Oodgeroo Noonuccal

This is a personal account of my association with Oodgeroo Noonuccal and the context in which it occurred.

A couple of generations of young Aboriginal people have now been fortunate enough to grow up with, and share in the legacy…

A dear friend of mine and Kath's wrote the poem that follows. I think it is a lovely poem and I thank Eileen for writing it and hope you enjoy reading it. (Eileen's grandmother and Kath's grandmother were sisters.)

There are few moments in contemporary Australian history that I have found more uplifting than 16 August 1991. It was on that day that, in an important moment of cross-party cooperation, the Federal Parliament gave historic unanimous support to legislation…

Kath was always a leader — she got us involved in all kinds of mischief. These are some examples Kath used to scribble from when she was young, when she wasn't writing she was exploring the mud flats looking for…

Oodgeroo, or Kath Walker, as she then was, visited China from 12 September to 3 October 1984 in a delegation comprising Caroline Turner (as leader), Eric Tan, Rob Adams and Manning Clark.1 The delegation was organised by the Australia-China Council…

Politics has been described in many ways, most of them unflattering and all of them seemingly opposed to whatever poetry may be. Politics is the "art of the possible". As Kath Walker, Oodgeroo made Aboriginal literature possible in 1964 with…

I first came across Oodgeroo's writing in 1965. I was living in Nigeria at the time, where Australia hardly entered one's consciousness. The slim volume of poems We Are Going shocked me into an awareness of the plight of the…

Jackie Kay's country is Scotland but she can be demonised within it because she is black. The poem's narrator has to assert her right to the land which does not itself erect barriers (the river shakes hands with the sea)…

Australia in 1972 was almost ready for the "It's Time" election when I took a job at Brian Clouston's Jacaranda Press. Two years before, Kath Walker's My People had been published and, in spite of Judith Wright's all too accurate…

A message stick sent to Oodgeroo of the Noonuccal from our brother Ken Upton of the Darug tribe, inviting her to visit Darug lands brought about our first meeting with Oodgeroo. From then on Oodgeroo became our friend and our…

My copy of My People — a 1986 reprint — has a photograph of Kath Walker on the cover. She sits on a rock at the edge of a pool looking thoughtfully past the fixed frame of the photograph. Her…

The past and history have been foregrounded in Aboriginal consciousness as issues that demand attention whereas the history of white Australia has often been taken for granted. Because they are a minority group Aboriginal people's history was, until the 1960s…

Long before the British invaded Australia our people expressed their emotions, our history, the sacred and secular events of our lives, via the medium of painting, storytelling, song and ceremony.

Pre-invasion stories and songs tell of the paths of the…

It was 1984 and Kath Walker, as she was then, had just witnessed the final rehearsal of You Came To My Country and You Didn't Turn Black, a theatre-piece inspired by her life and work. Produced by The Acting…

‘Oodgeroo…never once discribed herself as a poet. She often said, when pressed, that she was an educationalist and that her job was to educate both white and black…to wrench her verse away from her life and accepted role is to…

For those of us who knew Oodgeroo well and loved her dearly our attempts to contribute to this book are difficult as we are still mourning her. I have been told to tell it like it is and to provide…

Every memory has a point of departure.

My own starting point was a Wednesday in late August, 1980 T he place was Minjerriba (North Stradbroke Island) off the coast of Queensland in Quandamooka (Moreton Bay), half an hour east of…

"White people want to do something about Aborigines, but they don't know how to go about it," said Kath Walker (Oodgeroo) to reporter Jim Hall of the Sun Herald in June 1964. Hall was reporting on the phenomenal success of…