“Literature knows no frontiers and must remain common currency among people in spite of political or international upheavals.”
- PEN INTERNATIONAL CHARTER
Poem Series by Jeanine Leane is one of three PEN Melbourne pamphlets in the series Keeping Words Free. PEN Melbourne invited Jeanine Leane, Plestia Alaqad and André Dao to reflect on the above quote from the PEN International Charter. In a world currently shaped by unease, fracture and division we look to writers whose writing expands our horizons and speaks across borders.
At a time when writers, artists and advocates in Australia and around the world are being silenced for speaking out against oppression, PEN Melbourne is committed to the guiding principle that literature knows no frontiers. These pamphlets form part of PEN Melbourne’s support for the writing and reading community by encouraging and promoting writers whose work reflects a range of ideas, viewpoints and beliefs.
PEN Melbourne is run by a committee of volunteers united by the conviction that writing and literature have the power to create understanding across difference, to cross borders, and to enrich cooperation between peoples.
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Jeanine Leane
Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri activist, writer, poet and academic from southwest New South Wales. Her poetry, short stories, critique, and essays have been published in AustralianPoetry Journal, Antipodes, Westerly, Cordite Review Overland and the Sydney Review of Books . Jeanine has published widely in the areas of Aboriginal literature, writing otherness, literary critique, and creative non-fiction. Jeanine’s collection of poetry, Gawimarra gathering (UQP 2024) won the 2025 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize at the NSW Literary Awards 2025.
JEANINE LEANE
Occupied Poem Series
The world has shrunk.
A rectangular screen 9 x 11 inches occupies the sphere that was once the globe.
Sharp corners, hardlines replace wide smooth circles of multiple truths.
The harmony of many voices syphoned to a monotone that thump, thump, thumps like a bad sci-fi movie that plays across our screens.
Hyper-misinformed social media feeds a culture of ignorance, everyone is an armchair expert in an echo chamber, virtue signalling.
Celebrity activism morphs into an egotistical monster that cannibalises justice obscures truths.
Fingers do the talking but not the walking.
Keyboard vigilantes type over those they claim to advocate for.
Amid all the hollow noise censorship creeps silent as a virus unnoticed until its symptoms are chronic and the illness is terminal.
Words are weaponised by idealogues to silence the truths.
Cultural safety is code for white-settler supremacy social cohesion is doublespeak for cancelling dissidence.
Freedom speakers are labelled terrorists.
Truth folds like a discarded suitcase, packed another time, abandoned in the gutter of yesterday’s news cycle.
X marks the spot where activism goes to die.
The hum of dissent is reduced to a piercing *bleeeeep* the chant of Israel [nation] is committing genocide [redacted]
Benjamin Netanyahu [PM] is a war criminal [censored]
Donald Trump [President] is an autocratic megalomaniac [section considered offensive]
Palestine [country betrayed in 1948] is stolen land
67 000 or more Palestinians have been murdered by the Israeli Defence Force [this section has been edited]
These governments deserve our disrespect and contempt [word excised] Palestine [land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River] is occupied territory [removed by the Australian Communications and Media Authority]
The first casualty of war is truth [this statement is true and correct].
I want to unpick the tapestry of fear woven across the length and breadth of this nation as it arrived with the invasion in boat loads of remnants cast off from a white linen land unravelling across frayed edges to threadbare cloth. I want to pull the threads of tension across shame, hatred, loathing and terror through the weft and warp of the nation right back to the selvage.
Weave and thread the strands through the eye of the present, back-stitch over holes in the past, loop the future in bright skeins of embroidered stories that cut through the fabricated silence blanketing all our Countries oversewn with lies, fears and deceit. Stitch by stitch I want to sew against the grain of discovery, denial, theft and occupation to mend this tattered story and hem truths deep into the seams of colonial Australia.
Onthebrink,2025
A brink, the dictionary tells us, is an extreme edge, a slim space before a steep slope or fall –the verge before the critical point of a situation or a state beyond which there is no return.
The long-nosed shrew became extinct in Australia today. How wide was the brink where this creature like many before it sat on the edge of permanent demise before it was erased from the earth to become a figment held only in the memory of those who cared?
How long did it hover on this precarious bank of time as its life seconds numbered, day by day, unnoticed?
How far did it fall out of reality into an archive of extinction?
The shrew joins a growing number of terrestrial mammals to become extinct since invasion.
How steep was the slope, how long was the drop into oblivion?
How quietly did each species live and die unnoticed –documented by the few who witnessed their destruction, and those who lived to tell the story?
Australia is famous for a long list of creatures that are no more. Indigenous Australians are 4% of the national population since British invasion, and permanent occupation since 1788 a small fraction of the nation that encloses us, we are always on the edge of many attempts of extinction to push us into the depths of oblivion –to silence the witnesses who might remain to tell our stories.
After massacres, poisons, crowd diseases, thefts, assaults, stolen children and deaths in custody we still sit firm on a precipice of truth that is solid but narrow on the brink of a nation that still tries to silence us.
We survive on a planet where the pathological liars are kings, shahs, prime ministers and presidents where one nation survives genocide and then commits it against another and then another –where war is waged against journalists and survivors where administrators and armies push truth and lives to the far horizons of amnesia.
How wide is the brink that separates the living from extinction?
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PEN Melbourne is a community united by a love of literature and a commitment to freedom of expression. Founded in 1938, PEN Melbourne is one of 147 PEN International centres worldwide. Together we advocate for writers who, because they speak truth to power and express oppositional views, are persecuted, incarcerated and killed by regimes. PEN stands in solidarity with these writers, and campaigns for their right to peacefully practise their professions. PEN stands against censorship in a climate of increasing repression of dissenting voices.
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