Poetry
My People: A Kath Walker Collection
Oodgeroo Noonuccal · 1970
Synopsis
The collection brings together the poems of its author's first two books, published in 1964 and 1966, to which it adds, according to Encyclopedia.com, new poems and prose pieces. It includes “We Are Going”, written in 1962: as white colonisation spreads, the eagle, the emu and the kangaroo leave the lands that the Aboriginal people called their own, and the poem announces that this people will in turn disappear, in a nostalgia for a lost past that the Oxford Companion compares to a poem by Judith Wright.
Context
The collection appeared in 1970 from Jacaranda Press, publisher of the author's first book: that book, in 1964, had been the first collection of poems published by an Aboriginal person, and remained a steady seller, at first among white readers. “We Are Going” had appeared in the newspaper Tribune on 2 May 1962. The author was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire in the very year of this collection, then returned to her island, where she founded Moongalba, a place of teaching.
Who it is for
Short, direct poems, with no difficulty of language, and a few prose pieces; no French translation.
Prizes and reception
For the Cambridge Guide, the poem “We Are Going” is a moving elegy on the dispossession of her people.