Dropbear is a formally agile, ferocious poetry collection that takes aim at so called Australia’s big colonial lies and myths — and then refuses to replace them with anything comforting. Because, why should ongoing violence ever be comfortable?

Araluen writes across lyric, satire, archival fragments, and essayistic modes, exposing how nationhood is built through erasure and narrative control.

These poems are funny, angry, tender, and intellectually exacting. They interrogate land, language, pedagogy, and belonging without lapsing into moral instruction. What emerges is not a counter-myth, but an ask from the author to notice how culture trains us to look away, and how poetry can interrupt that training.

A landmark Australian collection that doesn’t ask to be admired — it asks to be read properly.