Dropbear (book)

The Stella Prize judges' report described Dropbear as "a breathtaking collection of poetry and short prose which arrests key icons of mainstream Australian culture and turns them inside out, with malice aforethought".^[3] The Victorian Premier's Literary Awards judges described the work as "a powerful act of sovereign resistance, breaking open the intersections of power, race and colonial fantasy".^[1] In a review for the Sydney Review of Books, Jeanine Leanne wrote that Dropbear "moves seamlessly between activism, literary criticism, remembrance deconstruction and confrontation".^[2] The collection also received positive reviews in the Sydney Morning Herald,^[4] Australian Book Review,^[5] The Guardian^[6] and Meanjin.^[7]

Reviewers praised Araluen's ability to subvert "colonial kitsch". Araluen critiques the aesthetics of the "pastoral" and the canonisation of Australian literary figures like Henry Lawson, Banjo Patterson and Les Murray. Araluen suggests that these literary traditions have been used to negate Indigenous sovereignty and to justify settler colonialism.^[2][7] John Kinsella wrote in a review for the Sydney Morning Herald that Araluen "plays back conventional devices and tropes, and undoes them so effectively that no colonial shibboleth is left unchallenged or undecoded".^[4]