Revolving around a motif of shared meals, symbolic of hospitality and nurture, Comfort Food is steeped in corporeal and sensual detail.

Their meticulous machinery balances wildness and control, their potent images resonate sonically and visually. Van Neerven’s poems are taut and energetic. Bearing witness and replying to destruction through art contests the silence that colludes with continuing histories of violence and injustice. In one of his few English lyrics, virtuoso Yolngu musician Dr G Yunupingu described reading “the world of destruction” and aiming, through music, to “bridge and to build Yolngu culture”. Yet, in the resulting vacuum, long after the gong’s last clang, the work of First Nations artists maps some directions reconciliation, treaty and atonement might take. No such action has followed and Australia is the only Commonwealth country without a treaty between its government and Indigenous people. He stressed the importance of government action lest the speech be “no more than a clanging gong”. However inadequate such an apology must be, Rudd argued, it might be part of a bridge. Almost 12 years ago then prime minister Kevin Rudd wrote and delivered an Apology to Indigenous Australians, acknowledging the “blemished” and “profoundly disturbing” history of invasion and settlement. The momentum and power of van Neerven’s work exemplifies the burgeoning of First Nations Australian writing.

This already spectacular body of work reinvents form and extends into nonfiction and plays. By the time Ellen van Neerven turns 30 next year, they will have published three books – the award-winning fictive triptych Heat and Light and two collections of poetry, Comfort Food and Throat, forthcoming.

The yield by tara june winch analysis