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"Municipal Gum" and Oodgeroo Noonuccal

5/26/2018

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In honor of Reconciliation Day, I wanted to write about the poem “Municipal Gum” and its author, indigenous Australian poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal.

Municipal Gum
Gumtree in the city street,
Hard bitumen around your feet,
Rather you should be
In the cool world of leafy forest halls
And wild bird calls.
Here you seem to me
Like that poor cart-horse
Castrated, broken, a thing wronged,
Strapped and buckled, its hell prolonged,
Whose hung head and listless mien express
Its hopelessness.
Municipal gum, it is dolorous
To see you thus
Set in your black grass of bitumen--
O fellow citizen,
What have they done to us?


—Oodgeroo Noonuccal

The gum tree, owned by the city and trapped in asphalt, belongs instead in nature. The poet compares the tree to a cart-horse that is castrated, confined, and hopeless. The gum tree is a metaphor for indigenous Australians forced off their land. Neither the gum tree nor its “fellow citizen”—the displaced, dispossessed indigenous Australian—is likely to thrive.
 
The author of “Municipal Gum” was born in 1920 on an island in southeast Queensland. Her father belonged to the Noonuccal people. Her family named her Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska, and she was known as “Kath.” From age 13, Kath worked as a domestic servant in Brisbane. When she was 21, she enlisted in the Australian Women’s Army Service and soon after married Bruce Walker, a member of the Gugingin people. After a severe ear infection forced her to leave the Army Service, Kath worked at a variety of jobs and became interested in politics, particularly in fighting for the rights of indigenous Australians. She had separated from her husband before their son was born and raised the child alone. Kath began writing poetry in the 1950s.
 
Her first collection of poetry, We Are Going, was published in 1964. It sold well, and other books followed. The poem “Municipal Gum” appeared in My People: A Kath Walker Collection, published in 1970.She continued writing and was known internationally as a protest poet, political activist, and educator. In 1988, she took the name of her people Noonuccal and the tribal name Oodgeroo (which means “paperbark”). Her final collection of poems was published in 1988, and she died on 16 September 1993.
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Her plaque on Sydney's Writers Walk
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The Writers Walk

5/8/2018

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When my daughter and I visited Sydney recently, I had one thing at the top of my “to-see” list. No, not the Sydney Opera House. (That was number two.) What I really wanted to see was the Writers Walk, a set of brass plaques about different writers embedded in a brick walkway somewhere near the harbor at Circular Quay.

The Writers Walk is easy to miss on the way to the famous opera house. We walked from the train station past the ferry jetties. In the bright sun, with the bustle and noise and color of Circular Quay all around, it was hard to remember to look down. My daughter finally spotted the first plaque, and then we retraced our steps to find the rest. The 60 plaques run from the Overseas Passenger Terminal on West Circular Quay (where the cruise ships dock), past the train station all the way to the side of the Sydney Opera House forecourt on East Circular Quay.

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The first 49 plaques were dedicated on 19 February 1991 by the Minister for the Arts, the Honorable Peter Collins, MP. In 2011, 11 more plaques joined them. The plaque that introduces the Writers Walk reads in part: “What we are and how we see ourselves evolves fundamentally from the written and spoken word.”

The Walk commemorates both Australian writers (many I had never heard of) and those who visited Australian. It makes writing part of the Sydney’s daily life and reveals a culture that really values literature--not just its own but literature from around the world as well.

Below are some highlights from among the 60 plaques.

These Australian poets were new ones for me. A.B. “Banjo” Patterson is best known for writing “Waltzing Matilda,” which is an unofficial national anthem. He also wrote a narrative poem, "The Man From Snowy River," which was made into a film. 

A woman named Kath Walker took the name of her indigenous tribe Oodgeroo Noonuccal in 1988. Oodgeroo means “paperbark tree.” Noonuccal was the first indigenous Australian to publish a book of poetry, called "We Are Going," in 1964.
Novelists such as Miles Franklin and Nevil Shute are old favorites of mine. I remember being terrified when I read Shute’s On the Beach as a teenager.
The Writers Walk honors visiting writers as well.
Charles Darwin, best known for his book On the Origin of Species, spent two months in Australia. The capital city Darwin in the Northern Territory is named after him.

Arthur Conan Doyle, who created Sherlock Holmes, visited Australia in 1920 as part of a five-month speaking tour in Australia and New Zealand. While Sherlock Holmes is the ultimate rational character, ironically his creator was here giving lectures on spiritualism.

Sydney also offers guided tours of the Writers Walk, something I plan to do the next time we visit.
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