Story written by Paul Sherman

It is thirteen years since we farewelled her but her power still resonates in her poetry and in the written and spoken responses to her life and work.

The first of the 2006 issues of Meanjin is out. Entitled BLAK TIMES (‘Blak’ being deliberate spelling) with an editorial by Peter Minter, it sold out rapidly from Brisbane’s Judith Wright Centre, and eventually was only available from the Meanjin office in Melbourne.

Oodgeroo is imaged in this publication by Tracey Moffitt’s artwork and in a moving poem by Dennis Foley entitled Tribute to Aunty Kath. His poem evokes ‘the twinkle in her eye’ which is remembered by those who have met her, and from a luminous photograph which Australia’s Bernard Hickey, at the time professor of English in the university of Lecce in southern Italy, had pinned to the wall of the Australian Library there. Her sparkling eyes and her lustrous smile fed an image in the poem I wrote and which then poetry editor Bruce Dawe published in the Courier Mail soon after her death in 1993: ‘Your smile – ripple of light in a Stradbroke lagoon…’ My poem was later translated into Italian by Sylvia Cazzato of Lecce.

Oodgeroo’s poetry is also well loved in the University of Le Havre in France where, in the Stan Mellick room cherished by Professor Maryvonne Nedeljkovic, I have performed Oodgeroo’s poetry.

I first met Oodgeroo nearly two decades ago when I recited her poem Cookalingee in the community hall at Dunwich on her island home of Minjerriba (Stradbroke). Later, in the Dunwich State School, she was sitting smiling among the students when I acted her story of ‘Old Carpie’, the omnipresent carpet snake, her father’s tribal totem. Carpie is also the epicentre of her poem, Ballad of the Totems, one of four by her in Fifty years of Queensland Poetry, edited by Philip Neilson and Helen Horton, published in 1998 by Central Queensland University Press. When then Arts Minister Matt Foley launched this book, I was lucky to be asked to perform her ‘Totems’ Ballad. I still often present it in schools (including Chisholm Catholic College on Brisbane’s south side, which has a house called ‘Oodgeroo’) and the children love to join in, making Carpie’s slithering sounds.

I knew the late Malcolm Williamson, the Australian opera composer who was Master of the Queen’s Music when he lived in England. Malcolm said that the Queen told him she found Oodgeroo’s poetry ‘truly remarkable’. Malcolm set a selection of her poems to music. I was present in the Concert Hall on Brisbane’s Southbank in 1989 when the Queensland Symphony Orchestra with soloists and chorus, performed his setting of The Dawn is at Hand. I can still see the poet siting high above the stage, listening attentively to her words spun to music. To this day I am haunted by the sound of ‘Tree Grave’ with its repeated ‘By the Long Lagoon’.

The late great Judith Wright advised Jacaranda Press, in the sixties, to publish Oodgeroo’s first book of poems which, like all her subsequent works, sold very well.

Oodgeroo and Judith later became close friend.

A few years ago, at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival, I was much moved to hear the poet’s son Denis, recite the poem which his mother wrote for him. In 1989, just before Oodgeroo received her honorary doctorate at Griffith University, she introduced me to her other son, the late Vivian (Kabul), who was a fine dancer and who collaborated with his mother in writing the script of the Rainbow Serpent Theatre for Brisbane’s World Expo in 1988. I happened to be arriving at Dunwich’s bayside jetty to visit my sister on Stradbroke, just as Oodgeroo was ready to hop on to the boat to travel to the mainland. She was very formally dressed, and explained to me with a twinkle in her eye, that she was on her way to meet the King and Queen of Spain at Expo.

Her work as a author of prose and poems owed much of its vitality to her long commitment to social and political activism on behalf of her own people and (I feel sure in saying this) on behalf of Australians as a whole. When she changed her name from Kath Walker to Oodgeroo, this was because ‘Oodgeroo’ was the Minjerriba name for paperbark – appropriate for an author. Her early poem Let us not be bitter, makes fruitful reading.

Now I am a research student in the Quensland University of Technology’s Kelvin Grove campus, which is culturally enriched by a vigorous indigenous unit – called, appropriately, the Oodgeroo Unit.

Oodgeroo

Noonuccal indigenous people

The southern end of Moreton Bay has been home to the Noonuccal people for thousands of years. The most famous member of this clan was Oodgeroo, formerly known to the world as Kath Walker. The Noonuccal recognise Quandamooka as the principal creator spirit of the area.

There is certainly a strong spirit of place pervading the bay. It draws people from far and wide. It may be presumptuous of me to say that I commune with the Quandamooka spirit by loving the bay, and that this communion has built a bridge between myself and the indigenous people in the sense that we are communing with the same spirit of place.

