Dark Secrets:
After Dreaming (AD) 1887-1961
A6 32pp ISBN 978-0-9807718-1-7
$9.90 including postage
Dark Secrets was WINNER OF THE 2010 SCANLON AWARD.
Leane also won the 2010 David Unapion Award.
This is a hard-hitting uncompromising look at white inscription of black history and experience in Australia. Leane’s work is direct, clear-eyed and pulls no punches. Her expression is direct and will certainly bring tears to the eyes of both black and white Australians - though possibly for different reasons. Leane’s is an original voice, informed by her research and by her heart.
About the Jeanine Leane
Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri woman from south-west New South Wales. She is currently employed as a research fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). AIATSIS is a premier national multidisciplinary research institution focusing on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. It has a special mission to provide leadership and excellence in undertaking, promoting and facilitating leading edge research in Australian Indigenous Studies and increasing understanding of Indigenous cultures and societies within Australia and internationally.
Jeanine has completed a PhD on twentieth century images and representations of Aboriginal Australians by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal authors in the genre of social realism. She has been a university academic in the area of teacher education and a secondary school teacher of literature and history. Her research interests concern the interface between literature and history, the power of language and representations constructed from a particular cultural standpoint and the role of literature in communicating the consciousness of one particular cultural group of another.
Jeanine’s prose and poetry have been short-listed for the 2006, 2007 and 2008 David Unaipon Award at the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards.
Dark Secrets II
After Dreaming (AD) 1961
Despite scientific rationalism in the year
After Dreaming, AD, 1961 dark secrets
still make their way into the world.
Here is one!
White is pure but,
Black is beautiful and
while Hell has no fury like a woman
Heaven has no equal pleasure but a woman.
All those who seek to enter the kingdom
know that Heaven can wait when
black women cross their path.
Millennia of clothing, centuries of science,
brains and hearts under the microscope,
decades of colonial corsets pulled tight
will never restrain or contain this
Dark Secret.
