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Dropbear
by Evelyn AraluenPrescribed for HSC English 2024–2027 (NESA) · Last reviewed Dropbear is the 2021 debut poetry collection of Evelyn Araluen, a Goorie and Koori poet raised on Dharug Country.
Summary
Dropbear is the 2021 debut poetry collection of Evelyn Araluen, a Goorie and Koori poet raised on Dharug Country. Blending lyric, satire, parody and memoir to turn settler Australiana against itself, it won the 2022 Stella Prize and is studied in HSC English Extension 1 in the elective Hybrid worlds.
Dropbear is the debut collection of Evelyn Araluen, a Goorie and Koori poet, editor and academic, Bundjalung-descended and raised on Dharug Country in western Sydney. Published by University of Queensland Press in 2021, it won the 2022 Stella Prize, the first year poetry was eligible, and it was written across the twin catastrophes of the 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires and the onset of the pandemic.
The book is built in three movements, Gather, Spectre and Debris, which loosely trace a passage from gathering story and Country, through confronting the ghosts of colonial history, to sifting the aftermath. It is hybrid at every level: it splices lyric poetry, prose poem, all-caps typographic assault, redaction, mock-scholarly footnote, satire and memoir into one book, and it builds nearly every piece out of somebody else's writing - the gumnut-baby idyll of May Gibbs, Dorothy Wall's Blinky Bill, the bush ballad, Kate Grenville's The Secret River - which it inhabits in order to turn against.
Key pieces include "Dropbear Poetics", where the icons of the settler nursery break loose and turn predatory; "The Trope Speaks", which personifies the settler literary convention itself; "To the Poets", a direct address to the appropriating writer; "PYRO", an all-caps bushfire poem; the memoir-essay "To the Parents"; and the tender lyric "See You Tonight".
Context
Evelyn Araluen is a Goorie and Koori poet, editor and academic, Bundjalung-descended and raised on Dharug Country in western Sydney. A co-editor of Overland, she wrote Dropbear from inside the Australian literary institution the book turns on. The collection was published by University of Queensland Press in 2021 and won the 2022 Stella Prize, the first year poetry was eligible for the award.
Two contextual pressures shape the book. It was written across the twin catastrophes of the 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires and the onset of the pandemic, so its collisions of form carry the weight of a present emergency. And Araluen grew up on the very Australiana she writes back to - May Gibbs, Blinky Bill and the bush ballad - and treats a colonial past that is also a literary past as demanding a literary resistance.
Themes and Techniques
The hybrid form is the argument. Araluen refuses a single genre and lets incompatible forms collide, so that meaning is generated in the seam between them: a children's fable turns carnivorous, and a mock-scholarly apparatus erupts into the vernacular it was built to exclude. Her own account of her method is that a colonial past which is also a literary past demands a literary resistance.
Every reconstruction is built from somebody else's text, and the parody is a hostile occupation of the source rather than homage. "The Trope Speaks" gives the settler convention a complacent consciousness of its own, so an argument about form arrives as comic character study, and other pieces turn Kate Grenville's The Secret River and the rhetoric of Cook's "discovery" against themselves until the settler archive testifies against its own mythology.
The collision of registers is deliberate and ethical. Blak English jostles mock-academic Latin; the all-caps howl of "PYRO" turns a crisis bulletin into a scream of grief for kin; and in "Dropbear Poetics" the escaped icon refuses the reader's expectations outright.
Yet the book's sharpest self-awareness is that it cannot escape the forms it attacks. In "To the Parents" Araluen concedes that her attempts at rupture often only rearrange what she inherited, and admits she grew up on the same books she now writes against. Beneath the satire runs grief and love for Country and kin, so the refusal of a single form is finally in service of something the settler forms could not hold.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Which course is Dropbear studied in for the HSC?
- Dropbear is studied in HSC English Extension 1 in the elective Hybrid worlds, which asks for a conceptual argument about how a text blends genres, modes and registers.
- Who is Evelyn Araluen?
- Evelyn Araluen is a Goorie and Koori poet, editor and academic, Bundjalung-descended and raised on Dharug Country in western Sydney. Dropbear, her debut collection, won the 2022 Stella Prize.
- What type of text is Dropbear?
- Dropbear is a hybrid poetry collection that splices lyric poetry, prose poem, typographic experiment, redaction, mock-scholarly footnote, satire and memoir into one book, built in three movements called Gather, Spectre and Debris.
- What are the main ideas in Dropbear?
- The collection turns the icons of settler Australiana against themselves through parody and intertextuality, while carrying grief and love for Country and kin shaped by the Black Summer bushfires and colonial history.
- What should students focus on when studying Dropbear?
- Focus on how the hybrid form itself makes the argument: how Araluen occupies inherited settler texts, collides registers such as Blak English and mock-academic Latin, and concedes her own entanglement in the forms she attacks.
Studying Dropbear for the HSC?
Dropbear is studied in HSC English Extension 1 in the elective "Hybrid worlds", which asks for a conceptual argument about how a text blends genres, modes and registers, works through intertextuality, parody and pastiche, and refuses to settle into a single category. BTA's expert English tutors work with students one-on-one on exactly that skill - find out more about English tutoring at BTA or explore our HSC English resources.
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