Analysis Of Jack Davis Waru

Values are those which seem of great prominence to one and meaning influenced by the daily movement, experiences and viewing of perspectives that profoundly surround us and change our thinking. A text can challenge these values by the use of characters that reach out to the audience and allow them to rethink their own by the presenting of differing perspectives. A text’s word can influence different meaning, send out a message, inform and change one’s opinions and beliefs by allowing one to experience different ideas and then to re-think about them. The ideas can oppose conceptions formed without any evidence resulting in the creation of new values, beliefs and visions to perceive the world by filling in the gaps of evidence that was not there

The poem was composed by the author as a response to the poverty in which the Noong-ah tribe lived following the white peoples rise to power and the denial of the rights and justice held by the culture. The text challenges the audience to reconsider their own perceiving of the Aboriginal cultures values and experiences. Davis’s uses a mixture of enjambment, rhyming and imagery to describe the old man in the poem who is removed from his culture, the first stanza introduces him “Fast asleep on the wooden bench, arms bent and weary head, there in the dusk and the back street stench. He lay with the look of the dead” A quote from the poem provides a contrast to the one previously mentioned, Davis uses highly emotive language, imagery, enjambment and rhyming to paint the picture of the man in another form, ‘With a leap he sprang to a run. He met the doe on top of the hill and he looked like a king in the sun.” Another example of a quote that further introduces the audience to the other form of the man is ‘He sang me a song, I clapped my hands and he fashioned a needle of bone. This allows the audience to contrast between the old man as his friend describes him in both situations, it emphasizes the effect of the poverty the British had to live in and challenges the values between the two types of Australians, the British and the Indigenous. The contrast enables the audience to note the prominence of culture to the Aboriginal communities and the destruction placed on the tribe and Davis’s people through the procedure of colonisation. The idea that the man slept on a wooden bench, arms bent and with a tired misplaced head in a dusty and murky area challenges his values and ours in terms of providing justice and rights to each individual.