Grace Yee’s follow-up to her triple award-winning poetry collection Chinese Fish. In the White Hills Cemetery in Bendigo the remains of more than a thousand ‘chinamen’ lie interred, many in unmarked graves. Most were from the Canton region in south China. Joss: A History is inspired by the lived experiences of these early settlers, and their compatriots and descendants across Victoria and NSW, and Aotearoa New Zealand. It is a hybrid work of poetry and history. The poems and archival extracts respond to longstanding colonialist prejudices that have exoticised and diminished Chinese communities in white settler nations around the Pacific Rim since the gold rushes of the nineteenth century. Refracted through a twenty-first century lens, Joss pays tribute to the poet’s ancestors, illuminating how they survived and thrived amid ‘life’s implacably white horizons’. It is grounded in the conviction that the past is not past, that historical events reverberate insistently in the present.
