Where Poetry Meets History

Where, in a city, does poetry meet history?

History is displayed in signs and facades, breathed into the leaves of red river gums and plane trees, shaped into the corners and slopes of streets and beds of grass, resounding in busker ballads and protest chants, held in the bubbles and sediments of bluestone that we walk over and are sheltered by.

In this walking poetry workshop, we will connect with the power of place, respecting and knowing that the street grids of Naarm, so-called ‘Melbourne’, are a colonial form imposed on Woi-Worrung and Bunurung lands and waters.

We will open our imaginations to the visible and secreted stories that live in the urban landscape, and practice writing to the past. In connecting with the city’s layered, fragmented, cacophonous history, how might we come into a new relationship our own stories? What surprising poems and poetic knowledges might grow in and beyond an inner street grid?

Content/prompt foci:

Reading history in the city:  landscape as story

Placing time: entanglements of past, present, and future

Urban ecology: finding growth in the organic city

Your facilitator: Nadia Rhook is a historian and poet with expertise on place-based histories of migration in colonial Victoria. She's the author of two history-themed poetry collections: boots (2020) and Second Fleet Baby (2022).

Please note: The starting point is near Parliament Station. Precise location given on booking.