Ali Cobby Eckermann – February 12 2017

Ali is a celebrated poet and writer living in the ‘intervention-free’ village of Koolunga, South Australia, where she has established an Aboriginal writer’s retreat. A Yankunytjatjara / Kokatha kunga (woman) born on Kaurna land in the north-west desert country of South Australia, as a baby Ali was adopted into the Eckermann family. After failed attempts she was assisted by Link Up to find her mother Audrey, and four years later her son Jonnie. Her journey was supported by many members of the Stolen Generations. She regularly visits her traditional family in rural and remote South Australia, to learn and to heal. After spending nearly thirty years in the Northern Territory, Ali is currently researching Aboriginal massacres in South Australia. Her writing has garnered her many invitations to national and international literary festivals, including the prestigious Ubud Writers and Readers Festival held each year in Indonesia. Her poetry has been translated and published in Croatia, Indonesia, Greece and New Zealand. Her other works include the poetry collections Kami and Love dreaming & other poems, her first verse novel, My Father’s Eyes, and her memoir, Too Afraid to Cry.

RubyMoonlightRuby Moonlight
Magabala Books, 2012; ISBN 9781921248511

This verse novel centres around the impact of colonisation in mid-north South Australia around 1880. Ruby, refugee of a massacre, shelters in the woods where she befriends an Irishman trapper. The poems convey how fear of discovery is overcome by the need for human contact, which, in a tense unravelling of events, is forcibly challenged by an Aboriginal lawman. The natural world is richly observed and Ruby’s courtship is measured by the turning of the seasons.

LittleBitLongTimelittle bit long time
Picaro Press, 2009; ISBN 9781920957988

little bit long time, Ali Cobby Eckermann’s first poetry collection, takes as its subject the difficult history of Indigenous people since colonial times. Both the four decades of her own often hard and confronting personal experience, and the lives of Indigenous people over the last two hundred years are the furnace in which the steel of Ali Cobby Eckermann’s incisive poetic voice has been tempered. Her language has the sureness of one who both knows her subject matter intimately and is able to speak authentically, having reached some sort of resolution in both life and in art.’ – Terry Whitebeach