A HISTORY OF THE TANAMITE PEOPLE
Winner of the Harri Jones Memorial Prize for Poetry 2017

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A PREFACE (MY SPEECH AT THE NEWCASTLE POETRY PRIZE CEREMONY):
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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.
     On the page, each line of this poem is preceded by a number. The numbers are seemingly part of a sequence. However, the full sequence doesn’t exist. When read aloud, though, I found the ‘flow’ of the poem was better without the interruption of the numbers, so they will not be read out here.
     I find I am ever seduced by my own wish for cohesion in an irremediably fractured world.
                                                                                                – JF

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#5       Rain is irregular and thus the Tanamite people mapped their thoughtlives by watersources.

#102   They invented no word for colour, only colour words.
 
#103   Thus blue and sky is double water: water-water.
 
#82     Thirst is historical.
 
#17     Before the pipeline and after the pipeline, work.
 
#9       The Tanamite people are credited with the invention of the constant request as work.
 
#35     Sometimes the water is only underground.
 
#11     This became a much-repeated fact of the Tanamite people.
 
#14     The use of a white pen to render such histories necessitates black paper.
 
#82     Marks stayed on the faces on the Tanamite people.
 
#95     One night there was a windfall, late by several centuries.
 
#12     The divisive windfalls are legendary among the Tanamite people.
 
#37     Figure one: an entanglement.

#39     Possibly because of the piping-in of the fizzydrink.

#23     Might, maybe, possibly, and perhaps are thoughts entirely strange to the necessities of a thirst culture. 

#40     The hot stretches of the day; the short phantasms of the night.
 
#53     The Tanamite people touched all plants with their feet.
 
#34     If you think you understand thoughtmaps.
 
#71     If you think you understand how a man sends his penis underground to reach a number of distant women.
 
#3       The Tanamite people went to rest in trees; clevermen went to rest in the best trees.
 
#68     Televisions on pension days and Toyotas on royalty days.
 
#41     If you think you understand thirst.
 
#103   Too few a band of Tanamites becoming worn with digging precipitates a final retiring forever to trees.
 
#79     Ochres, sand, feathers, charcoal, and flowers are traditional foods of the Tanamite people.
 
#80     Researchers continue to be confounded by their survival mechanisms.
 
#90     Figures in the sorry camps at dawn; figures in the rockcaves following the children home at dawn.
 
#25     The Tanamite people converse with sites in a manner researchers are anxious to observe.
 
#31     Such songs evaporate when a people get a new thirst.
 
#19     The pipelines continue to rupture and continue to be repaired, and other such thimblefuls. 

#75     Unrecorded feats of loaves and fishes evade the observations of the researchers.
 
#86     Unrecorded feats of people-moving in single royalty Toyotas evade the observations of the researchers.
 
#16     Muscle hard as rock on the right side of the body of the Tanamite people.
 
#124   If you think you understand digging.
 
#140   If you think you understand black paper.
 
#86     The U shape can be plural.
 
#114   Certain hollows of the thoughtmaps began to draw three-humped creatures, and drown them.
 
#39     Figure two: a refusal.
 
#43     They pulled bones out of their parched skins.
 
#76     They ground their skins pale with a hankering practice both cunning and confused.
 
#30     Shapes etched in caves depict the coming thirst and the thirst historical.
 
#112   One such figure has a huge mouth and a throat like a needle.
 
#102   Dark lakes bloomed in hazy country like a bad watercolour.
 
#148   “Never give a man a drink without taking one of his countries.”
 
#149   Surely you have heard this proverb arising from the history of the Tanamite people.
 
#1       Histories such as this are to be mistrusted. 

Obligation / Cordite
The mattress / Poetry Shelf
The kids / Exostale: Chrestomathy
First loss / Tuesday Poem
They could have stayed forever / Tuesday Poem
Bookcase full of closed books wants to sing / Tuesday Poem
Man in space talks to the stars / Tuesday Poem
Young woman talking to a difficult poem she has loved for many years / Best New Zealand Poems 2011
Theory of light / Best New Zealand Poems 2008
Carpet talking to the mother's feet / Turbine 2010
Lake and On the role of the master / Turbine 2009
Fingernails / Snorkel #11
Mount Cook / Snorkel #9
Makara / Sport 28
Two dreams in which things are taken / Duets chapbook series