First Nations: your January Longette Prompt

Thank you so much for considering my new poetic form the Longette, and its easier-to-get-along-with sibling the Longette Lite.

Shaun Tenzenmen recently became the second ever person in the world to finish writing a Longette! Congratulations Shaun : )

This Earth Keeps the Memory of Gadigal Footsteps Through Fire, Silence, Survival, and Unbroken Song Across Two Centuries of Dispossession and Resistance – 27th December 2025

January is a significant month for so-called Australia’s Aboriginal peoples. Since 1994, January 26th has been a gazetted public holiday “Australia Day”. Unfortunately, January 26th was the date in 1788 upon which 11 British ships, known as the First Fleet, arrived at Cunnel (Kurnell) in Gadigal (current-day Sydney) to set up the colony of New South Wales—planting the Union Jack and beginning a brutal genocide (which continues and escalates unabated to this very day) against the First Nations peoples living there since time immemorial.

There has been controversy about the rightness of celebrating such an invasion—since 1888. Today we have competing Invasion Day protests and Survival Day celebrations on January 26th, in honour of First Nations resistance. In Gadigal, the extremely popular Yabun festival is a good example. Many are lobbying to change the date of the nationalist celebration—or just to scrap it altogether.

Your prompt for January 2026 is to write a longette or a longette lite re First Nations issues where you live or where you come from. Shaun has already written a First Nations longette, which along with Elly’s submission gave me the idea for this month’s prompt.

Your longette can be an apology, or a pure critique of past/present treatment if you are knowledgeable about this—but it will be even better if you personally identify as a First Nations person, or if you consult with local elders for ideas around what something better would look like, moving forward. (The phrase “Nothing about us without us” is relevant here.)

I plan to release a new longette prompt each month, and to publish the resulting longettes on Wordflower (or as many as I possibly can!) after the end of each month. There will be a more elaborate annual event, in November–December each year.

For Longette instructions, see
Introducing the Longette: a new poetic form (and an event).

For the (simpler) Longette Lite instructions, see
Introducing the Longette Lite.

For a sample longette that also contains the rules, see
Thoughts on the Longette: what a longette is and what a longette is not, and a call to action—the world’s first known longette, written in December 2025

Please submit your longette for publication here:
Submit a poem

I’m so excited to see what people come up with—but take your time, this is important—and then, with your permission, to share the results with the poetry community ❤

[The picture of Gadigal’s Sydney Harbour Bridge, flying both the Koori and Australian flags at half mast, is from Pexels Free Photos.]