I say this as a gesture of reconciliation towards all indigenous Australians whose past is so troubled by the mistreatment of the colonial settlers. Oodgeroo herself earnestly wished for reconciliation¬

I could tell you of heartbreak, hatred blind,

I could tell you of crimes that shame mankind,

Of brutal wrong and deeds malign,

Of rape and murder, son of mine;

But I'll tell instead of brave and fine

When lives of black and white entwine

And men in brotherhood combine-

This I would tell you, son of mine.

Son of Mine, 1960

The following biographic note was published by the University of Queensland Fryer Library (http://www.library.uq.edu.au/fryer/)

Its origins are gratefully acknowledged.

Noonuccal, Oodgeroo (1920-1993). "My name is Oodgeroo from the tribe of the Noonuccal, custodian of the land that the white man calls Stradbroke Island and that the Aboriginal people call Minjerriba."

Known for most of her life as the writer, painter and political activist, Kath Walker, Oodgeroo in 1988 resumed her traditional name and returned her MBE in protest at the condition of her people in the year of Australia's Bicentenary celebrations. Oodgeroo shared with her father the Dreaming totem the carpet snake (Kabul) and his sense of injustice.

Leaving school at the age of 13, Oodgeroo worked as a domestic servant until 1939, when she volunteered for service in the Australian Women's Army Service. Between 1961 and 1970, Oodgeroo achieved national prominence not only as the Queensland State Secretary of the Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (CAATSI), but through her highly popular poetry and writing. With her 1964 collection of verse We Are Going, Oodgeroo became the first published Aboriginal woman. Selling out in three days, We Are Going rivalled the previous record for a publication of Australian verse set in 1916 by C. J. Dennis and his Moods of Ginger Mick.

The Dream Is at Hand (1966) was her second volume of poems. My People (1970) represented verse from the earlier editions as well as new poems, short stories, essays and speeches. Stradbroke Dreamtime was published in 1972. Oodgeroo also wrote a number of children's books - Father Sky and Mother Earth (1981), Little Fella (1986), and The Rainbow Serpent (1988) with her son, Kabul Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Vivian).

Oodgeroo was involved with many Aboriginal rights organisations. These organisations included the National Tribal Council, the Aboriginal Arts Board, the Aboriginal Housing Committee, and the Queensland Aboriginal Advancement League.

Oodgeroo spent her last days on Stradbroke Island where she established a cultural and environmental education centre known as Moongalba (resting-place).

We Are Going

They came in to the little town

A semi-naked band subdued and silent

All that remained of their tribe.

They came here to the place of their old bora ground

Where now the many white men hurry about like ants.

Notice of the estate agent reads: 'Rubbish May Be Tipped Here'.

Now it half covers the traces of the old bora ring.

'We are as strangers here now, but the white tribe are the strangers.

We belong here, we are of the old ways.

We are the corroboree and the bora ground,

We are the old ceremonies, the laws of the elders.

We are the wonder tales of Dream Time, the tribal legends told.

We are the past, the hunts and the laughing games, the wandering camp fires.

We are the lightening bolt over Gaphembah Hill

Quick and terrible,

And the Thunderer after him, that loud fellow.

We are the quiet daybreak paling the dark lagoon.

We are the shadow-ghosts creeping back as the camp fires burn low.

We are nature and the past, all the old ways

Gone now and scattered.

The scrubs are gone, the hunting and the laughter.

The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone from this place.

The bora ring is gone.

The corroboree is gone.

And we are going.'

What if you came back now

To our new world, the city roaring

There on the old peaceful camping place

Of your red fires along the quiet water,

How you would wonder

At towering stone gunyas high in air

Immense, incredible;

Planes in the sky over, swarms of cars

Like things frantic in flight.

In the cool world of leafy forest halls

And wild bird calls

Here you seems to me

Like that poor cart-horse

Castrated, broken, a thing wronged,

Strapped and buckled, its hell prolonged,

Whose hung head and listless mien express

Its hopelessness.

Municipal gum, it is dolorous

To see you thus

Set in your black grass of bitumen-¬

O fellow citizen,

What have they done to us?

Kabul Oodgeroo Noonuccal From The Rainbow Serpent

Rainbow serpent

Perhaps she will come

again when the sprits of men

and the spirit of this land

are once more together as one

Publications

We are Going : poems (1964)

The Dawn is at Hand : poems (1966)

My People : a Kath Walker collection 1970)

Stradbroke Dreamtime (1972)

Father Sky and Mother Earth (1981)

Quandamooka, the Art of Kath Walker (1985)

Little Fella ( 1986)

The Rainbow Serpent (1988)

The Spirit of Australia (1989)

Towards a Global Village in the Southern Hemisphere (1989)

Australian Legends and Landscapes 1990)

Australia’s Unwritten History: more legends of our land (1992)

Oodgeroo (1994)

Copyright 2001 Fryer Library All Rights Reserved. Legitimate, non-commercial use of text and images is permitted.