The Commonwealth of Amnesia: A collection of erasure and cut-up poems exploring the forgotten histories of Croatian and Yugoslav peoples in Australia and an exegesis Obliteration Creates More: examining the wreck of history through whiteout, blackout and cut-up erasure poetry

Author Identifier

Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon

https://orcid.org/0009-0001-1524-6260

Date of Award

2024

Document Type

Thesis

Publisher

Edith Cowan University

Degree Name

Doctor Of Philosophy - Creative Writing

School

School of Arts and Humanities

First Supervisor

Dr. Donna Mazza

Second Supervisor

Dr. Vahri McKenzie

Abstract

This thesis consists of two parts, a collection of poems, “The Commonwealth of Amnesia”, and an accompanying exegesis. The collection explores the forgotten histories of Croatian and Yugoslav immigrants in Australia from 1901 to 1957 through the medium of erasure and cut-up poetry, re-arranging words found in nonfiction documents to posit that forgetting can be metaphorically and visually represented through erasure while also re-narrativising a text. Erasure poetry takes a textual document and using whiteout or blackout erases portions of a text, transforming that text into a poem; cut-up poetry rearranges the words of a document in a textual version of collage. Also called documentary or docu-poetry, most of the sources for the collection were obtained from the Trove online repository of newspaper articles. A set of published oral history interviews with Croatian immigrant women were used to create the “Axe Marks in Tree Trunks” section of the collection, incorporating fragments of interviews re-mixed with a Markov random text generator, and the poet’s own words. Each section of the poetry collection is accompanied by a description of the historical circumstances affecting Croatian and Yugoslav people, including labouring on the Woodlines in the Goldfields, World War I internment, race riots and bombings in Kalgoorlie, the role of women, communist paranoia post-World War II, the repatriation of 700 people to Yugoslavia on the Partizanka and the Radnik, and a postscript that re-contextualises They’re a Weird Mob (O’Grady & Tynan, 2012). These descriptions provide a context for the poems in this radical collection, which is likely the first assembly of erasure and cut up poetry by an Australian poet that solely utilises documentary sources to investigate a migrant voice in colonial Australia. The exegesis consists of four parts. Chapter One provides a personal and historical background, and Chapter Two outlines the methodologies and theoretical frameworks applied to this thesis. These chapters reveal the extent of racism and xenophobia towards the Croatian and Yugoslav community during the period and show that this was in part instigated by the White Australia Policy and war paranoia. Chapter Three outlines the literary influences for this project, providing an analysis of the creative methods utilised by relevant Dada, Beat and contemporary erasure and cut-up poets, proposing two streams of erasure poetry, the whimsical and the social-political, that map onto a poet’s choice of source text. Chapter Four is an exegetical essay that examines the creative and critical process of making the poems, proposing the apsurdno subjekt and consulto sic as erasure The Commonwealth of Amnesia 2 techniques. It also explores the limits of Roland Barthes’ concept of the “death” of the author, positing that, in the light of work by Michael Davidson, William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Louise M. Rosenblatt and various erasurists, erasures and cut-ups open up a space for a concept of collaboration or “compenetration” (Rosenblatt, 1964, p. 126), between authors, readers and texts that generates new meanings.

DOI

10.25958/2vm9-za23

Access Note

Access to this thesis is embargoed until 19th September 2026.

Access to this thesis is restricted. Please see the Access Note below for access details.

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