckermann has undertaken and the rewards these journeys have yielded more succinctly demonstrated than in the final joyfully triumphant rhyming couplet of ‘First Time (I Met My Grandmother)’:

I’ll dance with mob on this red Land, munda wiru

place

I’ll dance away them half-caste lies ‘cos I got my

Nanas face!

Ali Cobby Eckermann, like so many Indigenous children, was removed from her birth mother and ‘grew up in the white man’s world’.  ‘Circles and Squares’ tells the story of her dislocation in relentless detail:

We lived in a square house we picked fruit and vegetables from a neat fenced square plot

we kept animals in square paddocks we ate at a

square table we sat on square chairs

I slept in a square bed

I looked at myself in a square mirror and did not know who I was

The poet then describes her reconnection with family who ‘gathered closely together by big round campfires … and slept in circles around our fires’, but the final lines of the poem make clear the cost of the early separation.

My heart is Round ready to echo the music of my

family but the Square

within me remains

The Square stops me in my entirety. 

Ali Cobby Eckermann looks clear-sightedly into her own and other people’s lives and unreservedly recounts the losses and the gains.  The realities are often hard to accommodate.  But these ‘poems of self compassion’ (to borrow the phrase) don’t preach; they invite us instead to unsettle our certainties and they compel us to consider the world in a new way.  In ‘I Tell You True’, the poet takes on the persona of someone in the thrall of alcohol, and challenges the reader:

So if you see someone like me

       Who’s drunk and loud and cursing

Don’t judge too hard, you never know

            What sorrows we are nursing.

Ali Cobby Eckermann’s poetry is as frank in its joys as in its sorrows, but there is nothing self-indulgent and maudlin about it. In common with the work of many Indigenous writers the poems are alive with humour and redolent with muscular strength: in ‘2 Pelicans’, for example, the poet pokes gentle fun at herself and her over-anxious attempt to find a spiritual sign of hope, after days of agonising worry at the hospital bed side of a seriously ill friend.

    I drive out to Amoonguna to tell the family he

is right

  I sit down with his Aunty, round the campfire, in

the night

 I ask her to explain the pelicans and the meaning

of the sign

She laughs and whispers ‘Arrangkwe just 2 pelicans

in the sky!’

Two aspects of the work that appeal to me greatly are the dynamic aural quality of the verse and its strong narrative strain.  Like Melbourne poet PiO’s work, these poems beg to be read aloud, so that actual people may be heard, speaking of actual situations, in country well known and well loved by them; country which generates a multitude of stories, from the appealing account of going to the ‘great shop’ to pick up a new baby sister, in ‘Karen’, to the bewildered, pained monologue of ‘Intervention Payback’, its fragmented and interrupted rhythms powerfully conveying the shock and disruption that have resulted from the Northern Territory Intervention.  From the opening, ‘I love my wife’, to the shocking finale, ‘I might hit her first time’, the narrative of violence perpetrated on Aboriginal people unfolds itself with devastating clarity.  Within the irrefutable logic of the narrative we come to understand how violence has bred violence.  I first heard Ali read this poem at Alekerange: it stopped people in their tracks.

little bit long way is also a book to take out bush with you; to sit quietly and look at the land, and ponder its simplicity and breadth, its mystery and efficacy.  The strength of Ali Cobby Eckermann’s connection to country is quietly but powerfully affirmed in such poems as ‘The Mountain’:

A bird comes.

I ask nothing

‘Dingo Eye’:

The dingo vanishes

with fading dusk

‘Shrine’:

I weight every stone

in my gaze

and ‘Messages’:

Every grain of sand in this

big red country

is a pore on the skin

of my Family

Nor does she shy away from the numinous, the multi-layered immanence of overlapping worlds: In ‘Cloud Storm’ the poet shows us ‘the cloud skin’ of ‘the oldest wedgetail in the world’ with a ‘string of men … resting on the eagles wing’, a mythogical context that makes sense of the world in which people often ‘sit broken together’ and ‘darkness waits’.  Such visions and realms offer more nourishing and sustaining realities, such as in ‘Black’, in which:

My nana opens windows

Weaving songs

And gently tells

Real myths.

Ali Cobby Eckermann is a graduate of Batchelor Institute’s Creative Writing program, which is where I first encountered her.   I was impressed then (as I still am) by her determination to give voice to her story, her insights and experience through art, and her dedication to her development as a writer.  She has another powerful and important book waiting in the wings, about growing up as a brown child in a white household: this book I am sure will have as big an impact as little bit long time.

Don’t read Ali Cobby Eckermann’s work if you want a comfortable ride, but if you are prepared to land on the bedrock of truth, to confront life with no holds barred, and if you’re ready to have your heart suddenly lifted by moments of lyricism and connection to country and to the mystery and miracle of life, you will find much to savour in little bit long way.

Terry Whitebeach writes novels, poetry, plays, biography, essays and reviews.  Her most recent published work was The Versatile Man, The Life and Times of Alexander Donald Pwerle Ross, Kaytetye Stockman. She coordinated Batchelor Institute’s inaugural Indigenous Creative Writing program.