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We gotta own 'em, now, those white-fella marks on paper. We gotta take them marks and make 'em run together like the dots and circles, the tracks and rivers and beings that live together on that bark. We gotta show that 's who we are, how we live. Them white-fella pages Tjukurrpa too, now, because it's us mob that's making the marks on 'em-markings of ourselves like we've always been, like we 'll go on being, tracing our tracks on the paper. . . . That 's how we gotta speak our place in that world where people paint the journeys by writing on pages. (Martiniello 94)
Oodgeroo Noonuccal and the success of the first edition of her collection We Are Going, cemented a strong legacy of First Nations' literary production as both visible and activist when the anthology was published in 1964. The collection yielded an unprecedented commercial response: it sold out before it was launched, and seven more editions were released within the following year ("Recording the Cries of the People" 18). The historical significance of We Are Going also lies in it being the first commercial literary publication by an Aboriginal author in Australia, not just of collected poetry, but of literature in any form.1 In a short biography, Karen Fox draws upon Noonuccal's reflections on her work's success: "Oodgeroo sometimes suggested that her Aboriginality increased interest in her poetry. She commented in an interview in 1988 that We are Going 'sold mainly out of curiosity value'" (Fox 60). "Curiosity" as a motivator for non-Indigenous readers to consume First Nations literature is fraught-in its most generous form, it can provide a bridge across difference, and, in its most exploitative guise, it can become literary cannibalism (more on this to follow). Nevertheless, Noonuccal's ongoing success ushered in an era of strong voices. Other contemporaries of Noonuccal's era (and ones who followed) include Kevin Gilbert, Jack Davis, Lisa Bellear, Kerry Reed-Gilbert, and Lionel Fogarty. However, these prominent and prolific voices of the twentieth century are often relegated to the realms of "protest poetry." Whilst it is reductive to classify all Aboriginal poetry as such, I am reminded of the words of Noonuccal, when asked to confirm that there is no such thing as non-political...