Summary

Little Bit Long Time is Ali Cobby Eckermann's first poetry collection. It takes as its subject the difficult history of Indigenous people since colonial times.

Both the four decades of her own often hard and confronting personal experience, and the lives of Indigenous people over the last two hundred years are the furnace in which the steel of Ali Cobby Eckermann's incisive poetic voice has been tempered.

Her language has the sureness of one who both knows her subject matter intimately and is able to speak authentically, having reached some sort of resolution in both life and in art.

These poems are 'the song of a soul that came through', the distillations of one who has been as relentless in finding the true home of her particular voice and striking exactly the note to convey meaning and feeling as she has been in her search for identity and true home and family.

Kumana

There is no life
but Family.

When I am young
I live with my Family.

When I grow up
I leave my Family.

When I am lonely
I miss my Family.

When I am drunk
I reverse-charge my Family.

When I pass away
I unite my Family.

There is no life
but Family.

Little Bit Long Time is published by Picaro Press in The Aegis Series.