November 3.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Oodgeroo – poet & campaigner
Black rights champion and poet, Oodgeroo displayed passionate commitment to her heritage and spirited belief in a “juster justice” for Aboriginal people. Words were her weapons and hopefulness her legacy. When she died in 1993 she had earned a nation's respect and achieved international renown.
Stradbroke Island is one of the beautiful islands that form part of the Great Sandy Region of southeast Queensland. The Noonuccal people inhabited this island for countless generations. They called it Minjerribah. On 3 November 1920, the newest Noonuccal descendant [Oodgeroo] had just been born.
I arrived about a week before expected, at the home of white friends where there was a wedding in progress; and the little black baby stole the show from the star performer, the bride. They named me Katherine Jean Mary Ruska. [1]
Since the late 1800s it had been Queensland government policy to gather up Aborigines from various tribes and relocate them in reserves or on church-run missions; it was an effective way of crushing the spirit of a people. Attempts to establish a mission on Stradbroke Island to control the Noonuccal inhabitants, however, had not succeeded. So Kath Ruska grew up with five siblings in the home established by her parents. Stories about the failed mission were told to her by older members of the Noonuccal tribe, but Kath had never experienced the heavy, paternalistic hand of mission rule. She grew up with a strong sense of her Aboriginal identity and the determination to fight for the rights of all her people.
(Kath [Walker] was committed to that fight to her dying day. She was, wrote Lois O'Donoghue, Chair of ATSIC:
“A lifetime campaigner against racism, who never lost her fierceness.”
Quoted by James Devaney in the Foreword to Kath Walker, We Are Going, (Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1964).
Acknowledgment: Kathie Cochrane, with a contribution by Judith Wright, Oodgeroo, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1994, Cover piece and p.3, 231 n.1.
____
THE PAST
Let no one say the past is dead.
The past is all about us and within.
Haunted by tribal memories, I know this little now, this accidental present
is not the all of me, whose long making
is so much of the past.
Tonight here in suburbia as I sit
In easy chair before electric heater,
Warmed by the red glow, I fall into a dream:
I am away
At the camp fire in the bush, among
My own people, sitting on the ground,
No walls about me,
The stars over me,
The tall surrounding trees that stir in the wind
Making their own music.
Soft cries of the night coming to us, there
Where we are with all old Nature's lives
Known and unknown.
In scenes where we belong but have now forsaken.
Deep chair and electric radiator
are but since yesterday.
But a thousand camp fires in the forest
Are in my blood.
Let none tell me the past is wholly gone.
Now is so small a part of time, so small a part
Of all the race years that have moulded me.
Acknowledgment: Cochrane, Oodgeroo, p.159.
A SONG OF HOPE
Look up, my people, Now brood no more
The dawn is breaking, On the years behind you
The world is waking, The hope assigned you
To a new bright day. Shall the past replace,
When none defame us, When a juster justice
No restrictions tame us, Grown wise and stronger
Nor colour shame us, Points the bone no longer
Nor sneer dismay. At a darker race.
So long we waited See plain the promise
Bound and frustrated, Dark freedom-lover!
Till hate be hated Night's nearly over,
And caste deposed; And though long the climb,
Now light shall guide us, New rights will greet us,
No goal denied us, New mateship meet us,
And all doors open And joy complete us
That long were closed. In our new Dream Time...
Acknowledgment: Cochrane, Oodgeroo, p.78.