Passive Complicity Congratulates Mr Lionel Fogarty
Mr Lionel Fogarty, whose work regularly features in this blog, has last evening awarded the Kate Challis RAKA Award.  This award for Indigenous creative artists has been made available through the generosity of Professor Emeritus Bernard Smith, eminent art and cultural historian. The prize was established to honour the memory of his late wife, Kate Challis, who was known in her youth as Ruth Adeney (RAKA is an acronym for the Ruth Adeney Koori Award). In the Pintupi language RAKA means ‘five’ and in the Warlpiri RDAKA means ‘hand’, and both meanings are particularly apt for a prize to be awarded in a cycle of five years to individual artists – novelists, poets, musicians, painters and playwrights – whose ‘hands’ are the basic means of creativity.

The $20,000 award is offered annually, the 2015 award will be offered to the best book of poems already published and written in English.  Mr Fogarty received his award for the anthology Mogwie Idan: Stories of the Land

A GLANCE
Lay my days away
Yaburuhma women’s of my past
The grunting mission present futures man
Says tongues are tightening by the home spun political
Nods of a hovel give in to them, who take your lands and personally.
The ego of eggs stubborn in breed
Was changing for higher educating.
Now big business wants us to fluent
Our decades to come, with job on job to have blown a canon
of literary.
Give annotated struggle, so brilliantly our new collection of young
can respect
Lifetime work as get it done now.
Important poetry is proper when poors are significant in praise.
Give recognised voices of us by our flighted publicities
The grunted mothers wants are needed
Those grunted Fathers wants are needed
Melt no plans when matrix
The writer is a lyricism
Say what on my tongue, be from we
Done or said it, lay my days away grunted

Lionel Fogarty 2013-07-01