Second Fleet Baby

A poetry collection that explores the connections between mothering, healing, history and inheritance.

Second Fleet Baby examines birth and motherhood, with a consciousness that spans centuries. This poetry draws on the energies of 18th Century English convict women, including Rhook’s own ancestors, to open raw questions of belonging. How might a settler reconcile the violence bound up with their role populating stolen land with the love and euphoria that can flow from parenthood? Intergenerational ties are traced through the soft weapons of the body, connecting the intimacies of nation-making with the politics of reproduction in lavishly personal ways. Through stories of childhood, of fertility, and of nurturing new life during a pandemic, the patriarchal weight of history is cast off and origins are pulled ‘from the seabed to the surface’.