Lionel Fogarty

 

b. 1958, Wakka Wakka land, Queensland

A Murri man, Fogarty is a leading spokesman for Indigenous rights in Australia, particularly deaths in custody following the death of his brother, Daniel Yock, at the hands of police in 1993. His poetry expresses the need for innovation and urgency. In doing so, it is sometimes surreal, sometimes confronting and includes large amounts of Bandjalang dialect and vernacular.

Fogarty's poetry, art and politics are explored in The Red Room Company's 'The Poet's Life Work Series' 2009.

Publications

Minyung Woolah Binnung: What Saying Says (Southport QLD: Keeaira Press, 2004)

Dha'lan Djani Mitti: Collected Poems (Salt, 2008)

 

untitled

 

 

Matureing avenges a beloved masses

Flashbloods of frantic roars

Are wearely revealing

Overturn every maimed tropical

Island and revolution is tortured

Smile the victory of huge futile questness

Smiled the wasted ammunitions

and pebble dead murky love's

Natur's tendenceys is one scientific time

Matureness of man needs to nest

Mature fully man is overestimating

Waging roving counter-revolutionary

are them blackfellas in capitulationist minds

Contradictions now is merely understood by us

A single sparke can bit you two half, and

a single bourgeois idealist can

fuck up a good campfire talk

They have the backward woods

They have the betrayed economic

fragil social buggered structure

Nature is on an ensured armed

countrysided roo snake animals

victoryness waring wageness

Nature will not babbling about

with political influences, only

with cultural nationwide balance aboriginal

To be Matured is to grow with Nature

Nature for some is invincible and convincible

Nature as an strategic success expaning

Nature is on our spirits higher than mechanistic ways

Nature is on the move, Nature is the revolution.

 

For the Greenye. 

 

 

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