Terra Nullius: Colonial Violence in Prynne’s Acrylic Tips

Examining J.H. Prynne’s Acrylic Tips through a series of analogous readings, this paper identifies the location, characters, and themes of the poem. By examining the poem and the contiguities with Her Weasel’s Wild Returning , Acrylic Tips is positioned against the historical decree of terra nullius over the sovereign land of Australia. The poem is read against and situated in the colonial and linguistic history of Australia. Read as a pastoral elegy, the poem depicts a hierarchy of human dominance over nature, which finds its ends in the colonial shearing shed, as well as the genetic laboratory. These positions are ultimately argued to be socio-political by-products of the colonial dominance of Indigenous culture and nature.

With the exception of one or two fragments, it is composed in a language which resolutely and systematically excludes any phrasing that retains the balances and tensions we would normally be able to detect in the manner of a speaking voice. What we get instead is not a discursive free-for-all filling the vacuum -not an intensifying of fracture and dispersal -but, offputtingly, a weird concerted texture, that works hard to make the separate parts of the whole comply with one another. The language is more bizarre than ever, but it is also more heavily synthesised, more systematically correlated, simply more commensurable. 1 In Acrylic Tips poetic language exists under pressure as the concretion of discourses is lineated across the transmigratory space of the poem. Both Acrylic Tips and Her Weasels Wild Returning contain themes that unify social ritual with song; in Acrylic Tips this song extends to Indigenous Australian ritual and songlines patterned on the landscape. From Her Weasels Wild Returning concepts of nomadicism and exile carry through to Acrylic Tips, where they are read through the traditional Indigenous and colonial milieus of Australian history. Another interesting element that has carried through from Her Weasels Wild Returning is the attention given to the politics and lexical complexity of the female pronoun.

Many of the elements discussed in Mengham's review of Her Weasels Wild
Returning function as contiguous threads running through Acrylic Tips. To exemplify the parallels between the texts it will serve to examine a portion of Mengham's analysis of Her Weasels Wild Returning, overlaying the larger critical structures onto Acrylic Tips. Mengham writes: In Weasels, there is the same basic tension that lies behind the alternatives of settlement and nomadicism, but it is not imprinted from the same pattern of validation, with the same distribution of gains and losses. Settlement is figured in intensely domesticated terms, while the nobility of transit, the enhancement of spirit formally almost guaranteed by the nomadic option, is now jettisoned and replaced by stark alternatives, both equally dispiriting.
One is the enforced flight of the refugee, for whom transit represents painful uprooting, for whom wandering is figured as a compulsion to ' escape', for whom being unsettled is seen as nothing more positive than a movement between conditions of safety and protection. 2 Acrylic Tips presupposes a nature, not explicitly Edenic -as is implied by the poem's first line, 'Assuming banishment for lost time back across nullity' 3 -but which speaks to the origins of knowledge possessed by traditional owners of the land. This is made explicit in Acrylic Tips by contrasting a Western and culturally imperialistic position inherent in an account of colonisation with an Australian Aboriginal understanding of land use and ritual in the mythopoetic space of the poem. The exploitation of the earth endemic to patriarchal societies is contrasted with the Australian Indigenous perspective, which traditionally understands the land as a living, identificatory embodiment of the people. 4 The forced adaptations to a technologised pastoral represent a discontinuity from an ecological-based reading and the exposition of nature as feminine. The text expresses a legacy of imperial dominance as it is represented against the Australian landscape and Indigenous culture, a power dynamic that has its nascent structure in an anthropocentric colonialism which entails dominance over, exploitation of and barbarity towards nature.
