Cirrus@Austlit

Lionel Fogarty was born on Wakka Wakka country at Barambah, now known as Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve near Murgon, Queensland. His traditional background is the Yoogum [Yugambeh] and Kudjela tribes and he has relations from the Goomba tribe.

After being educated to ninth grade at Murgon High school, he worked at a variety of local casual jobs, went ringbarking, worked on a railway gang, and came to Brisbane when he was sixteen.

In the early 1970s Fogarty became actively involved in Aboriginal politics after a realisation of the injustices experienced while growing up on the Reserve. His involvement in the political struggles of the Aboriginal people has been through various organisations including the Aboriginal Legal Service, Aboriginal Housing Service, Black Resource Centre, Black Community School and Murrie Coo-ee. As a legal and political activist, and as a community leader, his work has also been directed towards the reality of Aboriginal deaths in custody.

Fogarty has travelled widely throughout Australia and the USA as an ambassador for Murri culture and Aboriginal causes. In 1976 he travelled to the USA to address a meeting of the American Indian Movement of the Second International Indian Treaty Council in South Dakota. Attending this forum furthered his commitment to fight injustice and gave him a broader perspective of international struggles. In 1993, in the International Year of the World's Indigenous People, he undertook an extensive reading tour through Europe.

Lionel Fogarty began writing poetry out of a commitment to the Aboriginal cause, a belief that land rights is the basis of Aboriginal people's hope for a future not based on racism and oppression, and as a way of expressing his Murri beliefs and continuing to pass on his own knowledge and experience. His first work Kargun (1980) was published when he was twenty-two and further volumes of verse have continued to be published. With the approval of his elders he has published a children's book Booyooburra (1993), a traditional Wakka Wakka story.

His work New and Selected poems: Munaldjali, Mutuerjararera was nominated for the NBC Banjo Awards Poetry Prize in 1996. He has subsequently been shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in 2016, the Victorian Prmier's Literary Awards Prize for Indigenous writing in 2014. His 2012 work Mogwie-Idan: Stories of the Land won The Kate Challis RAKA Award in 2015.