"Ethnographies of Aboriginal peoples are a fiction, like any story. We writers who work in an ethnographic space both form and contrive these stories: inventing, selecting, narrating, magnifying, directing, and deflecting the reader’s attention. It is always an exercise of power.When I wrote this poem, I was thinking about the absurd certainty with which we declare our knowledge of an ‘other’, particularly an other whose experiences are so far from our own. I was also thinking about the romance of mythologisation, and the way ethnographies turn fragments of experience into cohesive narratives.I find I am ever seduced by my own wish for cohesion in an irremediably fractured world." – Newcastle Poetry Prize acceptance speech