Though Mengham talks about Her Weasels Wild Returning as introducing a 'synoptic language' that may be the only exemplary form of a 'terra nullius, previously unoccupied, unsettled, unowned' land, it is in Acrylic Tips that this position is tested against the application of terra nullius upon the occupied land of Australia. In Acrylic Tips the contestation of the land and its 40,000-year history of use and ritual is con- So what I am suggesting is that the peculiarly powerful abstractness of the language in Weasels represents an attempt to deterritorialize both masculine and feminine, not by neutralising their differences, but by at least proposing to equalize them; by demonstrating how the only viable terra nullius, previously unoccupied, unsettled, unowned, is one that can be projected in a synoptic language that shows remarkably little interest in either écriture feminine or the masculine tradition. 5 Andrea Brady's brief essay 'No Turning Back: Acrylic Tips' examines the forced transmogrifications of the feminine and the natural as inherently paralleling territorial and geographic division. Brady writes that the feminine is 'associated with the lineated and amputated body, the bound and divided land, is lyric'. 6 I will propose an alternative reading suggestive of the ongoing ramifications of colonisation and the increasing technological means of dominance both in social structures and cultural formations. This analysis is structured on concepts of social and technological advancement, and is incorporative of pathological models of harm and genetic engineering contrasted with notions of an Indigenous experience of the natural. Where Brady asserts that 'the bound and divided land, is lyric', this examination will focus on the manner in which, for 40,000 plus years, Indigenous Australians have used song as a cultural and spiritual practice establishing a relationship with and building knowledge of the land. For Indigenous Australians, knowledge of land and its traversal is a pathway to spiritual embodiment and replenishment. As Debra Bird Rose argues, Indigenous Australians move not through the landscape, but through a humanised realm saturated with significations, in which stories of country are told as they are traversed. 7 At issue in Acrylic Tips are postcolonial concepts of territorialisation and contemporary land usage, but also poetic language history as it corresponds to Prynne's definition of poetic thought, 'as brought into being by recognition and contest with the whole cultural system of a language'. 8 The poetic language used in the poem embeds and articulates patterns of colonial and argotic usage, demonstrative of its etymological antecedents as well as its potential to evolve and adapt to new models of meaning, as constituted by a localised, Australian English. Kinsella's 'The Hierarchy of Sheep -a report from my brother' and Acrylic Tips, but such parallels that it is reasonable to contend that if indeed this was a report physically delivered by Stephen Kinsella, then Prynne was present for its retelling. To provide a preliminary view of these parallels as they relate to pastoral violence, it will serve to contrast Kinsella's wordings with Prynne's in their respective poems.
Kinsella's 'Ewes' begins: All cut by a shearer at one time or anothersewn together with dental floss or wearing their scars gracefully Later in the poem, Kinsella writes that 'older ewes', 'all of them full with young, milk veins / up and pumping hard to udders -/ somewhere a nick with a blade has a vein / knotted off with needle and thread, / the myth declaring another will take its place'. 10  While these parallels will be explored more fully, it should be noted that very similar cross-readings can be made with John Kinsella's seven-part poem 'The Epistemology of Sheep', and appears to address the same reported events. The dedication to 'S.K.' in the Barque edition, the reader will surmise, is to Stephen Kinsella, who has previously been described by his brother John as an extremely hermetic artist making his living as a shearer. 12

'Assuming banishment'
The epigraph of Acrylic Tips, from Donald Stuart's Yandy, which describes the process of spear-making in Stuart's book, allows the reader to glimpse the technological transformations as they affect material and cultural advancements. The quotation juxtaposes forms, registers and government control of transport and food procurement between cultural epochs. 'The murderous head made from a motor car number-plate' 14 suggests a culture of adaptation and survival, positioned at the margins of society. The vectors of speed signified by the spear and the car, establish changing technology as destabilising rituals and cultural practices. As post-contact Aboriginal culture has undergone change; subjective identity, physical and social environments continue to adapt, and traditions alter based on dynamic and responsive social formations. 15 One could also establish a linkage between the registers of control over movement established in the epigraph, through the car's registration plates, and the car scenes in the poem. The practice of registering one's possession may also relate to early maps where land is not 'named' but numbered or referred to only by coordinates, where Indigenous place names were erased and restated in colonial contexts.
Other places, such as Mistake Creek, were given names which signified the traumatic legacy of colonisation. 16  If the reader allows the word 'nullity' from the poem's opening line its full weight it provides not only a caustic depiction of the Australian landscape but also, from a Western perspective, one of legal and foundational origins. To provide some insight into the sovereign authority of command in the decree of terra nullius over Australia, it will serve to examine this notion and its use in colonisation.
In 1770 Captain James Cook anchored outside what is presently called Botany Bay, then sailed north, around the Cape York Peninsula, and proclaimed the land he sighted as belonging to the expansive British Empire. 21 The legal rationale upon which the convention of colony acquisition was founded was one in which claims of ownership could be based on discovery and effective possession. 22 As Attwood contends: Aboriginal hunter-gatherers were adjudged to have no property rights because of the way in which their place in time was constructed by major seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophical and legal authorities which, in turn, drew upon historical theories regarding human society.
