Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker)

Readers note: This is an excerpt from the 200 Treasures exhibition catalogue, developed in 2017. This content was written as a brief biography on why this person was included in the exhibition.

When her book We Are Going appeared in 1964, Oodgeroo Noonuccal became the first Indigenous Australian to have published a volume of poems. Noonuccal went on to develop a voice that pricked the national consciousness and she became a household name. At the time of the book’s publication, she was aged 44 and a prominent person with a storied history.

She was born Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska on North Stradbroke Island, Queensland, to the Noonuccal people. Her mother was illiterate, but her father encouraged her to work hard at school to be not only as good as the white children, but better. Noonuccal’s formal schooling ended at age 13 when she took up domestic service.

At the outbreak of World War II, she joined the Women’s Army Service and, at war’s end, married Bruce Walker, who worked on the Brisbane wharves. Noonuccal gravitated towards the Communist Party, the only political party concerned with Indigenous rights and opposed to the ‘White Australia’ policy.

As Noonuccal’s political activism grew, she began publishing verse under the name Kath Walker. Her poems were inspired by nature, Indigenous culture, race history, politics and Indigenous figures such as Albert Namatjira and Truganini. Her second book of verse, The Dawn Is at Hand, was published in 1966 and won the Jessie Litchfield literary award in 1975.

Noonuccal used her position to promote Aboriginal rights. She was instrumental in lobbying the federal government to hold the 1967 referendum, which ultimately allowed the transfer of Indigenous affairs to the federal government and for the inclusion of Indigenous people in the census. Her stature in Australia earned her an MBE in 1970, but for her ongoing outspokenness on uncomfortable issues, she received death threats.

In 1988, disgusted by the Bicentennial celebrations, which she said symbolised ‘200 years of humiliation and brutality to the Aboriginal people’, she changed her name to Oodgeroo Noonuccal and returned her MBE. She spent her last years on Stradbroke Island.