Critique of Australia’s Bicentennial Moment in John Forbes’s The Stunned Mullet

To celebrate Australia’s 1988 Bicentenary, the federal government commissioned a series of literary works, among them John Forbes’s poetry collection, The Stunned Mullet. This article argues that, in this collection, Forbes satirizes the very notion of a national celebration. It places the “Bicentennial Moment” as the object of Forbes’s satirical critique and explains how this critique functions in the poems. The article reveals three active, verbal processes in Forbes’s poetics – beginning, memorializing, and viewing – which serve to draw the objectivity of the Bicentennial Moment into a state of emergence. It argues that Forbes contests claims of identity, which were everywhere at the Bicentenary, by drawing his use of language back to these actions. The article uses the concept of haecceity, from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, to theorize the temporal moment of the Bicentenary, and concludes by affirming that Forbes’s acutely materialist poetics is clearly evident in The Stunned Mullet.