In the opinion of Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke and others, hunter-gatherers (or 'savages' in their terms) had no concept of property because they were in the original state of nature. This assessment was founded upon one or more ' historical' sources: the representations of antiquity found in classical history and the representation of the Americas as 'the beginning [of] all the World'. 23 These laws demarcated the stages through which a society should pass, each stage being characterised by particular concepts and institutions regarding law, property, government and commerce. At the lowest stage, that of the hunter-gatherer -in which the occupants of a land lived as part of nature -it was determined that there existed no concept of property, and therefore the lands of the Australian Aborigines were declared to be unoccupied. 24 The decree of terra nullius over the already occupied land of Australia, whose Indigenous people Cook encountered, was upheld until the Mabo-Wik Judgement of 1992, with the recognition of land rights and the recognition of generational ownership. 25 The first line of Acrylic Tips and the connota- To begin to unpack these lines as they accelerate from position to position, 'the grievance solitary' entails the trauma and the brute reality of colonial oppression and the appropriation of Indigenous lands, while also hinting at the Romantic tradition of the isolated poet. As it relates to the father-daughter relationship depicted in the narrative of the poem, the 'grievance solitary' implies the isolation of the father, facing the loss of his daughter, and represents his increasing marginalisation from the family unit. Tracing this line further into the poem's first page links the line to 'take heart / for rapt token incision along a defined track; to cry / and mourn for her as he goes, to bring her home'; 28 which seems to entail a set of circumstances consequent to the removal of a loved one. Whether this progeny has been removed systematically, as in the case of Australia's 'Stolen Generation', or refers to a specific situation, the results are comparable. 29 References to domestic division accumulate within the poem. Where the phrase ' dejected by partner claimants' 30 appears, preceding ' out / pat on a moving front, muster to confirm a perimeter', it implies a group of people searching for a lost child, with the colloquial 'muster' indicative of a rural or pastoral property. 31 'Their kids besotted' 32 supplies news of a joyous reception of discovery, but also the possibility of intoxication. Another of the architectural traces in the poem, is that the children are under ' a felt roof', 'in a snug rafter', 33 which again reiterates the sense that the building belongs to a rural property. As with many rural Australian schoolhouses, homesteads are built complete, and above them a tin roof is constructed overlaying the domicile, providing an expanded living space and protection against seasonal conditions.
The narrative's focus on the domestic continues with the accusatory, 'Why should / she ever flinch,' 34 which evidences a (potentially violent) pattern of behaviour within the relationship. This is offset by the fragmented utterance, 'Promise so much,' 35 from the fourth stanza. The line, 'both not replenished even liable or yet / parted,' has the couple together, even if a decision or an amiable separation has not been mediated, asking, 'Shall each cherish / defrayment [. . .] for certain delusive grips'. 36 The instances of movement, 'bearing into reverse' and 'turned off', signify acts of departure. 37 An assonantal misreading gives a further semantic connotation to '[s]orrow will you turn remain muzzle gripe, yet sign / off abject partition truly.' 38 The grammatical structure of the line, in conjunction with its forced closure, implies a relationship that is defined by a growing distance. ' The sexual nature of the language leads to a scene of a more domestic sphere.
'Fresh choice' is represented as 'held to the very life', 46 commenting on the ' clastic' 47 grip of the female, and also alludes to extortion. The issue of substance abuse is raised in 'soft sweet fury gums,' 48 if one connects alcohol abuse to halitosis. The subject 'now estranged' is implored: 'why not try'. 49 This evokes a domestic register, wherein the subject deals with a 'novel / terror'. 50  (punning on 'bannered') 'whose heart / rate at a cub report brought down to hacker's amble.' 71 The precipitous and deteriorating state of the relationship continues to occupy the poem with a looming sadness and irreparable strain. 'Burning child' 72  although this may also refer to a bloodletting, a relinquishment of emotional trauma manifest through physical self-harm. Scarification is an Indigenous rite often linked with initiation ceremonies, or grieving, practiced both in rural and urban societies. 85 A reading of these cicatrisations as celestial suggests a paradigm which incorporates self-harm as a ritual practice. Therefore, a 'defined track' may signify a songline, a traditional and sacred path through a piece of land given to the processing of ritual grieving. These paths and the relationships they represent unify belief with country, and may also signify a cultural place inherited through familial-geographic mythos. 86 The promissory action entailed in mourning for loss or 'bring[ing] her home' details a protectionism associated with the father. But these pathways are 'krook' 87 and therefore this option seems unattainable. The subject is impotent to enact these options and is left to 'wheel and turn about', 'high over submission,' 88  the male subject's loss of his daughter, pleading 'to cry / and mourn for her as he goes, to bring her home'. 114 The most defining aspect of pastoral elegiac conventions within the poem is Prynne's use of the natural as a symbol for fertility and creation.
In this definitively Australian context, the association with the natural world and the processes of renewal and continuance are framed within the function of fire in the regeneration of Australian trees and shrubs. 115 The disparity between antecedent traditions of the pastoral elegy and the construction of mourning in Acrylic Tips may provide contextual inhibitions for readers but conceptualising the utilisation of Indigenous traditions as well as Prynne's use of Australian flora and fauna establishes contiguity with the elegiac mode.
