Structured as a sustained poetic conversation, False Claims of Colonial Thieves brings together Yamaji poet Charmaine Papertalk Green and settler poet John Kinsella to confront the history that Western Australia’s civic architecture prefers to keep decorative.

Their poems move through Geraldton and its surrounds: churches built over campsites, dams carrying family memory, mining country, wheat silos, wildflowers, tourist routes and the bureaucratic language through which theft is made to resemble development.

The collection’s force lies in its refusal to manufacture an easy harmony between its two voices. Papertalk Green writes from Country, kinship, inherited knowledge and the continuing violence of occupation; Kinsella answers from within settler history, attempting not to absorb her testimony but to remain accountable to it. Their exchange takes the form of yarning, response and counter-response—a method that allows disagreement, grief, accusation and recognition to remain active rather than being flattened into the vague national sacrament called “reconciliation.”

The book is for readers interested in First Nations writing, environmental justice and poetry capable of thinking through relation without pretending relation has already repaired anything. 

Magabala Books, 2024 reprint of the 2018 first edition. Paperback with light edge and shelf wear; clean and firm.