Blak Beauty, Blak Ocean

Ellen van Neerven

An influential writer who has been important to my work and the work of many others is Dr Romaine Moreton. Romaine is from the Goernpil people of Tjerangeri/Stradbroke Island of southeast Queensland and the Bundjalung people of northern New South Wales. Romaine grew up in a farming family who moved to the South Coast town of Bodalla on Yuin Country in south coast New South Wales.

A writer of poetry, prose and film, Romaine’s words come alive on the page and on stage with rare quality that most do not reach. Her spoken word performance style is smooth and distinct, offering a lasting connection of music and story.

With the poem “Blak Beauty,” Dr Romaine Moreton demonstrates her power as one of our most important Sea Country poets. “Blak Beauty” first appeared in her collection Post Me to the Prime Minister (2004) published by Jukurrpa Books/IAD Press – an Indigenous-owned press, founded in the 1970s in Mparntwe. Along with seminal works by the beloved Lisa Bellear: Dreaming in Urban Areas (UQP, 1996) and beloved Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert: Black woman, black life, (Wakefield Press, 1998), Romaine’s literary contribution at the turn of the century opened a space for Blak women voices in poetry which can be deeply felt today.    

The poems evoke vivid images of mud crabs, moons, and sea birds. Poems in this collection were recently celebrated in Fire Front: First Nations poetry and power today (2020) edited by Alison Whittaker and an exhibition titled Blak Beauty: Poetic Itineraries of Aboriginal Australia (2022) held at La Chapelle de Clairefontaine, France.

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“Blak Beauty” is an individual poem I return to often. The movement of the work itself mirrors the movement of the ocean, as lines flow like waves, some bigger than others. Romaine writes ‘my blood is both the ocean/and the tree,’, , asserting that there is no distinct separation between what is on land and what is on water, it is all Country, and it is all connected.¹ 

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In Romaine’s poem, belonging and survival are entwined; ‘Blak’ is ‘the blood of the wallaby[,]’ it is the mother of pearl’ as well as ‘the shell of the oyster,’ ‘the paw of the warrigal’.² It is all these things and more. The lines of this text bring sharp focus to the specific localities of Goernpil and Bundjalung. Both mobs that Romaine Moreton belong to are situated in the easternmost parts of the coast of Australia—one island and one mainland.

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To read a work by a First Nations poet from so-called Australia, it is useful to read with the poet’s Country front-and-centre in mind, especially if the work invites evocation of Country.  In the lines, ‘I hang like clouds/and promise nothing/I tamper like the cyclone,’ there is a suggestion that the poet is as awesome, unstoppable, unpredictable, and powerful as Country itself.³ A Blak woman who is aware of her sovereign power is a threat to Empire; ‘I shatter like the earthquake/ ripping to the core’.⁴

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Romaine’s work holds powerful influences on acknowledging and honouring the nourishment of the collective power of community and the connection of Country through the assertion of a Blak spirituality. in. This poem taught me the power of finding a mode of expression that can feel both like an oceanic roar and a reflective silence.

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