On the face of things, Hope’s “Australia” (1943) is a mocking self-effacement of the colonial experience; but the poem is also “devastatingly ignorant of anything other than a whitefella, civilising view of settler culture” (Harrison 2004:287). One wonders on the affects that become available when Hope’s accusatory evisceration of Australian dumbness is misread, purposefully, so that his gaze no longer judges colonisers but instead is read as surveying colonised others.

&  ||  pointing screens through a scree of screens, to memorize our memories >>> a Gwanghwamun (vb.) of shuddering shapes, 2,000,000 light-cascading hands rising through the moth-like snow, falling soft in neon drift, our glowerings on stone-faced fields a weather, accretive, a citizenry at the feet of Bukhan Mountain