This year, NAIDOC week is running from 4 – 11 July and focuses on the theme of Heal Country. Put succinctly, Heal Country ‘calls for stronger measures to recognise, protect, and maintain all aspects of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and heritage’; we recommend reading the full explanation behind the 2021 focus (and exploring how you can become more involved this NAIDOC week) here.

This week – and every week – we want to actively show our appreciation and respect to the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. In particular, we want to help recognise the amazing work of Australian First Nations creators (past and present) who continue to share their stories.

During NAIDOC week we’ll be highlighting some of the incredible and recently published works from First Nations authors. Today we’re focusing on works of poetry.

Here are five excellent collections to explore:

Whisper Songs by Tony Birch

In this stunning collection Tony Birch invites the reader into a tender conversation with those he loves - and has loved - the most. He also challenges the past to speak up by interrogating the archive, including documents from his own family history, highlighting forcefully the ways in which the personal is also intensely political.

Divided into three sections - Blood, Skin and Water - the poems in Whisper Songs address themes of loss (of people and place), the legacies of colonial history and violence, and the relationships between Country and memory. Whisper Songs reveals Birch at his lyrical and intimate best.

Drop Bear by Evelyn Araluen

This fierce debut from award-winning writer Evelyn Araluen confronts the tropes and iconography of an unreconciled nation with biting satire and lyrical fury.

Dropbear interrogates the complexities of colonial and personal history with an alternately playful, tender and mournful intertextual voice, deftly navigating the responsibilities that gather from sovereign country, the spectres of memory and the debris of settler-coloniality.

This innovative mix of poetry and essay offers an eloquent witness to the entangled present, an uncompromising provocation of history, and an embattled but redemptive hope for a decolonial future.

Homecoming by Elfie Shiosaki

Homecoming pieces together fragments of stories about four generations of Noongar women and explores how they navigated the changing landscapes of colonisation, protectionism, and assimilation to hold their families together.

This seminal collection of poetry, prose and historical colonial archives, tells First Nations truths of unending love for children-those that were present, those taken, those hidden and those that ultimately stood in the light. Homecoming speaks to the intergenerational dialogue about Country, kin and culture. This elegant and extraordinary form of restorative story work amplifies Aboriginal women’s voices, and enables four generations of women to speak for themselves.

Fire Front edited by Alison Whittaker

This important anthology, curated by Gomeroi poet and academic Alison Whittaker, showcases Australia’s most-respected First Nations poets alongside some of the rising stars.

Divided into five thematic sections, each one is introduced by an essay from a leading Aboriginal writer and thinker - Bruce Pascoe, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Chelsea Bond, Evelyn Araluen and Steven Oliver - who reflects on the power of First Nations poetry with their own original contribution. This incredible book is a testament to the renaissance of First Nations poetry happening in Australia right now.

Living on Stolen Land by Ambelin Kwaymullina

Living on Stolen Land is a prose-styled look at our colonial-settler ‘present’. This book is the first of its kind to address and educate a broad audience about the colonial contextual history of Australia, in a highly original way. It pulls apart the myths at the heart of our nationhood, and challenges Australia to come to terms with its own past and its place within and on ‘Indigenous Countries’.

This title speaks to many First Nations’ truths; stolen lands, sovereignties, time, decolonisation, First Nations perspectives, systemic bias and other constructs that inform our present discussions and ever-expanding understanding. This title is a timely, thought-provoking and accessible read.