Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet and academic from south-west New South Wales. She taught Creative Writing and Aboriginal Literature for many years at the University of Melbourne, where she is First Nations Writer in Residence. Jeanine won the 2025 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for her collection of poetry, gawimarra gathering. My conversation with her was recorded on Bunurong Country and in Naarm, in the east Kulin nations.

I’m curious as to how you arrived at poetry as your medium. What calls you to that form?

I think like the brevity and freedom of poetry. It’s free verse and lyric or narrative and not confined by restrictions and there’s an immediacy to it. With poetry you can borrow snippets, or it can be very intertextual, in a way that’s quite brief. For instance, in the “Fortress Australia” poem in the collection, I don’t actually quote any song lyrics or poetry directly but I riff off the words of Australia’s myth-scape, like “fuck-this-union jack/this mate ship has sailed”.

Poetry can be very multi stylistic, a bit like a story can. Often, it’s very much not fictional, it’s based in reality, but it can sort of jump and be fragmented, and then it can get cohesive where it needs to. What I really like is a braided form of writing that moves between prosy passages.

Some of my poems are quite long and prosy and others are very short, as short as six lines, sometimes even two lines, while others are quite long.

Sometimes, before I write another poem, I’ll pause and think about the violence of the words upon the paper they are written on. I mean, that’s a poem in itself. I often write notes by hand.

How much do you feel the need to explain those references and intertextuality, especially when brevity is such an important part of your art? 

They are a paraphrase and first and foremost, or some sort of play or twist on the words. So, I think it’s up to the reader to look for those references, some of which are cross cultural. A lot of them are touching on Western culture, such as poetry from Dorothea McKellar or settler colonialism. Others are not. In “Oh Australia”, or “2020 Vision” or “Fortress Australia”, I’m making direct comments on the culture. “Fortress Australia” speaks about the government of the day and what happened to Brittany Higgins – that terrible thing about sexual misconduct in Parliament House.

This makes the poems contemporary, but they are also timeless. They speak very directly to events that were happening in 2021 and 2022. when I wrote them. At that time, there was a strange eclipse with the political weather. There was a big rise in white identity politics. There were lockdowns and a closing up of what’s meant to be a union. That’s why I wrote it that way. You know, a woman’s raped in Parliament House, under a hills hoist flagpole.

What role do you think poetry plays in today’s political landscape?

Potentially, quite a lot. I mean, it does depend on the poet what they want to do. All poetry is political, just as much as identity is. And all poetry comes from that platform, but some more overtly than others. And it depends on what the poet intends. I intend a lot of things. I do intend that political dimension, but it can be more multifaceted than that. Some of my poetry is overtly political, and depending on your intersections, your positionality, your cultural background, your history, all those intersections around ethnicity, culture, class, gender — all those are reflected in my poetry in some ways or other.

But Black lives still don’t matter. This is unresolved still and it flares up from time to time when there’s another Black death. That’s quite frequent, whether it’s here or abroad.

Can you tell us a little of your process? How do you go about crafting your poems? Do they emerge fully formed, or are they developed gradually, over time? Do you revise and revise?

So many of these poems were written just because I felt strongly about something. Some were written as part of commissions or invitations or some I wanted to structure it in a certain way because they were written in Wiradjuri.

But some emerge as longer pieces, some of them are prosy, and some of them are short and pithy. Like the one at the very end of the collection, that is:

… gather words
upon pages
untangle thoughts
make them speak …

That’s a four-line piece. I feel strongly about the kind of unevenness of a poetry collection that gives it a dynamic and a realism and a lyric that is something of itself, and that also is a bit more like life really, because it is often like that, very fragmentary in a way, but also cohesive, for all the fragments connect or are relational.

For those of us who write fiction, there is an opportunity to keep parts of ourselves hidden behind or within our characters. But I feel like you are laid bare in your poems: they invite me on a very personal journey that traverses your memory, family, Country, feminism, racism, the body, the self — and the experience of self within the political. I cannot imagine these poems any other way: there is so much power in your personal. But can you tell me what it feels like to open yourself to the world like this?

In the past, I have written fiction, realist fiction, or critique or non-fiction, but probably not as much lately. I feel that, with poetry, it is very personal and it’s obvious all the way through who the narrator is. You don’t necessarily have to out yourself in the way that you do in fiction. You do because you’re laying yourself bare, but it’s right up there from the start, so you can be quite polyphonic. Some of the poems in this collection are written in third person, quite a few in first person, and even a few in second person. But they’re all me. Sometimes I will withhold because you know that capacity, that economy and judiciousness that you can work towards with words. What I do say and what I don’t say are equally as powerful.

Your poem “They Said I Could Be a Feminist” starts with the line: “In the ‘80s they said I could be a feminist if I didn’t talk about Blackness”. In direct contrast to the idea of women of colour buckling and bending to fit white versions of gender and feminism, the Black women in your poems are incredible — their matriarchal strength oozes from the pages of the book. Do you see a future for feminism that celebrates this strength — and Blackness?

I think the whole thing needs to be rethought now. Even the name. We must consider the fluidity of gender and how the broader LGBTIQ+ community feels about this term. The name feminism suggests a binary, which is problematic. In terms of Blackness, I don’t think it’s changed that much. I think a better name is equalism.

What has it been like to learn Wiradjuri, your first language, as an adult?

I’m learning the Wiradjuri language because I didn’t grow up speaking that. There’s a language reclamation program for the Wiradjuri language through the TAFE there. It’s quite a big area, as you can see from the map, including the Three Rivers in New South Wales through to Dubbo on the north-western side of that.

But where I first started learning some language was through the late aunty Kerry Reed Gilbert, who was learning through aunty Elaine Lomas, who is a Wiradjuri elder and language custodian. I worked with Aunty Kerry on a project in poetry and first languages for Red Room Poetry in 2018 and some of the poems then went on for publication in language in 2019. Then I started putting together some poems from about 2021 or so onwards for a new collection, which became gawimarra gathering.

So, I’m trying to work with Wiradjuri language. I’ve been encouraged by my sister, my son and his partner. I’m doing the Certificate III now. There’s still a long way to go — I feel like I’m just a beginner but I have learned a lot.

When I was a child, nobody spoke Wiradjuri. Occasionally I might hear a few words, but on the whole people weren’t allowed to speak it. It was discouraged. My grandmother didn’t speak it after she married a settler. So, it’s something I always thought was missing.

I always felt connected with place, intergenerationally, but I think learning Wiradjuri does give me a deeper understanding of place. And of the relationality and the power of less is more. This language is much more direct, but very powerful. I’m just scratching the surface with it, and I’ve got a lot more practice to do.

I do feel it’s given me a broader appreciation of something that I had. But, you know, there was, like a lot of First Nations history, bits missing.

I want to continue my language journey, just speaking and using it in small but powerful kind of passages, a bit like some of the new work I did recently in for the museum in Albury, including a poem which is all in language, called “Nina”, or “Nin du, Nina”, you are here. It was very succinct but very powerful about country, and you could read it in a few words that were saying quite a lot. I included a brief explanation at the end in English, which doesn’t really ever translate, but it says Nina means here, you are here.

Image: a detail from the cover of gawimarra gathering