First Nations poet Evelyn Araluen wins the 2022 Stella Prize with a 'wild ride' skewering colonial mythologies
- Written by Camilla Nelson, Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame Australia
First Nations poet Evelyn Araluen has won the 10th annual Stella Prize with a debut poetry collection that confronts the cultural evasions of an unreconciled Australia with a tender fury.
Australian poetics is the target of Araluen’s dark satire in Dropbear. Her poetry deftly dismantles the literary mythos that conjures the Australian landscape as ghostly, haunted and empty, or else reproduces it as a cultural commodity in the guise of “Australiana” kitsch.