Books

Elfie Shiosaki
Refugia

Elfie Shiosaki’s new book of poetry, Refugia, is remarkable. Her scholarly archival reading of the military enterprise that was the “settling” of the Swan River Colony is an insightful glimpse into the nature of colonial invasion that melds with a profound utterance from self and Country that stretches and breaks any idea of the colonial lyric into something much more powerful.

With intense sensitivity, Shiosaki considers the colonial impact on the Beeliar hydrology, habitat, spiritual and material architecture of Noongar custodianship in the context of colonial-settler-military attempts at erasure. In tracing early Noongar protest, Shiosaki injects Noongar knowledges – and more northern Yamaji knowledges as well – with the immensity of the cosmos, bringing the stars, black holes, waterways and the ocean into a contact that is both generative and cataclysmic.

We journey with the body and spirit of the poet trying to find redress, to find answers from Country itself, across “bend”, “break” and “bud”, the three sections of the work. There is a desire, almost a compulsion, for an end to the grieving of the invasion. Wadjemup, sacred island site of a colonial prison for Aboriginal people, is spoken to with fires on the beach, just as marches along Riverside Drive in Perth (Boorloo) under the eyes of armed police connect the statistically staggering imprisonment of Aboriginal people, especially youth, in colonial jails now. Deaths in custody connect with the first years of the Swan River Colony.

In “Misunderstanding”, the statement that “our understanding was never friendly” frees the ongoing colonial manipulation of invitation and welcome arising from first-contact accounts that are at the core of a settler sense of justification and reconciliation. If friendship was offered, it was under a different set of terms of engagement. There was no friendship in the act of military invasion.

The incredible gift of this book with its search for justice, restitution and redress is that it suggests a healing might come when the colonial invasion mentality ceases. This cannot be stopped by exclusion but rather by change in how settler culture addresses its past and also the grief of Aboriginal people in deep and complex ways. In the poem “Grandfather”, an ancestor of Shiosaki indicated in a “snippet of conversation” with colonial ethno-manipulator Daisy Bates that “There has never been an attempt to annex neighbouring tribal territory” by Noongar peoples. Invasion mentality is colonial mentality.

This book should be read by anyone interested in true paths to justice. From such works, we might understand that the “ancient root systems” will bring the red eucalypt flowers and the Rio Tinto Tower will eventually give way to Noongar people being “reunited // in an historic reckoning” (“Refugia”). Noongar people will “rise from the ashes // rise above the colony // rise into stars” (“Noongar Rising”).

Magabala Books, 96pp, $27.99

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 12, 2025 as "Refugia".

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Refugia

By Elfie Shiosaki

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