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Oodgeroo Nunuccal (Kath Walker)
Oodgeroo Nunuccal, formerly Kath Walker was a poet, political activist artist and an educator best known for her poetry and her campaigning for aboriginal rights. Oodgeroo was born as Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska in Stradbroke Island in Moreton Bay (east of Brisbane and the traditional land of the Nunuccal tribe) on the 3rd of November 1920 and died on the 16th September 1993.

At the young age of 13 Oodgeroo left school and began to work as a domestic servant in Brisbane and during World War II she signed up for the Australian Women’s Army Service to help her brothers Eddie and Eric who were captured as prisoners of war in Singapore. She worked as a communications officer in Brisbane where she performed such tasks as bookkeeping, typing and shorthand (an abbreviated writing method much faster compared to the normal writing way of writing) and at the height of her army career even reached the rank of corporal and noticed “a big difference in the way she was treated once she had enlisted.” This difference was the social equality that she had never received from a white community.
During the time she was enlisted, Oodgeroo married Bruce Walker who was an aboriginal welder and boxer but split up by the time their son Denis Walker was born (in December 1946) and in the early 1950s she conceived her second son, Vivian Walker and joined the Communist Party of Australia, which at the time was the only party opposed to the white Australia Policy.

Oodgeroo’s writing career began in 1964, when she published her first book at the age of 44. The book was entitled We Are Going and featured a poem of the same name which was about when the first European settlers arrived in Australia and forced the Aboriginal people to adapt to their lifestyle It is also about their tribes’ dying culture, opinions, beliefs and people. An example of this is:-

‘The bora ring is gone.
The corroboree is...