Inside My Mother

New syllabus (first HSC 2027). This text is prescribed for the 2027 to 2030 HSC under the English Advanced 11-12 (2024) syllabus (focus area: Textual conversations, paired with Barbara Baynton's Bush Studies).
Inside My Mother was also on the 2019 to 2026 list (English Standard Module A) with a different selection; only Unearth, Eyes and Key are set again. Sitting the 2026 HSC? See the 2019 to 2026 text list.

Why this text suits Textual conversations

Textual conversations rewards pairs in which the second text speaks back to the first. Ali Cobby Eckermann is a Yankunytjatjara and Kokatha poet who was removed from her family as a baby and raised by a non-Aboriginal family before reconnecting with her mother and her Country as an adult. Inside My Mother (2015) is written out of that history. Set beside Baynton's 1902 stories of the settler bush, it gives you a contemporary voice from the people the earlier text largely places at the margins, or describes through colonial eyes. Note that the title poem and the wider collection are copyrighted, so this page paraphrases and does not quote.

Why her method matters

Eckermann's poems are typically short, unadorned and exact. Rather than explaining pain, they often place a few concrete images and let the white space around them carry feeling. Your analysis will be stronger if you treat her restraint as a choice with an effect:

• Short lines and sparse stanzas slow the reader and make every image carry weight.
• Plain, direct diction avoids the flourish of the lyric tradition, which suits poems about truth-telling rather than display.
• First person that speaks for more than the self. The personal voice often opens onto family, ancestry and community, so the "I" is both individual and collective.
• Images of land, body and mother run together, so the mother is at once a person and a source, and Country and kinship are not separable from either.
• Cyclical and returning structures, in which an ending recalls an opening, can suggest healing that is real but incomplete.

NESA sets eight poems from the Giramondo edition (2015, ISBN 9781922146885): Clay, Inside My Mother, Warriors at Salt Creek, Unearth, Eyes, Key, Jacob and Nurture. Anchor every claim to these poems, and describe their techniques in your own words. Inside My Mother also appeared on the 2019 to 2026 list, in English Standard Module A, so older resources may discuss it. The 2019 to 2026 selection was different (Trance, Unearth, Oombulgarri, Eyes, Leaves and Key); only Unearth, Eyes and Key are also set for 2027 to 2030, so check older notes against the list above.

Two poems that are easy to skip

• Clay. The title names a material that is earth and also something shaped by hands. Ask how the poem uses that double sense for the body, the mother and Country, and whether the clay is being made, broken or returned to the ground.
• Warriors at Salt Creek. The title names a group of people and a place, so the poem is anchored in a named piece of landscape and in a history attached to it. Ask who is remembered, whose perspective the poem takes, and how it handles violence or loss. If you are studying Bush Studies as the paired text, test in your own reading whether this poem or another offers the sharpest contrast with Baynton's treatment of the bush.

Use both poems alongside Unearth, Eyes and Key rather than leaving them to the end of your revision, and check each reading against your copy.

What to look for across the set poems

1. Removal and its aftermath. Look at how the poems treat absence: what is not said, what is replaced by a gesture or an object, and how the poem's shape mimics a gap.
2. Return and reconnection. Poems about reunion and the return to Country often balance joy with grief, and they ask what can and cannot be restored.
3. Inheritance. Consider how the poems treat trauma as something passed between generations, and how care, language and ceremony are passed as well.
4. Voice and address. Track who is spoken to (a mother, a child, a reader) and how that changes tone.
5. Landscape. Eckermann's landscapes are inhabited and named, not empty. This is the clearest contrast with the bush Baynton describes.

Context as a driver of argument

Eckermann's work belongs to the history of the Stolen Generations, which the 1997 Bringing Them Home report brought into national debate and which the 2008 national apology addressed. Her poetry does not simply illustrate that history. It argues that personal testimony is itself a form of historical record, and that poetry can hold what official accounts omit. This is where the conversation with Baynton becomes productive. Baynton's colonial-era stories describe a bush that is hostile to settlers. Eckermann's poems ask what that hostility meant for the people already there, and what it is to belong to a place the settler texts treat as empty or threatening.

Conversation with its pair

Read Inside My Mother beside Bush Studies and argue how each text reshapes the other.

Values

Both writers value truthful testimony and distrust comforting national stories. Where Baynton's values centre on the safety and dignity of isolated women in a settler economy, Eckermann's centre on kinship, memory and cultural continuity for people separated from their families by government policy. Each shows the emotional cost of a system, and together they show that the cost was carried unequally.

Context

A 1902 colonial author writing about the bush and a 2015 First Nations poet writing about removal and return stand on opposite sides of the same history. Reading them together lets you show how time, authority and who gets to speak change what a text can say.

Form

Baynton uses narrative suspense, withheld information and ironic narration. Eckermann uses the compression of lyric poetry. One builds dread through accumulation, the other builds feeling through omission. A strong response compares how each form manages silence, because both texts are, in different ways, about what cannot be said.

Common pitfalls

• Treating the poems as autobiography only. Analyse craft: line, image, address and structure.
• Pairing by theme alone. The syllabus asks how the texts converse, so argue what each makes visible in the other.
• Speaking about Aboriginal experience in general terms. Stay with what the eight set poems actually do.
• Using the pairing to excuse Baynton's colonial attitudes, or to flatten Eckermann into a response to her. Each text deserves its own reading first.

Essay scaffold

Introduction

State your thesis on the conversation: for example, that Eckermann reclaims the bush as inhabited, remembered Country, which exposes what Baynton's settler narrative could not see.

Body 1

Eckermann's poetic method: restraint, image and white space, tied to two of the set poems, such as Unearth and Eyes.

Body 2

Removal, return and inheritance, drawing on poems such as Key, Jacob, Nurture or Clay, and how they turn private history into public testimony.

Body 3

The conversation with Baynton: values, context and form compared, with a clear claim about what changes when you read them together.

Conclusion

Argue that Eckermann answers Baynton not by arguing with her but by placing Country, family and removal where the settler story left blank, so that reading them together shows both how the bush was feared and who had lived in it.

Read the text

Inside My Mother is in copyright. NESA sets the Giramondo Publishing edition (2015, ISBN 9781922146885). Borrow it from a library or buy it from a bookseller. We do not link to unauthorised copies.

Sources

• NESA, HSC English prescriptions (checked 7 October 2026, year 2026).
• NESA, English Advanced Year 12 content pages: page 1, page 2, page 3 (prescription lists, checked 7 October 2026).