First Nations Peace Poetics: In conversation

The Australian National Botanic Gardens sits at the base of Black Mountain on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country. With a living collection of over 78,000 native plants from across the continent, the gardens are a national meeting place for biodiversity, celebrating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people's custodianship and care of Country for millennia. In July 2024, the gardens became a national meeting place not only for plants, but also poets. Narungga poet Natalie Harkin, Gunai poet Kirli Saunders, Noongar and Yaruwu poet Elfie Shiosaki and Mununjali Yugambeh poet Ellen van Neerven met in the gardens to reflect on the theme of peace, in a poetry workshop with the First Nations writing community in the ACT and at a seminar hosted by the Australian National University. This in-conversation essay reflects the cross-pollination of their ideas at the seminar about how their writing could be re-envisioned as a practice of peace-making. It weaves into the essay readings of poetry at the seminar.