IT was seven years in the making.
The Commonwealth of Amnesia is a deeply personal collection of poems that explores Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon’s Croatian heritage and the “forgotten histories” and hardships Croatian immigrants faced in Australia.
It all began in America when Dr D-Napoleon was working at a Writing Centre and saw her colleague making erasure poems—blacking out and removing words from prosaic, utilitarian documents to create something new and strangely moving.
“I came up with the idea of using erasures as a form to show the ‘erasure’ and forgetting of important history,” Dr D-Napoleon says.
• Fremantle poet and songwriter Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon. photo by Brett Leigh Dicks
“Being an Australian of Croatian descent I wondered if there were any interesting forgotten histories of Croatians in Australia, and lo and behold, I discovered World War I internment of civilians, race riots in Kalgoorlie, Australia’s most deadly domestic terrorist attack prior to Bondi, all hidden, all summarily forgotten.”
After successfully applying for a PhD in Creative Writing, the Fremantle poet returned home to start her mammoth erasure project.
She spent five years creating emotive works of poetry by unearthing and deconstructing newspaper articles from the Trove archive, and legislative documents like the original White Australia policy and even a song from the Victorian State Library archives.
“One whole year of that time, I got up and worked from 9am to 5pm at my desk creating poems by erasing and cutting up documents,” she says.
One of her poems, Shot by Guard: Palimpsest, is about Tome Grubelic, who was interned at Holdsworthy Internment Camp in NSW.
“The only reason he was interned was the war paranoia that flooded the WA Goldfields and dobbed in WA ‘Austrians’ who were mostly Croatians and other minorities,” Dr D-Napoleon says.
“He got upset in camp when he received a letter from his wife saying she and his children were starving because he was interned. He walked towards the fence at the camp and was shot for ‘trying to escape’ but the poor man was losing his mind.”
Another poem, Long Night of Fear, is about Mrs Sarich, who ran and hid with her one-year-old child in Boulder cemetery while she watched the homes in the racist-named “Dingbat Flat” burn to the ground.
“I can’t imagine the fear, vulnerability and absolute terror she felt,” Dr D-Napoleon says. “A mob of 1000-2000 of her fellow Australians set the homes of Croatians, Slavs, Italians and others alight.”
The road to publication was an epic struggle in itself—it took Dr D-Napoleon another few years of rejections and re-working the manuscript to get it published as a 100-page collection by Rabbit Poets.
“The unique aspect of my collection is that I’ve given readers all the URL links or references, so they can seek out the original documents, read them and formulate their own responses to the texts,” she says.
With immigration once again becoming a political football, is Dr D-Napoleon worried history could repeat itself again?
“Always. History is a cycle,” she says. “Human nature remains the same, yet so does human courage, human empathy and good sense. If history shows us anything it’s that we must remain ever vigilant against the forces of hate, racism and xenophobia. As Martin Luther King said, ‘Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.’”
Presented by the Perth Poetry Festival, there will be a launch event for The Commonwealth of Amnesia on August 14 at 7pm at Ode to Sirens, 25 High Street, Fremantle. For more info see nataliedamjanovichnapoleon.net.
by STEPHEN POLLOCK