Jeanine Leane interviews Dakota Feirer
Dakota Feirer is a Bundjalung and Gumbaynggirr man based on Lenape and Yuin lands. His debut poetry collection, Arsenic Flower, confronts the legacies of colonial violence and explores the cultural wisdom still echoing in the contemporary Blak experience. Dakota believes in healing Country and our communities through art and storytelling.
‘Poetry invites readers to experience the event of language uncurling from these attempts to distil and convey. The ‘real’ world is dizzy with maladies, but there is pleasure, beauty, catharsis—power—in poetry’s bold and manifold efforts.’
Poetry for this issue was guest co-edited by Mark Nowak and Angela Costi.
This interview originally appeared in the 2025 Rabbit Annual.
Jeanine Leane: Yuwin-dhu Jeanine. Wiradjuri yinaa. Marrambidya-dhi. Hello, my name is Jeanine Leane. I’m a Wiradjuri woman and poet from the Marrambidya River currently based in Naarm on the unceded lands of the East Kulin Nation. I am speaking today to Dakota Feirer, about his forthcoming collection Arsenic Flower.
Yiradhu marang Dakota. Congratulations on your forthcoming poetry collection, Arsenic Flower (Hachette, 2025).
Dakota Feirer: Thank you.
JL: Would you introduce yourself?
DF: I am a Bundjalung-Gumbaynggirr man raised on Yuin country on the South Coast. I am currently based in New York having just completed a Masters of Museum Studies at NYU as a Roberta Sykes Scholar. My research here has focused on data rematriation, ecologising museums and Indigenous archival intervention.
JL: Could you tell me a bit more about yourself and your work—especially your forthcoming work, Arsenic Flower, which I had the pleasure of mentoring, after you were awarded a black&write! Fellowship in 2024 and which I described as ‘a powerful, poignant and original collection of poems gathered over many years’. Could you talk a little about what inspired this work and your poetry more broadly, please?
DF: My great-grandad was a tracker … He knew Tracker Riley from out west. My Nan ended up befriending Tracker Riley’s son, actually. Many people know Tracker [my grandfather] for the work he did with the police but Tracker was an artist—a painter. And one of the Prime Ministers—Gough Whitlam, I think, ended up buying one of Tracker’s paintings. Tracker painted in water colours, like Namatjira, but he was using more colours. So I always heard stories of Tracker from my Nan growing up. He passed just before I was born. He was a really interesting figure that I knew through oral storytelling from what my grandmother would share and what my father would share … my uncles and aunties too. We were all connected to this one man.
JL: And this has been an important influence and/or inspiration for you?
DF: Yeah. On the one hand you have this mysterious creative side, that was little or lesser known and on the other, he was a boxer and a tracker for the police. He was respected for that, not just as an Indigenous man, but as a community member of Grafton. However, maybe … that was a surface level respect, because he wasn’t awarded the police pension for another 10, maybe 20 years, after his retirement. So, he still had to endure all that, because, being a black man he wasn’t for whatever reason … wasn’t worthy of the same treatment as any other police officer.
JL: Yeah. That’s a sad but all too common story of our mob isn’t it? Settlers did recognise, and in many cases make use of, the talents, skills and knowledges of Aboriginal people, but they didn’t want to pay for it or recognise it financially in the same way they would a non-Aboriginal person.
DF: There were two sides to Tracker and one wasn’t well known … In those days mob were all those things—they had so many different skills and were confronted with survival … Yeah, I supposed you learned all these different trades like boxing, tracking, labouring … They were always working, but there was a creative side there, too.
JL: Yes—they’ve been many things, the people who came before us.
DF: Yeah … and I suppose I have some anxieties as a writer and that’s why I’m always working some other job. I’m not a full-time writer …
JL: Do you feel that this kind of lived experience enriches your writing and gives you inspiration?
DF: I think it’s different for everyone … as you know … for artists and writers all round, not just First Nations mob. All our journeys are so different and individual. I think for me it’s being surrounded by new experiences. It’s always a treat being involved with work that is ultimately concerned with enriching our circumstances, either culturally or through education. Right now, for me, it’s through museums and cultural institutions. And kids—as a youth worker. It’s been through education. That’s what drives my poetry. It’s the living of our experience.
