Aboriginal author and poet Ali Cobby Eckermann  discusses her award winning massacre verse novel Ruby Moonlight and shares how she feels, when she dares to venture outside her Aboriginal community into the mainstream. As a member of the Stolen Generations, Ali Cobby Eckermann found her birth mother at the age of 34. She learnt about the effect on her Yankunyjatjara family from the atomic bomb testing at Maralinga SA in the 1950-60’s and the disregarded deaths of her traditional people. Across Australia, most Aboriginal language groups continue to remember and recount their own stories of massacre.

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  Ali Cobby Eckermann

  won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry (NSW) for Ruby Moonlight (Magabala Books, 2012), a massacre verse novel. Ali’s publications include Too Afraid to Cry (Ilura Press: 2013), A Handful of Sand: Aboriginal edition of Southerly (co-edited with peer Lionel Fogarty: 2013).

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  Michael Farrell: Australian Unsettlement

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  Ali Cobby Eckermann: Give me back my mother’s heart

  This paper was presented in the panel ‘Contemporary Aboriginal Poetics’ at Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry.