Holocene Pointbreaks

Shortlisted, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2025, Poetry

Holocene Pointbreaks presents a triptych of long poems that veer physically, temporally, and textually across the lands of the Dharawal and Eora Nations. From morning reflections on Australia's most polluted urban waterway, the 'Cooks River', to a discursive rumination on the history of whaling from the cliffs of Kamay, and an archival interrogation of Australia's colonial 'coalture' on the NSW South Coast, the three 'drifts' gathered here weave the poet's own bodily thought-steps to a socio-historical critique of three 'resources' key to the early colonial project: water, whales, and coal.

As an Eco-Marxist experiment in poetic composition, or poetic composting, these local histories are further drawn into conversation with the transnational free-market forces that shaped them. Through this stratigraphic interpretation of 'place'—one where the poet's own relation to different social, cultural, and historical strata is brought into question through a network of exchange—Holocene Pointbreaks points toward a type of eco-antipoetics: an interrogation of not only human and nonhuman relations, but the very nature of nature, and what it means to write 'ecopoetry' as a settler on the unceded lands of First Nations People.