farewell Lionel Fogarty, poet and activist
- Written by Benjamin Miller, Lecturer in English and Writing, University of Sydney
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and images of deceased people. They have been used with permission from Lionel Fogarty’s son Kargun “Moojidi” Fogarty.
In 2014, Yugambeh writer and activist Lionel Fogarty was named by poet and scholar John Kinsella as “the greatest living Australian poet”. More recently, Waanyi novelist Alexis Wright described Fogarty as the “poet laureate” of Aboriginal literature.
With his passing last week, one of the most widely-recognised poets of his generation leaves a legacy that will inspire future generations to challenge injustice in institutions of education, literature, government, policing and health.
Fogarty published 16 collections of poetry, from Kargun (1980) to Harvest Lingo (2022), appearing in countless anthologies of Aboriginal writing, Australian literature and poetry.
He facilitated writing workshops for remote Australian communities, for incarcerated peoples and at international universities. He also held solo exhibitions of his painted poems, including last year’s Burraloupoo at Sydney’s Darren Knight Gallery.
His energy remained limitless. Towards the end of his life, he painted poems and drafted new work daily. Just days before his passing, he was writing new poetry alongside close friends and reviewing the manuscript of a forthcoming collection, Warrior with a Fighting Stick.
Throughout his life, Fogarty worked tirelessly on political campaigns for Aboriginal peoples’ rights, while earnestly and consistently crafting provocative, complex poetry.
Today, he has a reputation as one of the truly unique voices in world literature. This stands in contrast to the early days, when critical praise for Fogarty’s work largely framed it from an outsider perspective, simplifying his varied, complex uses of poetic language.
Fogarty transforms conventional English grammar, expression and spelling in an effort to decolonise what he sees as a broken, colonial communication system.
His poems invite creative interpretation, while being underpinned by a view of art as a means of communication and understanding. In a 2011 interview with Australian poet Michael Brennan, Fogarty memorably noted, “poetry is only useful if it changes the bloody law!”
Conversations like rivers
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In the wake of the event, Fogarty produced some of his best poems. Two highly political poems of grief and anger appear in his best-known collection, New and Selected Poems: Munaldjali, Mutuerjaraera (1995).
And yet, it would be many years before he published new poetic works again, publishing Mogwie Idan in 2003. This collection combined poetic language and illustrations, a first for Fogarty. This practice pointed back to illustrations used in his former speeches and forward to the striking and colourful painted poems seen in the Burraloupoo exhibition.
Through his poetry, Fogarty anticipated questions of his own death, a subject marked by his sense of his own poetic achievement, while frequently tracing connections to the disproportionate numbers of Aboriginal deaths in custody. Indeed in his first published poetry collection, he wrote of his own death in a poem called 15th June 1978.
In the poem, Fogarty asks his fellow poets to honour his achievements in the following way:
When i die i want the poets to be loudshouting in winds shattering with shot gun noises Living for future children to see trueness.
Almost 40 years on from Kargun, Fogarty wrote in Signing My Death in Lion and Hell:
The pains comes and goesMe eyes are blendingMe ear hear nothingMy mind can’t keep upTo me writings.[…]
I am dead singing deathLiving in this moment
One thing I know doesn’t want to have a white death
Spiralling line-by-line towards the end of the page, Fogarty described a future where his writings may outstrip his physical body.
After reading the above poem with family and friends from his hospital bed this past January – filmed for an upcoming project with Documentary Australia – Fogarty remarked, “The whitefellas love my death poems”, a typically cutting remark to warn against imagining an end to his legacy.
May his passing make us all be loud in our grief, “shouting in winds” and “living for future children”.
Authors: Benjamin Miller, Lecturer in English and Writing, University of Sydney
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