The hierarchies of power and control in relation to nature stem from a top-down relation to the history of colonisation. This is a power structure which is systematically imbricated within a society, involving its treatment not only of Indigenous Affairs and multiculturalism, but also, as expressed in Acrylic Tips, the relationship between humans and nature. 116  The continual experience of trauma and brutality displayed in the working conditions of the shed allows no allusions as to the nature of this work and quickly dispels any suggestion that it might be read as romantic: 'Never at one blow to // Divvy up warm pleats'. 117 'Best at blood plastic / same time blent' 118 presents a manipulation of genetic material echoed in the captive 'bleat' of the sheep. 'Hand on the guard rail down most volition to slight / and planing sheer brings inert forwards, rifted for / them in the photograph acid' 119 establishes a connection with 'flim' two stanzas later, in discussing the treatment of wounded animals after they are 'tailed, castrated, ringed, earmarked and mulesed'. 120 Prynne's poem describes this brutality suffered by man and animals through 'lamb for kicks' and 'browsing hearts spear swap,' 121 where Kinsella's poem 'The Epistemology of Sheep' details the injured as having 'ribflesh flyblown and the heart exposed -all the world sees'. 122 As they relate to labour, technology and the pastoral elegy within the Australian context, some analogous readings may establish linkages between the violence to circumflex,' and the shearer's myth of the self-healing wound is incited in a 'post-hormone limb crisis.' 132 As the accumulation of these circumstances mount, the brutality and trauma suffered is '[i]njury too mounted in harm'. 133 The 'contracted mammal' references both men and animals, dealing with 'celestial scars' and 'sunken capital. ' 134 In Acrylic Tips's final pages Prynne writes: 'By year end will send bitten / for carbon season indifferent new chasm revival tips // Sprung forth digressed, cicatrised.' 135 Prynne's description of the wounds as ' cicatrised' unifies the wound with a ritualised act in Indigenous initiation ceremony, symbolising a transition rite 'through which the initiate passes from one condition to another'. 136 'Cicatrise', by definition, is a wound's healing via scarring, though in unifying this with aspects of Indigenous culture the term is associated with a notion of ' archaeological damage' done to a society, from which the emblematic and associative 'scar' manifests itself in multi-generational problems understanding past trauma. 137 Acrylic Tips proposes that this scarring, undertaken by Indigenous Australians, has manifested as a result of their cultural trauma, brutal treatment, and colonial genocide, which qualify their scars as ' celestial.' 138 It is this type of internalised, experiential trauma and brutality which leaves shearers suffering the same fate, clinging to past actions, reputations and attitudes which continue the hierarchies of violence, power and control that regulate their lives.
Acrylic Tips is constructed upon and contains conventions of the pastoral elegy, which it utilises to discuss the hybridity of Indigenous and colonial cultures. The elegiac aspects of Acrylic Tips and its relation to the pastoral function act as a means to frame Prynne's discourse on the role of technology, bodily harm, colonisation and the sustentive, the dominant subthemes of the poem. The passage from loss to consolation is extended by the poem's elegiac elements to direct the narrative and to abridge cultural differences. Elegiac expression is fundamental to the discussion of the increasingly technical methods of pastoral production and the ontological problems they entail for cultural understandings of the land. The role of technology and its influence on concepts of corporeality reflect this elegiac expression, but also contain influences of hierarchy and gendered preference which stem from colonial power relations. The colonial process of renaming and appropriating land expresses a dominance explored in Prynne's presentation of the technological, foregrounding a lineage of hierarchical power structures inherent in the culture of contemporary Australia.

Conclusion
The poem Acrylic Tips represents a relationship as a means of exploring a number of transformative accounts of Australian history. Through the microcosm of the relationship, Prynne formulates a poetic that can discuss patterns of subjective and systemic violence, from marital strife to the 'plan[ned] depletion' 139 of Indigenous communities. If reading the poem as written to a single addressee, the poem may offer a release from the pressures of violence in the relationship depicted. More broadly, as a public address, the poem offers a reaction to the long trace of colonisation on the history of Australia. The elegiac aspects of the poem unify the poem's narrative with cultural loss due to colonial violence, shaping and contextualising the themes of the poem under the rubric of colonial relations. Acrylic Tips constitutes a rare instance in which Prynne populates the poem with a narrative from those around him, revealing circumstances perhaps more common than criticism would suggest. The poem allows Prynne a means of representing the immutable effects of colonial violence on a people, as well as on its language systems. Prynne's experience and research into Australian history finds output in a poetic language 'which [is] cross-wired into the cultural history of a ramified national identity'. 140