Modewarre: Home Ground

Modewarre is the indigenous Wathaurong word for musk duck. Through this icon of land and water, Patricia Sykes explores various histories – her own, her forbears, the wider histories of identity and place – in poems that are as concentrated as pearls. three roads meeting in the one bird: modewarre (the indigenous); biziura lobata (the colonial); musk duck (the common). What is home? What is identity? These poems set out on the winding paths of memory and aspiration in search of how these questions might be answered. Their context is local and universal, their voices restless and insistent, their themes as broad or as narrowly defined as the journey demands. The only certainty is that nothing is certain: because the syllables/on the page are not/the land beneath the name. Whether inquiring into the futuristic interventions of intra-uterine surgery, all the soft and hard arguments/living outside the placenta, or into the dispossessions of terrorism, who will provide/the next welcome planet? these poems seek to confront and understand the complex meanings of belonging.