The Real ‘Skeleton of Principle’: Using Computational Poetry for Critical Indigenous Legal Scholarship

Australian law exerts a vertical force and is unyielding. When I talk to people about that law and how it impacts on us, I can participate in that vertical force and put all that weight on them. The language is dense. The split between normative justice and the textualism of Australian law is no more than moot in community. It is an embodied sense of fury and futility. Who would want to read another journal article that says things are bad, or invest tens of thousands of dollars in the tools needed to comprehend it? Plenty, but not the people I want to reach with this project. Through poetry, which complains of a slim readership but can lament nothing compared to the skeletal readership of legal journals (sorry!), we can excavate, express and teach critical Indigenous theory and critical whiteness theory in Australian law — without being part of that vertical force by either pushing down using its language, or attempting to resist it by deconstructing it. We can do so by distilling legal decisions themselves. In the following pages are poems that are part of an informal and experimental project to try to do just that. The first three poems of the project appear in BLAKWORK and focus on Trevorrow, Mabo, and the Inquest into the Death of Ms Dhu. The poems below focus on Wik, Wotton, Bugmy and Kartinyeri. For both collections I used computational tools to extract the 50-or-so most common trigrams (three word phrases) from key legal decisions in recent history that concern our mobs. I ranked them in accordance with their frequency in these decisions.