Philip Morrissey retired in 2017 after a career of thirty-seven years as an administrator and an academic. He is the co-editor of the essay collections Kim Scott: Readers, language, interpretation (2019) and Reading the Country: 30 years on (2018), and is the senior editor of Lionel Fogarty: Selected poems 1980-2017.
If nothing else, Lionel Fogarty’s longevity as a poet should bring him to our attention. Kargun, his first work, was published forty-two years ago amid the ferment of utopian Black Panther politics, discriminatory legislation, and racialised police violence. Fogarty’s finest work, Ngutji, published in 1984, drew on his experience growing up in Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement, but the breadth o ... (read more)
Terry Southern once wrote a short story about a black jazz musician cultivated by a white jazz fan. After evaluating the fan’s motives the jazz man cuts him loose as someone with an unfocused but suspect desire for the exotic other.
... (read more)
Those Who Remain Will Always Remember is a fitting successor to Paperbark, the Muecke, Davis, Shoemaker, Mudrooroo anthology of a decade earlier. Though it is a regional publication, restricted to Aboriginal authors from Western Australia, it follows the same catholic principles of inclusion that made Paperbark a book of its time. Its editors Anne Brewster, Angeline O’Neill, and Rosemary van den ... (read more)
A striking black-and-white photograph on the front cover of Oodgeroo implacable and wise. And then the publisher’s blurb on the back cover:
Oodgeroo – poet, human rights activist, conservationist, educator, artist – proudly saluted her people’s heritage, whose ‘long making’ was ‘so much of the past’, and gladly beckoned a brighter future. A great and passionate voice of Aborigin ... (read more)
In 1985, following the publication of their collaborative works Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley and Reading the Country: Introduction to nomadology (with artist Krim Benterrak as co-author), Paddy Roe, possibly sensing that the young researcher would be of critical importance to his life’s project, suggested to Stephen Muecke that there needed to be a third book, The Children’s Cou ... (read more)
