Jack davis poet biography project

Indigenous Australian playwright (1917–2000)

For other people with the same name, see Jack Davis (disambiguation).

Jack Leonard DavisAM, BEM (11 March 1917 – 17 March 2000) was an Australian 20th-century Aboriginalplaywright, poet and Aboriginal Australian activist.

His work incorporates themes of Aboriginality and their identity. It also includes many Aboriginal traditions and cultural practises. (Made By Reuben Horne)

While known for his literary work, Davis did not focus on writing until his fifties. His writing centred around the Aboriginal experience in relation to the settlement of white Australians. His collection of poems The First Born (1970) was his first work to be published, and made him the first Aboriginal Australian man and second Aboriginal person to have published poetry. He later focused his writing on plays, starting with Kullark, which was first performed in 1979. His plays were recognised internationally and were performed in Canada and England.

Early life and education

Jack Leonard Davis was born in Perth, Western Australia, where he spent most of his life and later died. He identified with the Noongar people, and he included some of this language into his plays.

The first five years of Davis' life were spent on a farm in Waroona, Western Australia with his ten siblings. His family then moved to Yarloop in 1923 after a bushfire destroyed their farm. Davis and his family were members of the Bibbulmun and Nyoongar people and spoke the Nyoongar language.

His mother, Alice McPhee, and father, William Davis, also known as "Bill", were both taken from their parents as they were considered by the government to be "half-castes". Under the Australian policy passed in 1890, children who had both a full-blood Aboriginal parent and a non-Aboriginal parent were considered half-castes, a policy which

2017 Indigenous Literature Week at ANZ LitLovers

Jack Davis (1917-2000), as we saw in my review of his childhood memoir, A Boy’s Life (here), had a normal rural working class upbringing in those years of scarcity prior to World War II, with just a few months at the Moore River Native Settlement in 1932 to remind him of his status as a non-white. The memoir ends in the 1940s with him droving in the Gascoyne, arid country, probably given over to sheep in those days, 1,000 km north of Perth, while one of his brothers and some of his school mates went away to war.

In the 50 pages Tony Hughes-d’Aeth devotes to Davis in his monumental (600pp) Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt, he gives a solid account of the dispersal of the Noongar – the Indigenous people of southwest WA – first by the pastoral industry in the 1800s and then by the transition to wheat farming in the 1900s. In the years before widespread mechanisation Aboriginal labour was vital, though generally unmentioned in rural histories. After WWII Aboriginal people, both Noongar and those from up north (like Davis’ parents), often dumped in the south west via the ‘Native Settlements’ at Carrolup and Moore River, and more and more often unemployed, settled on the outskirts of country towns.

Davis’ mother, after the death of his father, had gone to live with her sister at Brookton, 140 km east of Perth, where the jarrrah forested Darling Ranges merge into the gently rolling hills and open plains of the WA wheatbelt, and there she married into the local Indigenous Bennell family. H-d’A quotes Davis:

Reserves were small useless parcels of land left over from the great land-grab. Once the property needs of the farming community and its town had been met, a few discarded acres would be set aside as a reserve for Aborigines. It seldom had any economic value and certainly never had sufficient natural resource

For the past ten summers Jack Davis has worked as a Lookout Observer at a remote fire tower in the woods of northernmost northern Alberta. He also works with the street animal charity, Animal Aid Unlimited, in Udaipur, India. He lives in Parry Sound, Ontario.

His first book is the poetry title Faunics (Pedlar Press, 2017).

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Faunics is my first book and, as I write this, is yet to be released yet, so any changes remain contained in my head and nervous system at this point. We’ll give it some time.

I’ve been writing steadily for over 20 years but without having published, and therefore “finished” one thing and moved on to the next, it’s difficult for me to judge or compare one period to the another. It certainly has changed and moved and continues to move away from the I of the lyric poem toward what is outside me.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

A short attention span and no feel for narrative, maybe? Poetry has always stayed close in feeling and potential to painting and music for me, offering the uncanny possibility to try and use language to access what comes before language, before speaking. This is what keeps me writing and reading poetry.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I take a geological approach to writing: everything takes a long time. Individual poems will start out of a small fragment of sound or image, or a single word, but it’s not unusual for that seed to stay in a notebook for years before the next or the preceding line or the context fall into place. My process is fragmentary and operates through patience, ac

Classical archaeologist

Jack L. Davis (born August 13, 1950) is Carl W. Blegen Professor of Greek Archaeology at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio and is a former director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

Brief biography

Jack L. Davis has directed or co-directed regional archaeological projects in several areas of Greece, including the Nemea Valley, the island of Keos, and Messenia near the Palace of Nestor (Pylos Regional Archaeological Project). In addition he has directed regional studies and excavations in Albania in the hinterlands of the ancient Greek colonies of Dyrrachium/Epidamnos and Apollonia. Davis is a recognized authority in the archaeology of the Aegean Islands. He has published reports on excavations on the islands of Keos (at Ayia Irini) and Melos (at Phylakopi).

Davis is the author of "Review of Aegean Prehistory: The Islands of the Aegean" in Aegean Prehistory: A Review, a collection of papers edited by Tracey Cullen for the Archaeological Institute of America. He has also contributed to the Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age (2008) and to the Oxford Handbook of Aegean Prehistory (2010). In addition to prehistoric topics his research interests include the history and archaeology of Greece in the Ottoman and early modern periods and the relationship between the history of Classical archaeology and national movements in the Balkans. He is an occasional contributor to "The Archivist's Notebook."

Davis is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, a Corresponding Member of the German Archaeological Institute, and has served on advisory boards of the American Journal of Archaeology, Hesperia (journal), and Sheffield Studies