My Kaathi Sister
POEMS
Julie Janson
Publication date
ISBN:
May
2026
978-1-923248-25-0
About the author
JULIE JANSON, a Burruberongal woman of Darug Aboriginal nation, is an acclaimed novelist, playwright and poet. who lives on the south coast of NSW. She was a lecturer for thirty years in Aboriginal programs and a teacher in Sydney and remote Aboriginal communities.
Julie has had ten plays produced professionally in Australia, Indonesia and USA. Gunjies was nominated for an AWGIE Award and received a Highly Commended Award from the Human Rights Commission; Eyes of Marege, a collaboration with Teater Kita Makassar, Ujung Pandang, was produced at the Sydney Opera House 2007 and the Adelaide Ozasia Festival. The Crocodile Hotel was shortlisted for the
Patrick White Playwrights Award and the Griffin Award, 2010.
Julie’s novel Compassion (Magabala, 2024), an Indigenous historical novel, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2025 and won the ACT Writers Centre prize. Madukka the River Serpent (UWA,
2022), an Indigenous crime novel, longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award 2023. Benevolence (Magabala, 2020), an Indigenous historical novel, was published in USA and UK by Harper Collins in 2022. It
was shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award 2022, and nominated for the NIB Literary Award 2020 and the Voss Literary Award 2020.
Her poetry awards include the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Poetry Prize 2016 and the Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2019, and runner up in Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize 2025. Her poems have been published in Island, ABR and Overland. My Kaathi Sister is her first poetry collection.
About the book
This collection tells a life—and many lives. Janson's book begins with childhood, and a tribute to her father, Neville. This is one of several deep and enduring relationships—including those with her "Kaathi Sister" Jenny Ebbsworth, and with her beloved but troubled brother, Brian—which have anchored her and enabled her to survive the abuse, deprivation, discrimination and violence compellingly documented in poems such as "The Smallest Violin in the World" and "Hallelujah Praise the Lord." The focus softens and broadens as the book steps from childhood into the thick of life; the particularities of autobiography and family merge with myth; the scope of imaginative sympathy expands, and the individual story, Julie Janson’s own, becomes the story of the suffering and resilience of a people. In the end, the circle of the book’s compassion expands to embrace "all God's creatures"—the victims of the Black Summer fires, a lost and bewildered stranger in an airport, an Indian beggar, a starving dog.
Julie Janson writes with extraordinary honesty and emotional depth. These poems carry the weight of
history, family and Country but are threaded with tenderness and fierce love. Julie’s work reminds us
that survival is not passive; it’s creative, strategic, and spiritual. This collection is moving, unsettling and
profoundly important.
—LARISSA BEHRENDT
Distinguished Professor, UTS
At once beautiful, evocative, deeply moving, unsettling and compelling, My Kaathi Sister is impelled by a
fierce truthtelling, the celebration of kin and country, and the power of memory. It embodies Julie Janson’s
compassion, human insight and generosity—and it witnesses a remarkable life steeped in words, love of
family and place. This is Janson, the poet, at the pinnacle of her craft.
—PAUL DALEY
Guardian writer and author of The Leap