Oodgeroo

by Kathleen J. Cochrane

Black rights champion and poet, Oodgeroo displayed passionate commitment to her heritage and spirited belief in a "juster justice" for Aboriginal people. Words were her weapons and hopefulness her legacy. When she died in 1993 she had earned a nation's respect and achieved international renown.
Known as Kath Walker for most of her seventy-two years, she adopted the name Oodgeroo of the Noonuccal tribe as an effective protest in 1988. A denouncer of racial injustice, she worked unstintingly for peaceful change.
One day, out of the blue, Oodgeroo presented her friend, Kathie Cochrane, with a bundle of papers. They had known each other for half a lifetime. "Notes," Oodgeroo said. "They might help you if you write about me."
So began this book, the faithful work of a friend who is sometimes scribe and sometimes chronicler. Oodgeroo's memories, anecdotes and personal perspective provide an authentic autobiographical flavour. It is precious testimony, a benchmark for comparing the legend that posterity will fashion around her life.
Oodgeroo first joined Queensland's fledgling organisation for Aboriginal advancement in the late 1950s, and bravely steered a way through the years of Menzies government recalcitrance to the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal citizenship and the belated conferral on Aborigines of the right to vote.
The memorable combination of her fiery wit and mischievous humour won her the respect of opponents. Her poetry, too, found a large audience sympathetic to her ideal that "black and white may go forward together/In harmony and brotherhood".

Genres: Nonfiction, Australia, History, Biography Memoir

235 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1994

Reviews

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published in the 1990s - and put together after Oodgeroo's diagnosis with end-stage cancer, this volume combines biographical essays from Cochrane with poetry analysis from Judith Wright and speeches and poems from Oodgeroo herself. I was amazed that it was so hard to find - especially given no subsequent book-length biography exists - but it is also clear that the approach would be unlikely to be repeated today. In many ways, this is a shame - the book's photographs, poetry analysis and speeches are fabulous. But the biographical content is an explicit settler view of both Oodgeroo and of the Aboriginal Rights movement of the time. Cochrane is away of her perspective - and covers passionately Oodgeroo's own fight to force settler-run organisations to cede in favour of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadership, but, in addition to facilitating some clangers (wholesale dismissal of pre-war Aboriginal activism included), it makes Oodgeroo herself distant from the narrative. This is a whitefella history, written explicitly for whitefellas.
Nevertheless, with those caveats, I enjoyed it a great deal. There was much I had been unaware of in her life, and the anecdotes, told with love and fresh grief, evoking a strong sense of Oodgeroo's own warmth, humour, strength and passion.

[Emma Doherty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kathleen Cochrane's other notable works included academic papers, and it's no surprise. This biography was interesting, because it was about an interesting subject, but very little personal warmth seems to have been injected into it. I would recommend it purely for the small analysis of her poetry at the end, written by another great Australian poet, Judith Wright.