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The twentieth century was a time of momentous change for indigenous Australia. The traditions, identity, and languages of the continent's many peoples were assaulted; cultures that existed for millennia in remote desert regions were introduced to European settlers, their technology, and their language. At the same time, many indigenous people were forcibly relocated, children taken from their families and reeducated as white Australians. Indigenous land was appropriated and indigenous languages forbidden. Native Australians were denied citizenship until 1948, and even then many were not given the right to vote until the 1960s. Some of Australia's most powerful English-language voices sprang from this oppression.
There is Lionel Fogarty, whose postsurrealist poems incorporate words and phrases of his native Murri and pidgin English to create a linguistic portrait of the indigenous Australian conscience. There is Oodgeroo Noonuccal, an important activist and the first indigenous Australian woman poet ever to be published, whose often chantlike poetry uses tradition to establish a modern affirmation of her people within Australian society. And we have now the twenty-first-century voices of Yvette Holt and Samuel Wagan Watson. They belong to a new generation of indigenous Australian poets who have inherited the courage to express themselves in English, the language of the dominant culture, from poets like Fogarty and Noonuccal, and have inherited the fraught political and personal histories that have come with this courage.