VPLA 2024
the body country

Title: the body country

Author: Susie Anderson

Publisher: Hachette Australia

the body country is an evocative exploration of a world that too often marginalises and the power of a land that can offer connection. A meditation of wandering and wondering on Country, inviting the reader to understand the complexities and changing forms of self and love.

A Wergaia and Wemba Wemba woman, Susie Anderson captures profound meaning in moments often lost in the busyness of a day, encouraging us all to stop and allow ourselves the space to notice. To notice the shape of a mouth as it says goodbye; the colour of the sky as you fall in love; the way a steering wheel is turned carelessly after many wines; the crunch of dry ground after drought; the smell of fire on the wind; the movement of ants before rain; the power a word, a dress, a piece of art can give to run towards something new.

These are poems that take us across rural and urban settings; from the personal to the universal, from looking inward to mapping the land and always bringing us back to the Country that connects us all.

Photography by Sarah Walker

Judges’ report

In the body country, Susie Anderson traces the boundaries and contours of the body and of Country, while reflecting on their interrelationship. Spiritual invocations of Country are paired with confessional domestic realism, giving the collection its combined sense of inclusivity and intimacy. The writing is assured, with a light, deft touch brought to word choice and lineation. A core strength of the collection lies in its range of tones. The poems switch between humour, domesticity, and intimacy, and contain sudden and memorable lines. We were struck by the interplay of different conceptions of time in this collection. Minimal, short-line texts – which Anderson refers to in her afterword as ‘essay threads’ – wend like a river around poems with a more immediate, conversational syntax. This is an immediately engaging, and deeply reflective, collection.

Extract

embrace

when I return the air bites
asking where you been
bush nags my clothing and
each prickle torn from shoelace
stings punishment for absence
mist rolls across mountain
named by homesick Scottish
it’s been Gariwerd longer
morning sunbeams whisper
willy wagtail gossip
every rustle makes me jump
I thought no one was around
but there always was someone here
timeless mountain range
shoulders this land I love sitting still and solitary
inhale                      exhale
nothing else is quite so fixed
heavy with thousands of years
become part of atmosphere

*

sunday feeling

evening sunset by the lake sent
shadows through half-clothed trees
maybe fire burning bright beyond town
but mum said it was just paddocks gleaming
shepherd’s delight. faded signs
in twilight, broken play equipment
and rickety fences reminded us
everything was wrong in the world.

winter had been dry and town was crunchy
the paper said children under five
wouldn’t know what rain was. no river
water flowed and trees shed crispy
bark broke well underfoot.

mum brought presents from the city, but
instead of newness, everything could have
gone down with the sun. burn up
in f lames. no one else around
as we crunched leaves, an empty sunday
walk through rundown tennis courts
and abandoned CFA training areas.

*

leave early

we always sat with the boys
up back of the bus. our world neat
paddock grids, edges ever visible.

fire season years later blew through
boundaries. wind changed direction
and the plan was leave early.

no neighbours lost lives or houses
but land incinerated hundreds.
sheep burnt before their time.

farmers dug pits of blackened soil
excavating earth for charred carcasses
unaware what they had already extracted.

similarities so small now, distant
and past. our differences spread out
across years taking up space

boys from the bus now horrified
grown men digging mass graves
gathering remains with tractors.

*

the body was just a temporary, lonely container that I happened
to be borrowing 

the book meant the body was container for the self
I feel like self is slippery and wants to be untethered
from the world
will do anything it can to get liminal

the self wants to know what the light was doing

how shadows fell

how clouds opened

how sun felt on skin

About the author

Susie Anderson writes from the nexus of compassion and resistance. Her poetry and nonfiction are widely published online and in print, such as in Archer Magazine, Artist Profile, Artlink, un Magazine, Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia and in many poetry anthologies. In 2018, she was runner-up in the Overland Poetry Prize and awarded the Emerging Writers Fellowship at State Library Victoria; in 2019, she was awarded a Writers Victoria Neilma Sidney grant and was a recipient of the Overland Writers Residency. In 2020, she edited the online journal, Tell Me Like You Mean It Volume 4, for Australian Poetry journal and Cordite Poetry Review.

Her professional practice is as a digital producer in the arts and creative industries ranging from Sydney, London and Melbourne. Leveraging her position within institutions, she attempts to bring about change by uncovering and amplifying stories from her own and other communities. Descended from the Wergaia and Wemba Wemba peoples of Western Victoria, she currently lives on Boon Wurrung land in Melbourne.