Word Bank

War Cry, Poinciana, Collective Experience, Inclusive, Anglocentric vs Aboriginal

Brief Description

The digging up of the past to uncover the truth of Aboriginal Australia for present and emerging members of the community. We are invited into the endless battle for justice and equality through inclusive language.

This is a poem that works on two levels.

Literally, the poet is describing an excavation that brings to the surface the bones of the long-buried dead.

Metaphorically, she is commenting on the way in which an ancient culture (the repetition of the word ‘boomerang’ implies that this is a reference to Aboriginal people) has been ‘suppressed’ by a new culture and will one day rise up to combat that suppression.

The poem’s tone is negative and critical: the final line, ‘there is blood on the truth’, reads like a warning that a time of reckoning will come. The poem builds slowly to this point, beginning with inclusive language (‘let’s dig up the soil’) to involve the reader on the side of the excavators.

The image of the boomerang is important – it stands for the idea that you can attempt to destroy a culture, but if it is strong enough it will always return.

Loss of connection to culture 

Strong refers to ancestors

"boomerangs", "rising warriors", "bodies of our ancestors"

A strong connection to land

"soil", "poinciana", "hot wind", "dust storms", "excavation holes"

Loss of culture is the motif

"even when the language is changed"

Annotations

Analysis table

Truth telling for reconciliation

In contemporary Australian society reconciliation with Aboriginal people will only be achieved when an accurate and true history of the traumatic early settlement and contact is acknowledged. We see the need for facts and truth telling about the past in Ali Cobby Eckermann’s poem Unearth which begins with an invitation or call for us all to learn the true history of European settlement of Australia. The contraction ‘let’s’, employs the collective pronoun 'us' to suggest that all Australians need to know a truthful history. The choice of the word ‘excavate’ encourages a factual and objective examination of historical fact. The poet makes a strong connection between the past and the present through auditory imagery that links ‘the sounds of warriors echo’ and the next line ‘a people suppressed by dread’. The poet makes clear the plight of contemporary Aboriginal people is intrinsically connected with the past. The emotive metaphor in the final line of the poem ‘there is blood on the truth’, is a high modality statement that leaves no doubt that the past and the truth must be acknowledged. Unearth is a powerful call for past wrongs to be exposed and acknowledged as a way forward in the reconciliation process.