Song and Dance

The poet Lionel Fogarty was born on 25 December 1957 at Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve in south-east Queensland, and died last month aged 68. A Yugambeh man from the area south of Brisbane, he also had connections to the Kudjela people of north Queensland.

In the 1970s Lionel became involved in Indigenous rights, working with the Aboriginal Legal Service, Aboriginal Housing Service, Black Resource Centre, Black Community School and Murrie Coo-ee. He campaigned for land rights and protested against Aboriginal deaths in custody, including that of his brother, Daniel Yock.

The Black Resource Centre, whose inaugural director was his wife Cheryl Buchanan, mother of their 6 children, was involved in the defence and acquittal of the “Brisbane Three” in 1975. Fogarty was one of the three: he faced charges of conspiracy against the State, along with Denis Walker and Chilean national John Garcia. The charges, which had been laid by the Queensland Special Branch in 1974, were for various offences relating to an alleged plot to kidnap Jim Varghese, then the students’ union president, later a senior public servant, corporate leader and AM.

Fogarty’s first collection of poetry, Kargun, was published in 1980. He published a further thirteen volumes including the Scanlon Prize-winning Connection Requital (2010), Mogwie-Idan: Stories of the Land (2012), which won the Kate Challis RAKA Award, and Eelahroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Mobo-Mobo (Future) (2014). Fogarty’s most recent publication Harvest Lingo (2022) was the winner of the Queensland Literary Awards – Judith Wright Calanthe Award for a Poetry Collection and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in 2022. He was the 2025 recipient of the Red Ochre Award for Lifetime Achievement in Artistic Excellence by Creative Australia.

Fogarty’s is ‘a poetry of linguistic uniqueness and overwhelming passion’ repurposing both English and the Yugambeh language of his people to confront colonisation and celebrate a deep sense of Black-pride. His work has been described as “experimental”, and sometimes “surrealist”. He uses Aboriginal language in his poetry, partly as an attempt to extend the dialogue between Australian cultures. And as his wife and publisher put it in 1984’s Ngutjii, “There is a conservative ethic that pervades the ‘art’ world which Lionel refused to be sucked into. As a result, his writing is totally divorced from the ‘migloo mentality’. If you read Lionel’s words aloud, you too will hear the cries of our need for liberation”.

More recently Fogarty’s paintings gave visual presence to his poems. His paintings, seen as recently as last year at Sydney’s Darren Knight Gallery, tell of encounters between people and between cultures, address historical and cultural issues and political events, and pay tribute to important Indigenous figures. Fogarty’s painted poems are intensely felt, bold and fierce and at times challenging and confronting.

Meanwhile, another Aboriginal poet from Queensland, Cheryl Leavy of the State’s western Kooma Nation, has been announced as the winner of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize for her poem ‘Kumanjayi’, which is also concerned with Aborginal deaths in custody. Leavy becomes the first First Nations winner of this major prize.

The Porter Prize is worth a total of $10,000, of which the winner receives $6,000. This year’s judges – Judith Bishop, the Australian Book Review’s Poetry Editor Felicity Plunkett, and Anders Villani – shortlisted five poems from 1,360 entries. Poets from thirty-two countries entered the prize. “If the poems had a palette”, the judges said, “its accent was the green of hope and healing, held gently in a wide range of poems speaking across time place”.

‘Kumanjayi’ – the honorific title given to a dead person – begins:
riotous though the anger in our veins
still we dance the intersections of city streets
we march
we smoke your watchhouse
your felling floor

The judges said this of ‘Kumanjayi’: ‘Pulsing between speaking and silence, anger and tenderness, the poem’s spare lyricism flares into moments of repetition. These reflect trauma’s return and return, in kind, steadily to ceremony and honouring. Beginning where anger meets violence, ‘Kumanjayi’ turns to observance, tending the aftermath of violence across this “whole bloodied continent”. Drawing the reader into its momentum, shifting pronouns invite witness and ask readers to consider whether, ancestrally or now, we are part of the “we” who gather to heal or the “they” who enact the violence – perhaps both. The poem’s first-person singular “I” steps in only after partaking in collective mourning and healing, quietly requesting permission to address and imagine the young Kumanjayi. In the year in which there have been the most Aboriginal deaths in custody since 1979, this necessary poem moves delicately and unswervingly towards justice.’

Cheryl Leavy is passionate about language revitalisation. Writing in both English and her critically endangered Kooma language, she has been published widely. In 2022, Cheryl won the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Prize for Indigenous Poetry. She has recently completed her first poetry collection, titled ‘Mudhunda – The Song Country’, to be published in 2027.

For the full poem and further information, please go to the magazine’s Jan-Feb 2026 issue at https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/

Other Indigenous winners are Bangarra Dance Theatre who have won the prestigious Golden Lion Award at the Venice Dance Biennale. The prize for lifetime achievement in dance will be presented during the international festival, Venice Danza, which happens in July. Bangarra’s Artistic Director, Mirning woman Frances Rings, described the win as a “validation of the important role of Bangarra has in bringing First Nations stories to the stage and the responsibility that we carry”.

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