'The late 1920s saw an extraordinary protest by an Australian Aboriginal man on the streets of London. Standing outside Australia House, cloaked in tiny skeletons, Anthony Martin Fernando condemned the failure of British rule in his country.
'Fernando is believed to be the first Aboriginal person to protest conditions in Australia from the streets of Europe. His various forms of action, from pamphlets on the streets of Rome to the famous Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, distinguish this lone protestor as a unique Aboriginal activist of his time.
'Drawn from an extensive search in archives from Australia and Europe, this is the first full-length study of Fernando and the self-professed mission that was to last half of his adult life.
'Paisley brings to light new episodes in Fernando's activist career as well as previously unknown details about his extraordinary life in Australia and overseas. Her account dramatically shifts our understanding of the international reach of Aboriginal protest in this era.' (From the publisher's website.)
'The chapter outlines the mid-twentieth century debate over an Athenian-Boeotian divide in Australian literature, which extended an earlier false dichotomy between city and the bush through distinguishing between the expatriate and the writer who stays at home. Despite a global dispersion of Australian writers, it argues that most scholarship has tended to focus on those in Britain. The chapter discerns that the racialisation underscoring who is generally considered ‘expatriate’ renders the term problematic and that many Australian diasporic poets define themselves through other means. It also finds that many experience feelings of shame, anger, and guilt over the colonial violence shaping Australia. The chapter considers the development of Lola Ridge’s poetics while in Australia before considering Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s poem “Yussef (Hi-Jack),” written during a hijacking of her plane by Palestinian militants, and the poetry Oodgeroo wrote in China. The chapter foregrounds the significance of First Nations mobility, engaging with the London writing of Aboriginal activist A. M. Fernando in the 1920s and writing of recent poets like Ellen Van Neerven.'
Source: Abstract
'Until this book arrived on my desk I had not heard of AM Fernando. Few know of him, either in Australia or elsewhere. While the ‘A’ and the ‘M’ might indeed stand for ‘Anthony Martin’, the name ‘Fernando’ is moot: it appears likely the man took this name to signal his affection for Italy, where he was treated as a man, a human being. There exists no known contemporaneous likeness — neither photographic nor artistic — of the man.' (Introduction)
'Until this book arrived on my desk I had not heard of AM Fernando. Few know of him, either in Australia or elsewhere. While the ‘A’ and the ‘M’ might indeed stand for ‘Anthony Martin’, the name ‘Fernando’ is moot: it appears likely the man took this name to signal his affection for Italy, where he was treated as a man, a human being. There exists no known contemporaneous likeness — neither photographic nor artistic — of the man.' (Introduction)
Fernando's Ghost
Daniel Browning
(interviewer),
Australia
:
ABC Radio National
,
2012
Z1877037
2012
single work
radio play
Indigenous story
He's been described as an Aboriginal prophet - an extraordinary man who dreamt of self-determination, of independent homelands, of rights and political freedom for his countrymen and women and who fought a long, personal war against racism and settler colonialism. (Source: Awaye! website: www.abc.net.au)
