In much contemporary Aboriginal writing, concepts and descriptions of the land and its aspects are inseparable from the poetry, the cultural understandings which inform it, and the strategies employed by the poets.
Oodgeroo Noonuccal, for example, has described her understanding of the importance of the land as intrinsic to the development of Aboriginal cultures and legal systems. She has also expressed her interpretation of her people’s crucial role in relation to the land:
We know that the earth is our mother who created us all. We cannot own her, she owns us. So we are the custodians of our Earth Mother, whom we must protect and respect at all times. (1990: 8)
Her relationship with the earth as mother is therefore a sacred relationship which must be preserved and which has clear legal and cultural obligations. This is evident in many of her poems, as well as in her political work. It represents the reversal of white legal ownership precedents and forms an important political statement in terms of land rights claims made in the economic rationalist days of the early 1990s.
Oodgeroo also clearly claimed an interdependence of community, culture and land, and reinforced the role of the poet and her community in protecting the land from being abused as a resource; it is a philosophy which underpinned her own involvement in many environmental issues and campaigns, and led to her establishment of a community education centre on her beloved Stradbroke Island.
The interwoven rights and responsibilities of carers and guardians of the land gives rise to some complex legal situations in modern Australia, as well as being present in a great deal of the creative output of many Aboriginal artists:
There is a continuity between traditional and contemporary forms of cultural expression of this theme amongst Aborigines. Traditional culture provided a highly flexible set of ways of encoding a nexus of rights and obligations towards the land. It gave rise to aesthetic statements which were essentially political and judicial rather than personal and expressive.
(Hodge and Mishra, 1991: 92)
Hence, perhaps, some of the confused critical reactions to Oodgeroo's early work (see 3.3). Like Judith Wright, she was dismissed as a woman poet given to extreme and emotional outcry. There was little understanding of her assumed role as caretaker and spokesperson for what was, to her, an important and established set of complex legal realities. She was seen as over-reacting on an emotional level (as women are apparently wont to do). On the other hand, any statements perceived as objectively political were dismissed as polemic.
Hence, also, her popularity. Readers were able to respond both on emotional and ideological levels, even if only from the developing framework of 1960s liberalism.
It should not be forgotten that Oodgeroo and Wright were amongst the first high-profile environmentalists in Australia, and presaged the massive public campaigns of the late 1960s and 1970s. In both cases, their political frameworks encompassed both the importance of the natural world, and the role in it of the indigenous people. These were revolutionary concepts at the time, although they were echoed throughout the world.
Oodgeroo, like Davis, was for many years a leading advocate of the rights of Aboriginal people, and her work reflected both her political priorities and her own affinity with the place of her people, Stradbroke Island.
Two of her early and most famous poems reflect these dual strategies of calling for reform and recognition, and celebrating the traditional values and inter-relationships of an Aboriginal community.
In ‘Municipal Gum’ (1), she describes her sense of empathy with an indigenous tree, using it as a symbol of the oppression of Aboriginal people by white society. She addresses the gum tree surrounded by bitumen as “o fellow citizen”, a sarcastic remark on the lack of civil rights accorded Aboriginal people in this country (the poem was written at the time that Aboriginal people were finally granted citizenship).
It is also a comment on the European belief that Australia prior to colonisation was an untamed continent in need of civilising. This civilisation, according to the poet, has led instead to the restriction of freedoms of indigenous peoples and the destruction of the land. The urbanisation of the country, and of the Aboriginal people, is recognised as a destructive force which inhibits the natural world and the creativity of its people.
Oodgeroo describes the tree as:
Castrated, broken, a thing wronged,
strapped and buckled, its hell prolonged,
living in “hopelessness” and set in a square of “black grass of bitumen”, rather than the “cool world of leafy forest halls / and wild bird calls” to which it belongs.
The poem is a call for freedom for her people, a cry against the restrictions and expectations placed upon them by the dominant white urban society.
In her poem ‘Community Rain Song’ (2), Oodgeroo describes an Aboriginal community's relationship with their country that is so inter-connected that the people can cause it to rain. It is a joyous poem of “laughter” and “magic-making as old as the race”, and describes the ceremonies performed and the songs sung to bring on the rain in a dry spell:
But now little nardoo. Too long dry,
Grass all brown, birds not breeding,
Creeks not running, clouds gone long time.
This not a ritual secret and sacred,
This a camp game.
The country responds to the game and the songs: the rainbird cries out, frogs start croaking, the wind begins to howl, thunder rolls in, and the rains come amid a crescendo of drumming and singing designed to mimic the sounds of the storm. That such a powerful performance is considered a “playabout”, not a solemn sacred ceremony, makes it all the more obvious that the people take it for granted that they have an integral role in the country and its eco-systems.
‘The Food Gatherers’ (3) describes the use of the land as a resource, an inter-woven system of food sources in which is found a contented, positive community. In this poem she juxtaposes the necessary animal deaths which must occur for others in the system to carry out their own survival-based food gathering, with the European use of the land and its animal life:
Only for food, never for sport,
That new evil the white man brought.
The people are inseparable from this food-chain, along with:
The hawk circling over the plains,
The dingo, scourge of his domains,
The lone owl ...
“We are the food gatherers, we,” she sings, including all “furs and feathers” in her statement. There is, again, an empathy with all the creatures that live on and within the land, and the plants on which many of them live. The poem closes with a romantic view of the community at home in its country, understanding its structure, “full and content”, and obviously as skilled in their gathering tasks as the creatures with whom they share the land.
In such works, Oodgeroo balances her scathing critique of white society with a glowingly positive representation of traditional Aboriginal life, in order to round out her political claims for self-determination, restitution, and land rights.