In a collage-based textual assemblage, Eva Phillips explores Moreton Bay’s culinary history against a backdrop provided by surveyor Robert Dixon. This feminist creative work references nineteenth-century Australian female poets, concepts of ethnographic verse, and settler and Indigenous poetics and visual art to play with ‘only absorption: made visible’ the shifting ideas of margins and marginalia. Who crafts the margins, who believe they reside there, and what can be said for a more angled, squint from the side-lines approach to research? Dixon’s hand has traced many landscapes along the east coast, and his time spent as surveyor in charge in the Moreton Bay district was coloured by acts of suspected mutiny and cartographical defiance— an appropriate theatrical backdrop to the convoluted text it bears.
