ive always thought the gendering of ships and nations a bit odd; tho perhaps it seems more natural to those who language is more gendered than english. in jingkiri's poem 'Kurlintanya'/'Koolinda in Harbour' pp 36-7 the ship - the kurlinta/koolinda is gender neutral - is referred to as 'it'. Yet the second stanza begins as if the koolinda is male: 'He'll head straight out into the wind' - there is no other referent than the ship at this point. four lines later the skipper appears & 'He' then seems to have been deferring referring to the skipper. the affectionate tone given to objects is typical of these poems (and for example the sensibility of the 'bush mechanics' series). It's referred to as 'a huge plucky thing' 'a plucky thing' & 'Huge Koolinda!'. The anthropomorphism(?) (animation?) of this is unusual for its humour and imagination - a reading of the image (ie of the ship) not typical of euro poetics. (a more typical translation i think would be an uncanny one, unnatural behaving of the ship in an animated fashion: in this song however, the ships behaviour is presented as perfectly natural.)

'(huge plucky thing,
all its masts and derricks standing up),
on account of the cyclone
suggests various meanings of plucky to me. plucky seems to be bristly, nervy - nerving for the weather - tho it also evokes sexual arousal. & it makes me think of a chook ripe for plucking its feathers on end. it ends

'The skipper will take care of it
out in the deep water'
the koolinda needs to be brave, going out into the sea; yet it also has a carer. the line evokes indigenous care. its an exemplary poem suggesting ways of care that white culture has only quite recently been waking up to: & its derived from indigenous culture. the perhaps paradoxical aspect is that modern culture looked to indigenous culture for ways of living in the natural world (i dont mean to sound reductively optimistic about these trends: obviously modern culture mainly exploited the indigenous in every which way) - but indigenous culture has as much if not more (or at least more pertinently) to teach non-indigenes about modern living, the urban spiritual ..