I first came across Lionel Fogarty's poetry in The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry edited by John Tranter and Philip Mead. At the time, I was pretty well ignorant of contemporary Indigenous Australian poetry. High school English had stopped at Browning and Hopkins and hardly ventured into Australia at all, let alone Indigenous Australian poetry. In fact, the only mention of Australia's first nations peoples in our state's curriculum back then was to be found in "Aboriginal Studies", an elective, which I took, and which focused heavily on the land rights movement of the time and not at all on modern Indigenous artists, ignoring the interdependence of the two.
Fogarty's poetry is unashamedly political, but it is his experimental use of the Aboriginal Australian language, innovative, often surreal, that has garnered him praise of the kind from John Kinsella, as being "the greatest living Australian poet." One of my favorite of Fogarty's poems is "Appearance Shadows", in which the speaker considers the nature of disappearing as a kind of negative action—for a disappearance to occur, something has to "un-occur", be removed, taken away, so that "Magic give disappearing acts to appear" and "We cannot define disappearing life as appearing in the present." The poem is haunted by Australia's history viewed as a disappearance of Indigenous peoples and culture.
The poem I'd like to introduce is, however, an assertion of being, and, it seems to me, an introduction in itself. "Fellow Being" opens with the declaration that "we aboriginies in humanity" and goes on to, in part, describe Aboriginal people and their profound relationship to their land: "An aboriginal is nature's soil, you pick it up hold it in your / hand and / you will feel our growth in the ground." It is a relationship that is felt and known without being able to be "understood", and therefore, impossible to explain. Fogarty's poetry is a bridge to this feeling.
Fellow Being
An' we aborigines in humanity.
The pulses of the red sun give a beat in aboriginal people.
The kissing of winds to trees are the love between
aborigines.
Even the water we drink is the pure tears aboriginals share.
We wisely in our humanised aboriginal homes are united
under all one colour.
The aboriginal is the bread of man's rich land.
We are the rocks of ages and purpling skies.
Look at every scenery in bush you will see an aboriginal face,
body and spirit.
The aboriginal is not owned by any human being on earth.
Our presence is the flesh of fresh new worlds.
We are music that floats into a wonderful not to all ears.
An aboriginal is nature's soil, you pick it up, hold it in your
hand and
you will feel our growth in the ground.
We are the gods of man in this land but then we are not
humans.
Yet we are part of you kind now hey.
The earth above is our spirituals.
And now if you speak our tongue, don't mean you are native.
The sea, hills and lakes are in our hearts and minds.
The universe is belonga to dem big spirit creator.
Oh, now man you go out there to find out more of us, who
down here.
Well listen to that fish talk and you will know we ate it the
other day.
And if you talk to a bird of paradise you find they are people,
same with
all creatures here, we aboriginals com from them.
If you feel the heat of the sun, you feel us.
If you see and feel the light of the darkness then you have
just touched an aborigine.