a lawn isn’t a lawn until it’s a sit in
by Tim Loveday
Perspective: South Lawn
Get directions: 37°47’54.6″S 144°57’36.8″E
i can’t remember who said it;
if it was one of the political science professors
posturing toward a lecture theatre or a bambi-
legged kid who goes all deer-eyed when the ping
-pong ball swings skyward; i can teach
them what it is to be an instrument
of demarcations; though i forget
they do not need this; this part
of me that pontificates my forgetfulness;
to register only the immediate is progress;
to be a body this large is to be a dialect
detached from the mouth of the singer;
i am certain i had a mother but who is it;
the clocktower sometimes seems
like a fine intervention; someone drops
a leaflet & someone scrunches it;
if memory serves me i’m as good
as a memo; though this time the pitch
casts a shadow; though zip zips past me;
though if i had to tell you
i’d say there was truth here; the deadliest; i am
made of hardened things like refuge concrete
& old manila folders & someone’s long-lost
dependency on namesakes; but still the scarcity
of flour is what gets to me; how cooking bread
on me is illegal; how a camp-chair announces
my forgetfulness; demarcates the complicity
of box-shapes; i am one arm arming another;
i used to be heath; uncultivated; not virginal
but treasonous by nature; i was
earth-born & blood-soaked; then excavated;
i am not the eye nor the pencil stroke;
i have been taught how to bend
around corners; i have been taught how
to bend as in to fold; there is no flight
in this folding; no freedom; these pegs
are what germinate; do not mistake
my sit-ness for silence; to sit like this
is resistance; there is glory in this knowing;
i am as much a canvas as a banner;
one of them; alive; living; unwilling; dead;
do not forget this; remember this.
Fancy responding to the South Lawn?
2 responses to “South lawn”
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Tim Loveday’s ‘a lawn isn’t a lawn until it’s a sit in’ explores themes of memory, protest and systemic erasure of history through the voice of a university lawn. Written as a stream of
consciousness, introspective but also defiant, this poem gave me a powerful sense of intimacy and solidarity with the lawn. The figurative language and the structure formed with enjambment and semicolons reflects the fragmented nature of memory and perfectly paces the piece.The lawn as a symbol is revealed as an ‘instrument of demarcation’ and for me, this points to how structures of power have forced Indigenous and other disempowered peoples ‘to bend around corners’ like the lawn does around ‘refuge concrete‘. It also ‘demarcates the complicity of box-shapes’, as these peoples, and student protestors, have been put in metaphorical boxes with a loss of agency.
Yet there is resistance. The ‘sit-ness’ is not silence. Indigenous peoples’ sit-ins like The Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the lawn opposite Parliament House in Canberra, and student sit-ins on the South Lawn, demonstrate that ‘to sit like this is resistance’. And the lawn here is complicit in the resistance as it has provided a platform for their voices, ‘as much a canvas as a banner’, a past and present participant marking moments as ‘one of them’.
I’m prompted to ask myself now: What has my back lawn witnessed? Has there been a ‘sit-in’, a resistance on it at some point in the past, long forgotten? What will the South Lawn look like in one hundred years from now? Will sit-ins be ‘blood-soaked; then excavated’ erasing history, resistance, and truth-telling?
I feel that this poem is a call to ‘not forget’ these acts of resistance, to not forget the sit-ins, the protests and their demands for justice. It is a call to allow their voices to be heard and for them not to be silenced by The Establishment.
Thanks Tim!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Loveday is a poet, writer, educator and baby academic. His work explores class, masculinity, online radicalisation, rurality and climate collapse. He won the 2022 & 2024 Dorothy Porter Poetry Awards and the 2023 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Award, and was a finalist in the 2023 David Harold Tribe Poetry Prize and 2024 Montreal International Poetry Prize. You can find out more at: timloveday.com
Words from Tim
‘a lawn isn’t a lawn until it’s a sit in’ was inspired by the artifice of settler-colonial institutions like the University of Melbourne, wherein forgetting is built into the very architecture and infrastructure of the university grounds. It is written from the perspective of South Lawn; the lawn, while describing itself as ‘one arm arming another’ ends up denouncing its forgetfulness in the presence of student protests. The work stands in solidarity with the 2024 pro-Palestinian student encampment, and all those student protests before it that have resisted settler-colonial violence.
Find out more
South Lawn is also a South ‘Roof’ to an underground carpark, guarded by Atlantes Statues.
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