Gold Digger, by Lisa Collyer, Gazebo / Life Before Man 2025
I ain’t sayin’ she’s a …: so goes the chorus of Kanye West’s catchy, yet thoroughly misogynistic 2005 hit which bears the same name as Lisa Collyer’s second poetry collection, Gold Digger. It’s impossible to not makes these associations with such a proverbial phrase, which I suspect is the poet’s intention. Layered meaning, and revealing raw truths that ride under the kind of offending tropes West employs in his song, are very much the game here. In this case, the ‘gold digger’ from the titular poem is a literal female gold prospector, who “turns up dirt, sieves wealth from toil”.
And there we get a subtle location tag for the collection too, where “wealth from toil” echoes the Australian national anthem. It’s likely no coincidence that this central image of a woman attempting to scrabble gold from the earth in such a tactile, personal way speaks to its West Australian setting, a state that is deeply associated with mechanised, large scale resource mining – gold being one of the most prominent of those local resources.
Gold digger is a nuanced journey through the world of women’s labour. We don’t just meet a small-scale prospector here, but a range of female workers across domestic, civic, and commercial spheres. Though many poems sit comfortably in the confessional tradition, and likely reflect Collyer’s personal history with work, characterization and storytelling are important techniques in the collection too. A lens of imagination and referenced research brings us into the orbit of women that swing from jam makers to agricultural workers, as with the gorgeous preface poem, ‘The Grape Pickers’:
……………This graft pays for a couple’s lodgings
chaperoned in
……………that ladies’ lounge; detect floral bouquets
recently pitched to single ladies. She’s taught to hold
and make a keen cut at the node to form a callus.
Collyer’s formal diversity has evolved from her 2023 Dorothy Hewett Award shortlisted collection, How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up, a book which frequently employed parataxis as an exposition strategy. We do see that technique resurfacing in ‘The Real Revolution is Terylene’, where the poet eschews preposition and conjunctive to create a bobbing rhythm of juxtaposing resolutions across ten couplets:
Desertion. Tick. A haloed mien, plain gold band
gynaecological occupation.Cruelty. Tick. Oher people’s dirty laundry
a washboard stomach subject to friction.
But, overall, Gold Digger is a book of many approaches. Collyer’s prose poetry often calls in its prose referent with micro narratives, or there’s the accomplished contrapuntal poem, ‘Forget-Me-Not’, which fully embraces the form’s potential for multidirectional reading. Gold Digger is published by Gazebo Books’ poetry imprint, Life Before Man, which is overseen by visual artist, Phil Day, and Day’s oft noted aesthetic approach to setting is used to great advantage in this collection. The poem ‘Supply and Demand’, though not formally a contrapuntal, is laid out across two facing pages that contrast the historical restrictions of women’s labour hire to the realities of the current moment. ‘Supply and Demand’ also answers the earlier characterization of a historical female gold prospector with that of a modern mine worker:
In high-vis uniforms at Sassy Sue’s
two gals finger vintage frocks
in-between their twelve-hour shift
driving haul trucks down at the super pit.
Counterpoints are important to Gold Digger as an integral work – the sense of history passing, changing, and regressing too. A reader is never left with a single impression: note the way ‘The Rag’ Trade voltas from the gentrified glamour of fashion to a final revelation of the low paid worker who makes the clothes. Or note the how the Scottish protagonist of the poem ‘Gold Digger’ exists alongside Italian ancestors in works like the macaronic poem, ‘An Appendage’. Language, labour, culture, and struggle all traverse complex versions of identity. But if there is a throughline of thought that inflects the whole of Gold Digger, it is not only gendered labour, it is also class.
Gold Digger has five themed sections, and all but the final section, ‘Where Her Tears Were Kept’, focus on blue collar and unpaid domestic labour exclusively. ‘Where Her Tears Were Kept’ uses a more expressly political theme, in that the poems revolve around women in the political class. In the preceding four sections, the workers represented are from the rural and urban proletariat. That hard focus on class position is a trope breaking move in itself. The usual class advantages enjoyed by women trailblazers in science, the academy, or in the arts are left aside to reveal types of gendered labour that have always existed and have, indeed, often been a matter of survival, as in ‘Pit Canary’:
A choreographed reel with water, rock
soil; a cleaved crotch weathers
bare breasts, rumoured vice. Prospects
grow dim but piety’s outrage won’t
raise her. The family kitty rests
on black lung for its bread ‘n’ butter
her milk spelunking into the quietude
on half his pay. Try erasing slag
from a silk pocket; a winched wench
on your conscience.
There is a sense in which the poem, ‘Hodge’, could serve as a central metaphor for the entire collection. Its verbiage and title are directly lifted from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles with its endless milking toil – and hodge is a 19th century slang term for a female agricultural worker. But Collyer’s final excursion into the lives of women of the political class is worthwhile too. ‘Thirteen Uses for the Ties in Parliament House’ is a clever abstract with haunting allusions to the sexual assault case of Britttany Higgins, mirroring themes of gendered violence that occur in previous poems like ‘Forget-Me-Not’, while ‘Does My Bum Look Fat In This’ recalls some of the startling misogyny Julia Gillard suffered as leader of the country. Class is advantage, but not protection.
In Gold Digger, Collyer has created a witty, playful, yet hard edged and incisive work of art. Collyer, as in How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up, is frequently in her comfort zone with abstraction and high sarcasm; and it is never an easy prospect to combine humour and absurdity with harrowing subject matter. But the result, if the writing is as deftly handled as it is here, is a work that is both enjoyable to read and that will resonate with a reader long after the back cover is closed. Gold Digger is a book that will spill many of its rewards on the first reading, then more (and richer) rewards on a second and third reading too.
– Alan Fyfe
Alan Fyfe is a poet and storyteller from Boorloo (Perth). His first novel, T, was listed for Australian and international manuscript awards, and was published by Transit Lounge in 2022. T was then listed for a WA Premier’s Award for an emerging writer in 2023. His debut poetry collection, G-d, Sleep, and Chaos, won silver in Flying Islands’ first poetry-manuscript award, and is published by Gazebo books. Most recently, G-d, Sleep, and Chaos was awarded highly commended in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, and won both the award for poetry and book of the year in the WA Premier’s Awards. His second novel, The Cross Thieves, is available from Transit Lounge now.
Gold Digger, by Lisa Collyer, is available from https://gazebobooks. com.au/product/gold-digger/
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