JL: So let’s talk about that a bit more—what drives your poetry?
DF: I think it’s what someone told me once. I took a long break from writing for a few reasons, but one was that I found myself writing from commission to commission—and I think that’s probably a common experience for a lot of us. I felt there was a lot of appetite for our voices in a lot of ways but I also felt detached from the output or the process. And someone said to me—it was Tamryn Bennett, actually—Tamryn said, ‘Sometimes it’s important just to live—live the poetry.’ So I did that and now I feel like every day, every minute is part of being a storyteller. It’s the life that we live. It’s moving through the world and allowing the world to move through us and articulating what that is in the moment, in time, in this place, and how we’re carrying that.
That’s how a lot of the themes in poetry come up … Writing about masculinity and manhood and how that manifests into my relationships. And my father, too, and all of the other figures, and then essentially how to write them into Country from my end.
JL: That was really good advice from Tamryn. And you’ve hit on something here when you mention commissions and a lot of people wanting to hear Blak voices in certain spaces, which I think might be the tensions between commercial publishing and Blak stories and storytelling?
DF: Yeah, commercial demand and the commodification, in some cases anyway, of Blak stories …
JL: Yeah. A bit like a literary cull? I’m interested in what you said about letting the world move through and exploring the themes so prominent in your work, of masculinity and manhood and how that then determines or guides your relationships with women and Country?
DF: I think it’s one of those topics and life contours—masculinity and manhood that says it’ll be ongoing. As we age and we grow and we move through the world, masculinity takes on new meanings. Where I’m at now, I feel like there’s been a giant leap from when I was a younger man—even just several years ago, in my undergraduate degree, it was a constant battle in being a man and being masculine—that word masculinity … that’s very close to a line in one of my poems: Trees, leaves, solemnity … And that’s about the relationship to the body, to the woman and a relationship to history. This history of man—the indentured man. I speak about chains and how foreign names forced a discourse that says emotional pain does not equate to being a strong man … and what are the boundaries of those emotions remaining still. And because we’re confined at a very young age and socially conditioned to be restrained in our emotions, or to have a limited suite of emotions available to us. And that can manifest and be expressed in violent and self-destructive and toxic ways. Hence I’m articulating this whilst being acutely aware of all the privileges that come with being male … especially in my case a light-skinned one. But there comes with that, as well, those limitations—that limited suite of emotions available—that society allows, can make you emotionally stunted and lead to some sort of cognitive stunting as well.
JL: Yeah. I see what you’re saying—there’s an institutionalised duplicity where on the one hand there are all the privileges associated with being a man and being heterosexual … but there is the emotional crippling, or the potential for it, and nothing in between for all those who are other than … Is that what you mean?
DF: Yeah, and I think that’s where the toxic comes from—those echo chambers. And it’s that sort of self-hatred, I think, to be expected to be restrained in our emotions, or to have a limited suite of emotions available, that can manifest and express itself in violent, destructive and toxic ways. And I think ultimately that’s where the toxicity ends up—in violence towards anyone who is the antithesis of masculinity—women, and queer peoples and communities, and other men who don’t fit the institutionalised stereotype from the social echo chamber. And violence to one’s self too and to ultimately taking your own life …
JL: Yeah—tragically, statistically we see a lot of that in our community, and the statistics are real people and real families and loved ones left grieving with many things still unanswered.
DF: Toxicity erodes from the inside. I’ve been on my own mental health journey, and it’s not only about being a man but an Indigenous man, an Indigenous person with a compounding intergenerational history that I’m holding—that I’m carrying inside. That’s something I’m still, even to this day, navigating. The poems—it was a way of healing that in the beginning was why I started writing and why I started writing poems.
JL: Thank you for sharing that. I wanted to ask what draws you to poetry as your chosen form of expression.
DF: There’re a lot of things and there are a lot of inspirations, but what really drove me to get up and speak and find my voice was that burning—burning thing inside that otherwise would have just eaten me. Continue to eat away my spirit. It was a way to heal in the moment—a way to exhale. Let this big breath go, and my first poem was about a magpie and being painted both black and white and trying to decide who to resent more … And like this rolling internal monologue … Poetry was a way of clearing, like the leaves or the smoke. It was just another version of medicine for me.
