Walker, Kath (1920–1993)

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Walker, Kath (1920–1993)

First Australian Aborigine to publish a book of poems . Name variations: Cath Walker; (Aboriginal name) Oodgeroo Noonuccal. Born on November 3, 1920, on Minjerriba (North Stradbroke Island), Queensland, Australia; died in 1993; educated to primary school level; children: two sons.

Received Jesse Litchfield Award (1967) and the Mary Gilmore Medal (1977); established an Aboriginal educational and cultural center on Stradbroke Island; lectured and tutored at several institutions including the University of the South Pacific.

Selected writings:

We Are Going (1964); The Dawn Is at Hand (1966); My People (1970); (compilation of Aboriginal legends) Stradbroke Dreamtime (1972); Father Sky and Mother Earth (1981); Little Fella: Poems by Kath Walker (1987); Kath Walker in China (1988); The Rainbow Serpent: O.N. and Kabul Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1990); My People: Oodgeroo (1990); Shoemaker (1994).

Born in 1920 and brought up in the traditional Aborigine manner on an island off the southern coast of Queensland, Kath Walker was initiated into the European world via a primary school education. Although she was proficient in both cultures, her primary identity was as an Aboriginal, and from an early age she was active in civil liberties groups (including the Communist Party of Australia). Walker was especially active in support of the referendum of 1967, which delivered to Aborigines the suffrage that, in those states where it had existed, had been eradicated under the Australian Constitution in 1901, and also in the politics of land rights and conservation. She also served on a variety of arts and social services boards, including the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders and the Aboriginal Advancement League, to press for the civil rights of her people. She established a school, Moongalba, for the advancement of her people, and enjoyed a significant national and international reputation as an assertive and charismatic artist and black activist. As the first poet of her race to be published in English, she became an inspiration to a younger generation of writers. Though she was named a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1970, she so strongly identified with her people that she rejected the honor in 1988 in protest of England's bicentennial celebrations of European settlement, one she described as "200 years of humiliation and brutality to the Aboriginal people." That year she officially changed her name to the Aboriginal Oodgeroo Noonuccal.

Walker became the first Aborigine to publish a book of poems with the appearance of We Are Going in 1964. In a 1960s Australia that was comparatively wealthy and complacent but fearful of Communism, Walker's satiric and polemical verse brought on shock. She wrote plainly and bluntly about her people's economic mistreatment in such poems as "Aboriginal Charter of Rights," which was notable for its firm and seemingly confident assertion of rights that at the time did not constitutionally exist. Walker implicitly attacked the practice of Christianity in Australia and charged government and welfare with bureaucratic paternalism and with relegating her people to a permanent underclass. To white Australia at the time, it was seditious, and certainly dangerously socialist in tone. It was easy for the formalist aesthetes of the academic establishment of the day to denigrate her poetry as propagandist and regressive in its craft, because the influence of an older bush balladry was clearly evident in it. This manifesto, and other poems in the same vein, made a plea for human and Christian rights to be extended to Aborigines, and pointed to a long list of discriminatory practices. At times, her poetry works more obliquely, as in her much-anthologized "We Are Going," which nostalgically contrasts a demoralized present with an implied presettlement golden age when the tribes are represented as having been in harmony and identity with every feature of their environment. In poems like "No More Boomerang," she is laconically satiric about the "advances" of white civilization, which are contrasted unfavorably with traditional values. Many poems lament the passing forever of a lifestyle that she perceived to be in the best interests ecologically of the land she loved and of all Australians.

Walker's controversial poetry sometimes had critics among her own people. Mudrooroo, the leading black-identified intellectual of his generation, viewed her less as a poet than as a polemicist (he invented the term "poetemics" for her work), and pointed out that the genres she used are those internalized as a result of her white education. However, he noted that her use of simple meters and diction are part of her enduring appeal to both her own people and to a more numerous readership of white readers. Other critics, informed by postcolonial theory, debated whether the critical frameworks of the mainstream are appropriately applied to her work, and cited features of the verse entailing the use of Aboriginal forms of rhetoric that are not visible to white readers. Some pointed to the performance dimension of her art and its roots in mythic ritual and political oratory.

Although she was committed to exposing the dispossession of Aboriginal society by the white "invaders," Walker avoided the role of victim and worked actively and resistantly to build Aboriginal pride, identity, and solidarity. An important aspect of her educational program was her commitment to writing down stories of her almost traditional growing up at Minjerriba, and recovering and illustrating—in a delicate and accomplished traditional manner—the myths and stories of her own people and place for a younger generation of both black and white readers.

Walker was awarded honorary doctorates by Griffith and Macquarie universities and the Queensland University of Technology. In 1967 she won the Jessie Litchfield Award for Literature, and in 1977 the Fellowship of Australian Writers Patricia Weickhardt Award and the Mary Gilmore Award. Her work has the rare distinction in Australia of being continually reprinted and of having struck a note of optimistic hope for a self-respecting Aboriginality that remains potent decades later. She died of cancer in 1993, at age 72.