The three winning poems, as with those on our shortlist, are vastly different in their aesthetics, but what unites them is a shared ethics of seeing the world and its sociopolitical constructs anew, and a searching for patterns that might make sense of what’s impossible to resolve – our shared, though disparate, existence in the Anthropocene.

A complete* collection of Australian Prime Ministers, Dave Drayton’s P(oe)Ms is the neat, satisfying, wordplay that haters of poetry (and me) often forget is its benchmark. These kinds of engaging, playful works are increasingly coming from younger poets – politically and technologically on top of it, and very present. Or is that prescient? Anyway, P(oe)Ms is funny. Very.

no mist no mystery no hanging rock only many girls white linen men with guns and harsher things white women

As a book with its institutional filters, Gularabulu can be a disquieting read. It is clad in notes: about Aboriginal English, explaining stories before they’re told, guiding pronunciation. Its transcription occasionally describes, rather than carries, Roe’s wordwork. His breaths, even background noises, are painstakingly noted. I describe this as poetry, perhaps incorrectly. Others call Gularabulu a story collection.

Indeed, the ‘janitorial ring’ of ‘traditional custodians of the land’ of which Flournoy complains in her article is part of the symbolic problem she later raises: the practice has become routine, rehearsed. I would say the practice has become strategically corrupted: pithy Acknowledgements, heartfelt and perfunctory alike, are equally capable of trying to dislodge Indigenous belonging when they suggest Indigenous relationship to land is ‘traditional’, managerial and ‘custodial’, or position our claim to sovereignty as ‘past-based’, ‘non-possessive’ and merely reparative.