'Thirty years after it was decided, the Mabo vs. Queensland case is remembered as a singularly defining landmark in the Aboriginal land rights movement and Australian political history. Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs posited in 1995 that we live in a “post-Mabo Australia” of “unsettlement,” a “moment of decolonization, [where] what is 'ours' is also potentially, or even always already, 'theirs’” (171-172). In this article, I reconsider Mabo’s historical legacy through the writings of Lionel Fogarty, who has kinship connections to Wakka Wakka, Yoogum, and Mununjali peoples. Fogarty is rarely studied in the Mabo turn in Australian literature, perhaps in the view that his poetry is located within the ‘protest poetry’ of a pre-Mabo Australia. Born more than a decade before the 1967 referendum, Fogarty writes continuously about land rights through a poetic oeuvre spanning forty years, often from the perspective of his close personal involvement in activism. Fogarty unsettles the commemorative ethos with which Mabo is remembered, while inextricably tied to its memory. Fogarty’s resistance to monumentalisation can also be read as a guide to reading the poet’s own literary achievements in the decades before and after Mabo. By disrupting the commemorative impulse at the heart of Mabo, Fogarty renews the eventfulness and potential of another Mabo (and perhaps, another Fogarty): one that is always in-progress or unsettled, ‘a courtesy sustained’ and a ‘wave to turn.’' (Publication abstract)
'There exists an extensive amount of research in the fields of anthropology, literary studies, and philosophy driven by settler-oriented comparisons between Indigenous nations that verified the representation of Indigenous peoples as Other. Meanwhile, the amount of scholarly works on comparative Indigenous literary encounters in the last decade is worthy of note as indicative of the emergence of a planetary decolonial consciousness. To present an argument as to the need to think of the planetary agency of Indigenous writers, I will closely examine the variety of poetic strategies utilized by Yankunytjatjara poet Ali Cobby Eckermann of South Australia, and Yoogum and Kudjela poet Lionel Fogarty of Southern Queensland, in their writing towards other Indigenous peoples from Gaelic Ireland, and the Pacific. This serves two crucial interventions, puncturing through the deficit discourse that essentializes the poethical contribution of Aboriginal writers, and developing comparative strategies for future Indigenous-to-Indigenous encounters.' (Publication abstract)
'There exists an extensive amount of research in the fields of anthropology, literary studies, and philosophy driven by settler-oriented comparisons between Indigenous nations that verified the representation of Indigenous peoples as Other. Meanwhile, the amount of scholarly works on comparative Indigenous literary encounters in the last decade is worthy of note as indicative of the emergence of a planetary decolonial consciousness. To present an argument as to the need to think of the planetary agency of Indigenous writers, I will closely examine the variety of poetic strategies utilized by Yankunytjatjara poet Ali Cobby Eckermann of South Australia, and Yoogum and Kudjela poet Lionel Fogarty of Southern Queensland, in their writing towards other Indigenous peoples from Gaelic Ireland, and the Pacific. This serves two crucial interventions, puncturing through the deficit discourse that essentializes the poethical contribution of Aboriginal writers, and developing comparative strategies for future Indigenous-to-Indigenous encounters.' (Publication abstract)
'Thirty years after it was decided, the Mabo vs. Queensland case is remembered as a singularly defining landmark in the Aboriginal land rights movement and Australian political history. Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs posited in 1995 that we live in a “post-Mabo Australia” of “unsettlement,” a “moment of decolonization, [where] what is 'ours' is also potentially, or even always already, 'theirs’” (171-172). In this article, I reconsider Mabo’s historical legacy through the writings of Lionel Fogarty, who has kinship connections to Wakka Wakka, Yoogum, and Mununjali peoples. Fogarty is rarely studied in the Mabo turn in Australian literature, perhaps in the view that his poetry is located within the ‘protest poetry’ of a pre-Mabo Australia. Born more than a decade before the 1967 referendum, Fogarty writes continuously about land rights through a poetic oeuvre spanning forty years, often from the perspective of his close personal involvement in activism. Fogarty unsettles the commemorative ethos with which Mabo is remembered, while inextricably tied to its memory. Fogarty’s resistance to monumentalisation can also be read as a guide to reading the poet’s own literary achievements in the decades before and after Mabo. By disrupting the commemorative impulse at the heart of Mabo, Fogarty renews the eventfulness and potential of another Mabo (and perhaps, another Fogarty): one that is always in-progress or unsettled, ‘a courtesy sustained’ and a ‘wave to turn.’' (Publication abstract)
