POEM ANALYSIS
Ali Cobby Eckermann, is the first Australian aboriginal poet to receive the Windham-
Campbell Prize. She is an Australian poet of indigenous Australian ancestry. Her poem reflects
her griefs and agony of being a part of the stolen generation of Australia. Her poem ‘Ngingali’ is
dedicated to those who had a dreadful childhood for being a part of the ‘Stolen Generation’.
Ali Cobby Eckermann composed the poem Ngingali, to depict the distress of a child who
is growing up without his or her biological mother. The memories of a child, who is the victim of
aboriginal policies of Australia and a part of the ‘Stolen generation has been portrayed all
through the poem. In order to make her description vivid and lively, she has used poetic
language as well as instruments like metaphors, simile, personification as well as symbolism.
The metaphor used in this line-‘My mother is a granite boulder/I can no longer climb nor
walk/around/her weight’ are-‘climb or walk’. In theis line the phrase -‘climb or walk’ depicts
how an aboriginal child who has been separated from his or her parents, misses the company of
his or her mother. It also indicates the child’s urge to stay close to its mother.
In the lines- ‘I sit in her shadow/gulls nestle in her eyes/their shadows her epitaph/’ the
word ‘shadow’ is a metaphor. It is indicative of the child’s memory of his or her mother. Here ‘I
sit in her shadow’ refers to the child’s vision. In his or her vision, the child can identify its
resemblance with its mother. The child is imaginative and its mind glides through a series of
discrete memories related to her mother, just like discrete shadows of a sunny day. The line –“
their shadows her epitaph” implies that these ‘shadows’ or discrete memories in the child’s
vision, compose the memoir of the beautiful days of his or her childhood. The metaphor
‘shadow’ is also indicative of the fact that the child’s mother is always with the child like a
shadow and the child can envision the existence of her mother through an imaginary shadow.

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