"Makin it right" through the poetry of Alf Taylor

Abstract

Although Australian indigenous poetry is often overtly polemical and politically committed, any reading which analyses it as merely propaganda provides only a small window on it. By presenting the verse of Alf Taylor collected in Singer Songwriter (1992) and Winds (1994) and discussing it in the context of the wider social and cultural rnilieu of the author, my essay aims to show its thematic richness of indigenous poetic expression. Indigenous poets have, on the one hand, undertaken the re­ sponsibility to strive for social and political equality, as is generally believed, while on the other, they have produced powerful self-revelatory accounts of their own mental and emotional interior, which urges us to see their careers in a perspective much wider than that of social chroniclers and rebels.