This Musical Dispatch is from
Mr Lionel Fogarty, Poet.  This is the introduction to his 1995 work ‘New and Selected Poems, Munaldjali, Mutuerjaraera’ published by Hyland House, Melbourne.

I want to give everybody my understanding so that they can understand what the reality is in my community; the dreaming and the need for a revival of my language and connection to the land.

When people read my poetry I want them to feel the spirit that is in me and in the people of my community.

You have to understand all the poetry I write in order to get the message.  It’s a performance in literary oral tradition, of even using their English against the English.  The way they write and talk is ungrammatical, because it doesn’t have any meanings in their spirit.  More so, the cultural symbols that belong to my people are more significant to my people than the A, B, and C.  What i want to achieve in my writing one day is to put Aboriginal designs of art inside the lettering to bring a broader understanding to the meanings of the text.

This will break down the sophistication of black intellectual authors.  My writing is to give a direction to Aboriginal people coming up in the future, to stay away from European colonialist ways of writing, and the disease of stupidity in their language.  I want to use a method encouraging readers to accept that the solidarity Aborigines write to give spiritual and political understanding of the conventional social structure of their community.

I must say I think it is going to be difficult to divide the layout of my brain to you, but I have done it quite successfully in giving verses of text in foreign tongue.  I believe in the pride and heritage of an indigenous, ancestral past and future where the technicalities of written words can be broken down.  I see words beyond any acceptable meaning, this is how I express my dreaming.

To Aboriginal people in my country, listening and hearing is more important than reading materials.  The whole magical way of song and dance is difficult to write down very well, because poetry is emotion.  Only and black writer can produce the authenticity in it.  I don’t believe that white writers can catch the intelligence or the meanness of the black guerrilla fighters (Jantamarra, Mulbaggarra, Dundalee and Pemulway, for example).  Only we can bring out on paper what our fighters back then fought to produce, the raising of people’s consciousness about what really happened back then.

In my writing I don’t believe in compromise at all.  I don’t want to be a reconciliation writer or a reformist writer.  I like to hit psychological minds and cross boundaries.  It doesn’t matter if it is in correct grammar or their style of writing, because the white man will always criticise written pieces of paper.

White man will never fully interpret what a black man is thinking when he is writing.  Maybe in the generations to come this may change.

There are many contradictions in European written material, but don’t get confused with my negating the reality of literary white Australia.  I know how white Australians write and I know how they talk.  They’ll never come near the fourth world. White man will never know – and the only way they will know is through Aboriginal tongues that dominate in our lingo.  Aboriginal writers are the best writers to edit themselves and encapsulate the spirit of anger, to transform a good spirit.

The book is dedicated in part to Bart Willoughby (the most original indigenous muso)

So here is Bart Willoughby playing “We have survived”

And tomorrow another of Lionel Fogarty’s poems.
And next week in MDFF we have “Guerrilla Poetry: Lionel Fogarty’s response to Language Genocide”