White on White

White on White's point isn't empathy or sympathy, it's unsettlement. And I don't mean discomfort, I mean the unstitching of white Australia from the idea that we ever 'settled' anything. Elvey uses words. And I mean uses like how I imagine them personified, waking up after she's had her way with them — no realigned chakras to help them back – wondering if they're still the same symbols they were before their appearance in this project of acknowledging white privilege. Although they lent their use willingly, they've awakened to an unmoored feeling not anticipated.

'What is it I take for granted? Skin. The body's fragile, necessary, and sensitive clothing marked by culture accrues value (or otherwise) in particular places for no good reason but history, and an obdurate maintenance of relationships of power and (dis)possession. Hoping to unsettle presumptions of superiority and their mingled threads of colonial violence, I am writing to access and decolonise a white settler unconscious. In limited ways, again and again, poem by poem, by collage, by prose approximations to poems, I am joining a small and growing throng of writers questioning whiteness.

This collection has been building for some years, prompted by thinkers and poets such as Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, and more recently Peter Minter, Natalie Harkin and Shane Rhodes. Minter writes of a 'vision of a decolonised Australia, a place where settler and Indigenous cultures have begun to find an existential common ground that is beyond postcolonial'. White on White takes a path through histories and incidents, familial, social, and historical, thinking whiteness, in the hope of opening towards that 'existential common ground'. – Anne Elvey