Tossed Up by the Beak of a Cormorant
Publisher: Fremantle Press
Published: July 2024
Genre: First Nations, Poetry
In 2021, I was lucky enough to attend the WA Premier’s Book Awards. Dr Nandi Chinna received the fellowship at that ceremony to spend time on writing development with First Nations writers around the Derbarl Yerrigan and the waterways of Fitzroy, including Martuwarra. Three years later, Tossed Up by the Beak of a Cormorant has arrived, written by both Chinna and Professor Anna Poelina, Elder and Guardian of Martuwarra. Upon reading, it’s clear their book is not just a passion project but an important fragment in a continuing, profoundly spiritual undertaking by those whose land it always was and those now just as indebted to its beauty and preservation.
The interplay between the work of Poelina (‘You need to form your own relationship with the river’) and Chinna (‘All my memories could end right here in caves of wet darkness’) is exhilarating. They are the guide and guided, knowledge and definition (Chinna’s ‘A balmy wind breezes from the main river’) versus wisdom (Poelina’s ‘Martuwarra Marturwarra flow free…Murtuwurra help us to see the we in me.’)
Here, Chinna is both the observer— indeed, the collection is replete with stunning imagery— and the ‘we’ mentioned above. She is the poet wanting not only to understand but also to build a deep, ongoing relationship with Aboriginal elders and the land itself.
Collections like this live and die on the authenticity of voice from the non-Indigenous perspective, and Chinna’s voice integrates wonderfully with Poelina’s. It’s a dialogue of two contrasting but parallel ways of seeing and types of being in connection, consultation, and reverence for the Kimberley’s Martuwarra Fitzroy River.
Tossed Up by the Beak of a Cormorant is a book to experience as much as consider, and while not wanting to give away the book’s ending, I do want to state just how much I very much enjoyed not just the works created, but the spirit in which they were written. May we all remain as open to the wonders of nature, acknowledgement and deep, meaningful human connection.