But wait there’s more: counter-mapping place with the lyric essay

<p dir="ltr">Can a white settler Australian write about place as home and Indigenous sovereignty at the same time? Or are narratives of place and questions of belonging by white writers, antithetical to acknowledgement of and encounter with Indigenous sovereignty? This thesis argues for the lyric essay as a form of creative nonfiction writing which is able to hold irreconcilable knowledges of place in productive tension. By using a place-based research methodology grounded in the field of settler colonial studies, I analyse power relations and assumptions about place, home and land, in three book-length lyric essays by white Australian writers, namely, Ross Gibson’s <i>Seven Versions of an Australian Badland </i>(2002), Kim Mahood’s <i>Position Doubtful </i>(2016) and an exegetical account of my extended lyric essay <i>Spider Bird Tree Stone. </i>I conclude that the lyric essay enables white Australian writers to productively examine and potentially disrupt settler colonial possessive narratives of place and history by embracing fragmentary, non-linear experiments with narrative, voice and structure. Furthermore, the lyric essay— with its capacity to juxtapose disparate sources—may offer a way to resist the recentring of the white voice. However, the results of this project, both critical and creative, indicate that settler colonial conditioning reproduces colonialism through the urge to speak over or for Indigenous voices and knowledges. Awareness of such settler colonial compulsions remains a crucial challenge in anti-colonial white writing about place.</p>