JL: That’s a good way to put it.
DF: I was lucky enough that I stumbled into this beautiful community in First Nations literature … I’ve just landed perfectly into a strong timeline of people—like yourself and many others before me that have knocked down doors and smoothed the path for me to arrive at … I’m one of that generation that Oodgeroo’s Municipal Gum was on our English curriculum.
JL: Yes—my children were born in the 90s and had the benefit of being able to read some Blak writers like Oodgeroo when they were at school, too. I think it took quite a while for Blak stories to make it into print culture, even though those stories had always been here, and for there to be any intergenerational safety net for writers—only in the last 50 years or so. Then in the late 1980s—1988—Blak activists, like the late Kevin Gilbert, and Bruce McGuiness, and Oodgeroo worked with the University of Queensland Press to establish the David Unaipon Award to support emerging First Nations writers; then in 1990 Magabala Books was established, so since then there has been a bit more of a continuous flow of Blak writing.
DF: And then there was the technological turn. I should say my inspiration doesn’t just come from poets but also rappers, musicians and filmmakers that were available to me. As you were talking then I was thinking of the number of Elders that wrote poetry later in life about their childhoods or their homes or places where they grew up—so many gems. It’s like in all our communities, they never had opportunities like black&write!, Magabala, and Blak & Bright and the Unaipon Award.
JL: Yes—and it would be good to see even more of those stories and poems in print. I was really interested in the title you chose for your forthcoming collection: Arsenic Flower. Like, arsenic is toxic—always poison and there’s the ugly history of it and the destruction of our people. And flowers are always beautiful to look at but some can be poison, too. Could you talk more about that?
DF: It’s deep, the title—it reaches backwards and forwards and it’s about duality and binary—like existing in two directions at once. And I think I play with these binaries through the themes of the book, and toy with the idea of beautiful tragedies and burdened privileges. And it’s about being an Indigenous person today—despite our Blak history. A nation state that’s attempted just about every method to erase our existence. Despite all of that we’ve survived, and there’s all the love, power, wisdom and selflessness that came before and is still here.
JL: ‘Despite’ is a very apt word here—like against all odds in the invasion nation.
DF: So it’s about trying to tell that story—trying to tell the complexity of duality that’s not only about historicity of our experiences—it’s about the internal struggle as well—like there’s a poison inside us that I grapple with through some of the poems. That poison is to do with understanding the idea of intergenerational silences—like the silence between a father and his son—the inability to be able to articulate things and what that does in a pattern or cycle through generations.
JL: Intergenerational silences and the spaces they leave are part of the poison you write about?
DF: Yes—metaphorically, what’s not said is the loudest thing.
JL: Like silence screams?
DF: Yes—so a lot of my work is addressing that silence and space. The title Arsenic Flower is also a signal to the histories of where I was born—and my sister, too—in Coutts Crossing, which is in the Grafton region. So the titular poem, ‘Arsenic Flower’, is about that time, about the new birth on that soil. And the township of Coutts Crossing has to do with a massacre by the station owner, Coutts, and that massacre involved the well-known method of lacing flour with arsenic and that history is explored through archival intervention—in the middle of the book is a section called ‘Soil’ which looks at the Bawden Lectures from part 1 to 5 in a series of redacted poems that are speaking directly to the massacre and the subsequent acquittals, which is a social, ecological and moral haunting that continues to persist today. The namesake of the place still carries that, and also the population that doesn’t want to talk about it—still.
JL: Yes—like the greater population of the nation doesn’t want to talk about atrocities of their story of invasion and occupation.
DF: But it’s like—your sins aren’t going away with silence. And in spite of all that we’re still here. We’re beautiful! We’re writing. We’re dancing. We’re creating. We’re continuing our culture. And we’re also dealing with the experience of carrying all this history. So that’s a big journey to go on.
JL: It is! Thank you for sharing all this—you’ve been very generous. When are you coming home?
DF: End of August [2025].
JL: I look forward to when you come back, because you’re launching Arsenic Flower then.
DF: That’s right. End of September, I think.
JL: I look forward to that as I’m sure many others will too. Mandaang guwu—thank you again for your time and generosity. Guwayu—until next time.