My People

My People is a collection of poems by Oodgeroo Noonuccal, the Noonuccal poet and Aboriginal rights campaigner who in 1964 became the first Aboriginal Australian to publish a book of verse. The selected poems, including "We Are Going", are set for HSC English Standard Module B: Close Study of Literature.

Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920-1993), born Kathleen Ruska on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) and published as Kath Walker until 1988, became in 1964 the first Aboriginal Australian to publish a book of verse. She was also a leading campaigner for Aboriginal rights, working at the front of the campaign for the 1967 referendum, and her poems are inseparable from that activism: they were written to be heard by a whole country, and to change it. She described her own style as "sloganistic, civil rightish, plain and simple", and the plainness is a deliberate political choice - a poetry meant to reach ordinary readers, black and white, cannot hide behind difficulty. The prescribed selection from My People ranges from elegy to forward-facing hope. "We Are Going" watches "the many white men hurry about like ants" over the old bora ground and builds a collective identity in a litany of "We are", before the same anaphora delivers its loss. "No More Boomerang" counts a culture out by subtraction, each sing-song "No more" removing a named practice as assimilation swaps corroboree for commodities. "Gooboora, the Silent Pool" is an elegy addressed to a place that has outlasted its people. "Municipal Gum" turns a city gumtree set in bitumen into an image of the colonised self. And "The Dawn Is at Hand" pivots the collection from lament to hope, addressing Aboriginal people directly with the promise of a coming justice. The arc of her own life - from mourning, through protest, toward a self-determined future - organises the collection, which is why it can hold the vanished tribe of "Gooboora" and the coming dawn without contradiction.

Dispossession is made concrete, never abstract. In "We Are Going" a real estate agent's sign is quoted flat against the sacred ground beneath it - "Notice of estate agent reads: 'Rubbish May Be Tipped Here'." - so the coloniser's own words condemn him without comment, while the tolling catalogue "The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone from this place." empties Country creature by creature. In "Municipal Gum" the city itself becomes anti-Country, the tree "Set in your black grass of bitumen".

Identity, in these poems, is fused with Country and ceremony at the level of grammar. The people are not said to have a culture but to be it - "We are the corroboree and the bora ground," - which makes dispossession a wound to being rather than a matter of property. The great reversal, "We are as strangers here now, but the white tribe are the strangers.", turns the coloniser's own category back on him, and the close - "The bora ring is gone. / The corroboree is gone. / And we are going." - holds the people in the act of vanishing, so the loss stays present and unresolved.

"No More Boomerang" carries the protest against assimilation through irony. The negative refrain "No more boomerang / No more spear" measures a culture as a series of deletions; the swap of corroboree for commodity - "Now we got movies, / And pay to go in" - exposes the exchange as a swindle; and the antithesis "Black hunted wallaby, white hunt dollar" sets two value systems against each other in identical grammar, a plain line carrying a whole critique of materialism. In "Municipal Gum", apostrophe turns witness into accusation: "O fellow citizen, / What have they done to us?" places the reader inside the injustice and demands moral response rather than offering an answer.

The collection's deepest movement is from lament to hope. "Gooboora, the Silent Pool" closes on the wounded antithesis "That you should be here but my people no more!", the surviving place the sharpest measure of the loss. "The Dawn Is at Hand" acknowledges the grief - "Sore, sore the tears you shed / When hope seemed folly and justice dead." - precisely so it can be overcome: "Was the long night weary? Look up, dark band, / The dawn is at hand", with the drumbeat refrain "Fringe-dwellers no more." converting a political claim into something the reader cannot forget.