Paul Collis
Wita Witalana (look out over)
“The searing ‘Barkindji’ voice reminds us that so much remains unreconciled in the depravity of colonialism-crimson brush strokes on tarnished Dreaming.”
Recent Work Press, 2025
Wita Witalana (look out over), Paul Collis’ second collection of poetry, deliberately inhabits space where history is written on the person. But it is a history deeper than, and in contest with, any idea of ‘Australia’. Collis asks us not only to see the effects of colonialism on a people, but to experience those effects as someone thrown into its brutal shadows. It mourns old ways of being, the loss of connection with country, and the loss of family and friends while offering a powerful meditation on the complexities of Indigenous life in contemporary Australia. These poems resonate with a deep sense of longing, memory, and the enduring strength of connection to land and culture. They are a powerful call to listen to messages carried through the trees, and a reminder of the stories etched within the Australian soil.
Dancing Home
UQP, 2017
‘When he was in gaol, he’d begun to prepare himself for the fight of his life, a showdown with the policeman, McWilliams … he’d face life with death, and see who blinked first.’
Blackie and Rips are fresh out of prison when they set off on a road trip back to Wiradjuri country with their mate Carlos. Blackie is out for revenge against the cop who put him in prison on false grounds. He is also craving to reconnect with his grandmother’s country.
Driven by his hunger for drugs and payback, Blackie reaches dark places of both mystery and beauty as he searches for peace. He is willing to pay for that peace with his own life.
Winner, 2018 ACT Book of the Year Award
Winner, 2016 Queensland Literary Awards – David Unaipon Award
“This story of one Aboriginal man who turns the inside of a cell – a site of ultimate colonial oppression and cultural genocide – into a site of emancipation of the mind is a powerful reminder of those who are not free, a metaphor for the nation as a jail still incarcerating its first peoples.”
About the Author
Paul Collis is a Barkindji man, born in Bourke in far western NSW on the Darling River. Paul worked in Newcastle for much of his young adult life in the areas of teaching and in Aboriginal community development positions. He has taught Aboriginal Studies to Indigenous inmates at the Worimi and Mount Penang juvenile detention centres and in Cessnock and Maitland prisons. Paul has a Bachelor of Arts degree and a doctorate in Communications. He lives in Canberra and works as a Creative Writing academic at the University of Canberra. Dancing Home is his first novel and won the national 2016 David Unaipon Award for a previously unpublished Indigenous writer and the 2018 ACT Book of the Year Award.
