Karla Dickens - 'A Dickensian Country Show' Poem

Karla Dickens has brought her own sinister circus to Adelaide, 'A Dickensian Country Show' is a uniquely Australian iteration of the funfair, absorbing and repurposing the trappings of regional country fairs and Easter shows. Dickens looks behind the scenes of carnival life, and beckons us into the side-shows and boxing rings to reframe the ‘greatest show on earth’ as a carnivalesque pastiche of Australian history and politics. Her fortune tellers offer portents of doom and visions of a ravaged planet. In no holds barred fashion, Dickens’ troupe of carnival performers speak to the atrocities of colonization, declaring that ‘True Horror is the massacre of Australia’s first people’. Image: Karla Dickens with her work A Dickensian Circus: Clown Nation, 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Monster Theatres; photo: Saul Steed.