Holocaust Island by Graeme Dixon

Foreword by Jack Davis
    Graeme Dixon first saw the light of day in Katanning. His was to be a life of almost complete institutionalisation. His mother was Aboriginal, his father a migrant orphan from England who deserted the family of three children when he, Graeme, was two years of age. The next four years he spent in Sister Kate’s home. Circumstances changed for his mother when she married again, but because he bore a resemblance to his father, his stepfather disliked him and in his own words, “I kept my distance from him and generally kept my thoughts to myself.”
    Upon moving to the Gnowangerup–Borden area in the extreme southwest of the state, his stepfather deserted the family which had now grown to six. Two brothers and three sisters were placed in a home. This time the Salvation Army orphanage. But they were separated, his three sisters were placed in a different home to that of him and his two brothers. In Graeme’s words “In the orphanage I soon discovered what type of kid the Salvo’s desired. If you kept quiet and didn’t show too much emotion you were classified as a good boy.” Many a time the administration tried to adopt him out, but he would purposely misbehave and they would change their minds. He was eventually not wanted at fourteen years of age for becoming drunk and was also expelled from the Hollywood High School. He was sent back to his mother in Katanning where for a short time he found some of the happiness which was denied him for so long. But the only friends he made were ex–orphanage Aboriginal boys and they altogether were enjoying their first real taste of freedom in their lives. But the type of freedom they enjoyed was to see the young Graeme Dixon in a reformatory at fifteen and at nineteen in the Juvenile Yard in Fremantle Prison and from then on he was to spend every Christmas and birthday, from his sixteenth year until he was twenty-four, in prisons. But in the prison atmosphere, where feelings are repressed and weaknesses taken advantage of, he began to write largely as he says in his own words “to get things off my chest”. Unfortunately, he destroyed most of these early writings because as he puts it “I didn’t feel safe with my feelings lying around the cell for the prying eyes of the screws.” At twenty-five years of age he decided to keep out of jail and settle increasingly, but understandably enough, into a lifestyle of alcohol and drugs. Eventually, he was hospitalised and it was then that he met his wife Sharmaine, who recognising his talent as a writer, urged him to further his education and coaxed him into sending his poetry in as an entrant for the inaugural David Unaipon Award, which he won. Now he is also enrolled as a student at the University of Western Australia.
    Most of his poetry deals with the life he had been forced to live in the past to survive. Others express the love and the loss of his Aboriginal people.
    Now at thirty-four years of age, Graeme Dixon, Poet, has plenty of time to learn his art as a weaver of words and his craft as a writer of verse.

Prison Spirit

Prison
    Prison
    what a bitch
    Brutality
    Savageness
    Depression
    Is all caused by it
    Must’a been
    A wajella 1
    Who invented this Hell
    Wouldn’t know
    For sure
    But by the torture
    I can tell

    To deny
    A man freedom
    Is the utmost
    Form of
    Torment
    Just for
    The crime
    Of finding money
    To pay
    The Land lord’s rent
    Justice for all
    That is
    Unless you’re poor

    Endless days
    Eternal nights
    Thinking
    Worrying
    In a concrete box
    The disease
    It causes
    In the head—
    I’d rather
    Have the pox

    Because man
    Is just
    An animal
    Who needs to see
    The stars
    Free as birds
    In the sky
    Not through
    These iron bars

    There must be
    Another way
    To punish
    Penalise
    Those of us
    Who stray
    And break
    The rules
    That protect
    The taxpayers
    From us
    The reef
    Of humanity’s
    Wrecks.

    1 Wajella—white person