Galah’s Skull
Sarah Holland-Batt
RM 2012004271
1904
CRICOS No. 00213J
Queensland University of Technology
Research Description
Galah’s Skull is a practice-led work of creative research in the form of a lyric poem, published in Poetry magazine in
2010. The poem draws on ecocritical theories of the posthuman and recent developments in animal studies in order to
consider conditions of nonhuman agency and knowledge. The poem documents the poet’s encounter with a galah’s
skull and a live millipede in a field, and, drawing upon Deep Ecological ideas of the interconnectedness of animal and
human worlds, rejects the idea of a fundamental unknowability of the animal psyche in favour of an empathic and
indistinct encounter in which nonhuman and human thoughts merge.
Deploying a set of experimental metaphors that both endow the animal with complex cognitive and generative powers,
Galah’s Skull reduces and complicates notions of distance between its speaker, the galah’s skull and living millipede,
endowing agency and power in the encounter to the animal and underlining the permeability between the categories of
‘animal’ and human’, especially in relation to their shared mortality.
a university for the
real world
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CRICOS No. 00213J
a university for the
real world
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CRICOS No. 00213J
Cover of Poetry Magazine and
Young Poets in which “Galah’s
Skull” appears
a university for the
real world
R
CRICOS No. 00213J
a university for the
real world
R
CRICOS No. 00213J