Gold Digger by Lisa Collyer, Gazebo Books 2025, was launched by Bron Bateman at Astral Weeks Listening Bar on the 28th of November 2025.

Before we start, I would like to acknowledge that we are meeting on the unceded boodja of the Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation. I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging and acknowledge that their stories have been told on this land for over 3000 generations. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.

In reading Lisa Collyer’s poetry collection, Gold Digger, I was struck by how she writes poems that are battle-line hardy, staunchly feminist, with a working-class sensibility and a gendered understanding of both out-of-home work and the domestic sphere. This is a book that rewards re-reading, as it avoids rendering such things into simple binaries. The pervasive themes of Collyer’s collection are patriarchal power, female work and experience, class and ethnicity and female agency. Her protagonists are articulate, unapologetic, angry, wryly humorous, embodied and come from all walks of life. Collyer stuns with the vividness of her imagery, the pared-back urgency of her language and the compulsive readability of her poems.

I was also starkly reminded of how she employs power dynamics, which are conveyed through the act of looking, most famously represented in Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Mulvey introduced the concept of the male qaze. This gaze analyses how images, particularly in film, are constructed to present women from a masculine, heterosexual perspective—often objectifying them as passive and sexualised—while men are typically portrayed as active agents of their own narratives. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing refined Mulvey’s theory by suggesting that we see before we have words. Collyer wields words like weapons, replacing the visual with the articulated. Berger also explained that visual representations have currency, and bodies have fiscal worth. In Collyer’s poem ‘Volcanic Fed’, about Italian actress, Anna Magnani, she writes that even as an Academy Award-winner, Magnani “comes on too strong” and is “public space” the “slip-slide of a rock-fall [of] “women who smoulder.”

The takeaway from this poem and Berger’s Ways of Seeing is that beauty exists in Collyer’s work, even in the price paid for fame.

Mulvey’s theory has since expanded to include other perspectives, such as the female gaze, the queer gaze and the oppositional gaze, to better understand representations of gender, sexuality, race, and power beyond just the male-female binary. In her poetry, Collyer has subverted the masculine, patriarchal gaze to turn an unflinching, oppositional gaze on the gazer himself to reveal the hierarchy, structures, strength, endurance and audacity of the gendered, classed, and sexualised female protagonist.

In the poems ‘The Barmaid’s Gaze‘ and ‘The Shoe Hat’ the women “like men”, ”dazzle manhood with a wrist and comely smile” “effing and blinding” and “revamp[ing] the double entendre.” Women in Collyer’s poems are unapologetically sexual, non-maternal, make the best of their lives in poverty and drudgery, in both the paid work and domestic spheres. The barmaid rules the bar, acknowledges masculine privilege, but exists in a privileged space within it. In paid work, in the poem ‘The Rag Trade’, a woman is “in a warehouse at six a.m.” as she says, “I stand up, bend, and cut for a pittance.” She has agency, nevertheless, as the narrator of her own experience.

Another strength of Collyer’s collection is the way it explores ethnicity with nuance and sympathy. Although steadfastly working class, her Italian protagonists create food, family and connection through their work and family celebrations. She explores the importance of maintaining familial bonds in female, working-class immigrants in her Gwen Harwood Prize shortlisted poem ‘The Grape Picker[s]’. As the first poem in this collection, this is a searing, deep dive into Lisa’s intentions and themes. She writes:

…………This dry heat; beneath her frock, a micro-
climate trickles; her hands once proxied manpower;
…………that farm she’ll never in[her]it. On the scale
of sweet and acid, I think she’s developing.

These searing feminist insights and wide range of literary influences such as Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, Luce Irigaray, Sylvia Plath, Tennessee Williams, Tim Winton and Tracy Ryan, to name some, demonstrate her intellectual prowess without negating the importance of her working-class Italian/Celtic origins and the collision of cultures therein. In the poem ‘La Vera Pizza’, she slyly asserts:

My matrilineage is questioned when I
respond, Australian. Here. Here. Here. County Clare. They
scan my Roman nose. Frigento. Ha! They decide I am Italian.

In the section of Gold Digger entitled It Doesn’t Pay to Be Polite, Collyer explores both Domestic and Family Violence in an intimate partner setting. The contrapuntal poem ‘Forget-Me-Not’ is a devastating exposition of one woman’s brutal assault and harrowing death on the steps of the Midland Town Hall. The victim is a representation of the physical and emotional indenture of any woman in a domestically violent relationship and the impact such violence has on her family and community. One of the most significant poems of the collection, ‘Forget-Me-Not’ and the opening lines of ‘Why Doesn’t She Just Leave Him?’ starkly state the equivocation and ultimate futility of “just leaving”. Collyer writes, “[T]he chains are loose, she can leave the devil / any time and does occasionally…”. ‘In How Not to Die [at Work]’, she explores the adage that men most fear being laughed at, while women most fear being killed. The refrain, ‘I’d rather be stabbed than raped” iterates the danger of the familiar, with fear felt in the workplace and the frightening walk through the carpark with a fistful of keys highlighting this danger. She writes:

Assess the danger.
The door slams, eyes wide shut.
Dying not waving, pub metres
from bar of inebriants, happy hour
for some.

Paid employment is also explored in detail in Gold Digger. Collyer’s strong, Fuck You attitude to white collar employers is explored powerfully in her poems ‘Thirteen Uses For the Ties in Parliament House‘ with attire as a class and gendered indicator, and ‘Does My Bum Look Fat in This?‘ where women’s attire is shown as being demonstrably unsuitable for their needs when she writes:

Or maybe, it was the pocketless jacket
where her tears were kept.

I am reminded of two poems that resonate with Collyer’s lyrical, poetic sensibility. Firstly, Sylvia Plath’s poem, ‘Lady Lazarus‘, with the defiant, final stanza that states:

Out of the ash I rise
with my red hair
and I eat men like air.

I am also reminded of Maya Angelou’s feminist anthem, ‘And Still I Rise’:

You may write me down in history
with your bitter, twisted lies,
you may trod me in the very dirt
but still, like dust, I’ll rise.

This stridency, confidence and urgency is emblematic of every voice, every story and every poem in Gold Digger.

At its core, this collection of poems celebrates and explores relationships that these characters form with themselves and their families, friends, and partners and the harm and joy that can be engendered. This collection is overflowing with strength, exactitude, intelligence, humour, righteous anger and female agency, despite any privations of patriarchal control. May this book reach readers, bookshops and bookshelves far and wide, and may it nourish and empower many minds and hearts. Raise a glass, everyone, and drink a toast to Lisa Collyer and her brilliant collection. I am proud and honoured to declare Gold Digger well and truly launched.

 – Bron Bateman

---

Bron Bateman is a queer, crip poet, editor and educator from Boorloo. She has had four collections of poetry published: People from bones (Ragged Raven Press 2002), Of Memory and Furniture (Fremantle Press 2020), which was Highly Commended in the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry in 2021, Blue Wren (Fremantle Press 2022) and Love Like This Isn’t Harmless (Fremantle Press 2025). She has won the Bobbie Cullen Memorial Prize for Creative Writing in 2004, Columbia University’s Winter Prize for Poetry in 2017 and been shortlisted and Commended for the Tom Collins National Poetry Prize in 2022 and 2024. She has been published in journals and anthologies such as Cordite, Westerly, Southerly and Australian Poetry Journal and has performed her poetry locally, nationally and internationally.

Gold Digger by Lisa Collyer is available from https://gazebobooks.com.au/product/gold-digger/