False Claims of Colonial Thieves is a thought-provoking and intimate collection of poems by two veteran poets. Charmaine Papertalk-Green and John Kinsella structure their poetry like a conversation, with poems alternating and weaving together to form a shared history. Papertalk-Green is an Aboriginal woman of the Wajarri and Badimaya groups from the Yamaji Nation of Western Australia. John Kinsella has ‘colonisers as ancestors’. Through this collection of poetry they create a shared dialogue about an Australia both broken and unified.

These poems are personal histories and activism. Kinsella and Papertalk-Green tackle the legacy of colonisation, particularly the environmental and cultural destruction it has caused. Both poets are ardently anti-mining, and their poems are awash with images of brutality inflicted upon the aching earth. It is an earnest, and sometimes confronting read. However Paperbark-Green’s poems have a lulling rhythm that makes the material lighter and easier to digest. Her use of repetition and rhyme gives some of her poems a lyrical quality, reminiscent of oral storytelling. Her political poems are cutting and clever. Kinsella’s poems are complex and technical. He expertly draws together the breaking apart of the earth and social fragmentation. He philosophises on the nature of language and his images of the natural land are breathtaking.

Reviewed by Alexandra Irving