Oodgeroo Noonuccal ( UUD-gə-roo NOO-nə-kəl; born Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska; 3 November 1920 – 16 September 1993), earlier known as Kath Walker, was an Aboriginal Australian political activist, artist and educator, who campaigned for Aboriginal rights. Noonuccal was best known for her poetry, and was the first Aboriginal Australian to publish a book of verse. Her first book of poetry, We Are Going, was published in 1964.
Noonuccal was born the second youngest of 7 children on 3 November 1920 in Bulimba, Queensland. She was named Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska at birth and was the daughter of Lucy (née McCullough) and Edward (Ted) Ruska.
Her father, a labourer, was a member of the Nunukul people from around Moreton Bay who also had Filipino and German ancestry. Her mother, Lucy, was the daughter of a Scottish migrant and a Wanggamala-Pitapita woman from Marion Downs Station in western Queensland. Lucy was removed from her family at the age of ten and trained as a housemaid. She became pregnant to a white man at the age of fourteen and transferred as an inmate to the Holy Cross Laundry in Brisbane. Lucy met Edward Ruska on a trip to Stradbroke Island and they subsequently married.
Noonuccal spent her early years at the One Mile settlement on North Stradbroke Island, on the outskirts of Dunwich. She attended Dunwich State School, leaving at the age of thirteen in the aftermath of the Great Depression as the family could not afford to send her to nursing school like her older sister.
Like many Aboriginal girls, Noonuccal was recruited into domestic service in Brisbane. She was forced to live separated from her Indigenous culture and to follow the orders of the women she served. Noonuccal’s story serves as a demonstration of the assimilation many Aboriginal girls experienced.
Activism and political candidacies
Noonuccal joined the Australian Women's Army Service in 1942, after her two brothers were captured by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore. Noonuccal enlisted, in her own words, because she felt guilty that her brothers had been taken as prisoners of war. Additionally, many Indigenous Australians escaped from the restrictions of the various Australian "Protection Acts" by enlisting, which provided them with an education that was otherwise denied—Noonuccal included. Enlisting allowed for her to escape the domestic servitude in Brisbane and the Protection Acts. She served as a signaller in Brisbane, she met many black American soldiers, as well as European Australians. These contacts helped to lay the foundations for her later advocacy of Aboriginal rights. During the 1940s, she joined the Communist Party of Australia because it was the only party which opposed the White Australia policy.
During the 1960s Walker emerged as a prominent political activist and writer. She was Queensland state secretary of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI), and was involved in a number of other political organisations. She was a key figure in the campaign for the reform of the Australian constitution to allow Aboriginal people full citizenship, lobbying Prime Minister Robert Menzies in 1965, and his successor Harold Holt in 1966. At one deputation in 1963, she taught Robert Menzies a lesson in the realities of Aboriginal life. After the Prime Minister offered the deputation an alcoholic drink, he was startled to learn from her that in Queensland he could be jailed for this.
On 13 June 1970, Noonuccal (as Kathleen Jean Mary Walker) received the award of Member of the Order of the British Empire (Civil) (MBE) for her services to the community. In December 1987, she announced she would return her MBE in protest over the Australian Government's intention to celebrate the Australian Bicentenary which she described as "200 years of sheer unadulterated humiliation" of Aboriginal people. She also announced she would change her name to Oodgeroo Noonuccal, with Oodgeroo meaning "paperbark tree" and Noonuccal (also spelt Nunukul) being her people's name.
In 1983, Noonuccal announced she would stand as an independent candidate for the Senate in Queensland at the 1983 federal election. She unsuccessfully attempted to recruit Senator Neville Bonner to join her on a pro-Aboriginal ticket, following his resignation from the Liberal Party. She subsequently withdrew her candidacy, stating she and Bonner were likely to split the vote. Later in the year Noonuccal ran in the 1983 Queensland state election for the Australian Democrats political party in the seat of Redlands. Her campaign focused around policies promoting the environment and Aboriginal rights. Receiving 6.4% of the primary vote, she was not elected.
In 1988, she officially changed her name to Oodgeroo Noonuccal. While often overlooked as simply a personal choice, this was an intentional action by Noonuccal to connect closer with her heritage and culture, while simultaneously being an act of activism by rejecting the White Australia identity that had been forced on her. Additionally, the name change reflects more than just her culture. “Oodgeroo” means “paperbark tree” and alludes to her career and passion as a writer. “Noonuccal” is the name of her people, who lived on and took care of the land for 20,000 years.
She wrote many books, beginning with We Are Going (1964), the first book to be published by an Aboriginal woman. The title poem concludes:
This first book of poetry was extraordinarily successful, selling out in several editions, and setting Oodgeroo well on the way to be Australia's highest-selling poet alongside C. J. Dennis. Critics' responses were mixed, with some questioning whether Oodgeroo, as an Aboriginal person, could really have written it herself. Others were disturbed by the activism of the poems, and found that they were "propaganda" rather than what they considered to be real poetry. Oodgeroo embraced the idea of her poetry as propaganda, and described her own style as "sloganistic, civil-writerish, plain and simple." She wanted to convey pride in her Aboriginality to the broadest possible audience, and to popularise equality and Aboriginal rights through her writing.
Her writings also included themes of ecological activism, highlighting the wisdom of previous Aboriginal Australians and how they cared for the land. Other themes contained in her poems include Aboriginal storytelling, nature, spirituality, and identity. The impacts of colonialism are often present in her writings, as her poetry aimed to strike at the “white ego” and to remind them of what atrocities had been committed against the land and its people.
Walker was inaugural president of the committee of the Aboriginal Publications Foundation, which published the magazine Identity in the 1970s.
In 1972 she bought a property on North Stradbroke Island (also known as Minjerribah), which she called Moongalba ("sitting-down place"), and established the Noonuccal-Nughie Education and Cultural Centre. In 1977, a documentary about her, called Shadow Sister, was released. It was directed and produced by Frank Heimans and photographed by Geoff Burton. It describes her return to Moongalba and her life there. In a 1987 interview, she described her education program at Moongalba, saying that over "the last seventeen years I've had 26,500 children on the island. White kids as well as black. And if there were green ones, I'd like them too ... I'm colour blind, you see. I teach them about Aboriginal culture. I teach them about the balance of nature." Oodgeroo was committed to education at all levels, and collaborated with universities in creating programs for teacher education that would lead to better teaching in Australian schools.
In 1974 Noonuccal was aboard a British Airways flight that was hijacked by terrorists campaigning for Palestinian liberation. The hijackers shot a crew member and a passenger and forced the plane to fly to several different African destinations. During her three days in captivity, she used a blunt pencil and an airline sickbag from the seat pocket to write two poems, "Commonplace" and "Yusuf (Hijacker)".