Second Fleet Baby

Description

A poetry collection that explores the connections between mothering, healing, history and inheritance. Second Fleet Baby examines birth and motherhood, with a consciousness that spans centuries. This poetry draws on the energies of 18th Century English convict women, including Rhook's own ancestors, to open raw questions of belonging. How might a settler reconcile the violence bound up with their role populating stolen land with the love and euphoria that can flow from parenthood? Intergenerational ties are traced through the soft weapons of the body, connecting the intimacies of nation-making with the politics of reproduction in lavishly personal ways. Through stories of childhood, of fertility, and of nurturing new life during a pandemic, the patriarchal weight of history is cast off and origins are pulled 'from the seabed to the surface'.

Nadia Rhook is a non-Indigenous historian and poet, born in Naarm/Melbourne and currently living in Boorloo/Perth. She has a PhD in History from La Trobe Univiersity and lectures in History and Indigenous Studies at the University of Western Australia. Her poetry appears in various journals and anthologies including Cordite Poetry Review, Peril Magazine, Mascara Literary Review, Westerly, The Enchanting Verses Literary Review, Authora Australis, Twice Not Shy- One Hundred Short Short Stories (Night Parrot Press) and What We Carry- Poetry on Childbearing (Recent Work Press). Second Fleet Baby is her second poetry collection.

'In these wide-ranging, self-questioning, imaginative poems, Rhook tracks how colonisation works against and through the bodies of women. The poems are shaped by a rare combination of judgement and compassion.' --Lisa Gorton 'Extraordinary craftswomanship, tender yet piercing stories of nation-building and child bearing, intricately woven together by the hands of an astute and fearless poet.' --Elfie Shiosaki