Frozen 3 (the poem not the movie)

 Elsa said that the cold never bothered her anyway, but it is bothering me, and it is bothering the acknowledgement, treatment and culture of Aboriginal Australians.

Disney came out with ‘Frozen’ in 2013, but Samuel Wagan Watson came out with ‘cold storage’ in 2002 - someone’s nachos are being reheated here.

Wagon Watson’s CHILLING poem doesn’t have Elsa’s ice powers, but he does use his magical writing powers to talk about the past, present and future loss of Aboriginal culture.

“Cold storage” probably makes you think about when you chucked your leftovers in the fridge Tuesday night then got them out to eat on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday… Don’t worry you’re not the only one because that’s exactly what Australia did to Aboriginal culture – they froze it and then chucked it into the fridge next to the leftover colonialism.

Metaphorically but also literally because the title “cold storage” is a metonym for a refrigerator. 

They preserve food so that it won’t grow mouldy and the same thing is happening with an inhibition and prevention of growth when it comes to understanding, acknowledging, and respecting Aboriginal culture, people and history. 

Imagine only thinking about your heritage the way you think about what’s in the freezer: only when it smells bad or someone else mentions it.

Even when there is acknowledgement, it’s artificial – covered by a “smothering layer of cold political rhetoric”. These politicians make pinkie-promises with a cherry on top and, like children who make pinkie-promises with cherries on top, they forget and fib.

Their political gestures are superficial and performative – they fail to enact real change for First Nations people.

Around just before ‘cold storage’ was published, in 1997, the report of an inquiry into the Stolen Generations (called ‘Bringing Them Home’) was released. In 1999, Prime Minister John Howard passed his ‘Motion of Reconciliation’ act with a cute speech. The title is quite literally blatantly named “Reconciliation” with a capital R, and though he does talk about this for the duration of a whole 5-page long script, he never says the word “sorry”. Though we do get Kevin Rudd’s famous 2008 ‘Sorry’ speech following all of this, there’s still something integral missing – an actual proposition for compensation or a restitution process. Like a refrigerator, these politicians preserve appearances but freeze real growth.

The Rainbow Serpent - the G.O.A.T. of Dreamtime.

The Aboriginal Dreamtime story about our king starts with the serpent laying still with the earth as nothing, then it awakes and brings about the waterways, nature and mountains. It’s seen as the great giver of life and holds a lot of power and significance in Aboriginal culture. One significant trait is its ability to shed its own skin to symbolise growth, renewal and revival. But in ‘cold storage’ the rainbow serpent is “dormant”. This symbolises societal regression - almost as if we are #throwbackthursday-ing to the beginning of the Creation story - and describes how Australian society has regressed instead of progressed. While snakes are out here shedding skin and evolving, Australia’s shedding Aboriginal practices... and gaining nothing in return. Western ideologies have come in like a software update nobody asked for, overriding a cultural system that once updated itself naturally. Now we’re stuck buffering.

My second movie reference: ‘Spirited Away’ - but interpret this very literally. 

I mean literally because the “spirits” are being “sucked away into gas-pipelines”. Spirits, in Aboriginal culture, relate both to their present culture and practices, as well as their past culture and ancestors - playing an essential role in the way they live their lives and their perspectives of the world. By how these spirits are then “sucked away” it describes how their values of culture and connection are being removed. “Sucked” also holds forceful and harsh connotations on how Aboriginal culture was torn apart and how their tribes were detrimentally hurt and affected. European colonisation brought about mass killings, displacement and relocation from their traditional lands and denial of cultural practices – this brought about a HUGE loss of culture.

The “gas-pipelines” adds another layer as the land that the Aboriginals had a spiritual connection to and belonged to their culture was instead used for materialistic gains of natural gas extraction and supply (if we’re interpreting it literally). But in a slightly more metaphorical sense, it is symbolic of the urbanisation of their land. The land is part of their culture, and exploiting and destroying it in such a way severs the Aboriginal people’s connection to their culture which just pmo so bad.

This Western oppression keeps “taking … taking … taking …” from their culture and nothing’s being given back. The slow and eventual italicisation as well as the ellipsis slows the reader down and symbolises the eventual freezing of Aboriginal culture. Greater emphasis is placed on each subsequent “taking” as more is sucked away into gas pipelines and frozen each time.

The “Big Smoke” – from nature to Nandos.

This is Western slang for big cities - fun fact it specifically refers to London, Sydney and Melbourne. By including Western Gen-1900s brain rot words like this, Wagan Watson also emphasises the spread of Western slang and colloquialism. But, primarily, the “kids” being “packed off to the Big Smoke” portrays the future generation of Indigenous Australians leaving for the big city. This is gut-wrenching when you think about how Aboriginal people’s culture and aspects of their ways of living are being in tune with nature. By leaving to the “Big Smoke”, Wagan Watson implies they’re also leaving behind parts of their cultural identity.

 

The only thing echoing here is colonial guilt.

The very closely approaching dystopian future: “a main street void of the laughter of it’s children”. The “main street” is the core and centre of the town and its people, and the children are the future generation and continuation of their culture. There are no children inhabiting its core and there’s no one to stop the flame of their culture from extinguishing. This isn’t just a prediction though, because this exact same thing has already happened before in the past - the Stolen Generation. For almost a century, between the 1910s and 1970s, thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were systematically removed and taken from their families by the government, churches and welfare bodies. They were stripped of their communities and culture, placed in institutions, and adopted or fostered by non-Indigenous Australians. A valuable aspect of culture is it’s language, and these children were forbidden from and punished for speaking their own language. Wagan Watson also includes a structural gap on the page in between “a main street void” and “of the laughter of it’s children”. This physical “void” is symbolic of how the core of their future and culture is hollow and empty. Wagan Watson ends the poem on not a bang but a whisper with this as the final line. It is followed by emptiness, and it also fills me with hollowness and emptiness after reading it. It’s impactful, heart-wrenching because Wagan Watson is essentially picking up a megaphone and shouting at us that the vibrancy of this 65000-year-old culture is fading faster than a Wi-Fi signal in the outback. 

Let’s thaw out this culture, before it’s too late.

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