Aboriginal·& Torres strait islander readers are advised that this article includes videos, recordings, writings and speeches of people who have now passed away …
“His memory and beauty, we carry beyond
How long, how long will these killings go on?”
– Kev Carmody
Too sad, the passing of Aboriginal poet, Lionel Fogarty, whom I remember saying farewell to his brother Boonie (Wakka Wakka dancer Daniel Yock) in Musgrave Park murdered by Queensland police nearby on the corner of Edmonstone and Sussex Streets, South Brisbane on 7 Nov 1993.
There followed the gravest march I have ever experienced: Three and a half thousand people marched in silence from Musgrave Park to the Brisbane Watchouse led by Lionel and Brisbane Blacks. Brisbane, November 1993.
My condolences to Mooj and the Brisbane Blacks for their loss.
Yugambeh land forms the banner of BushTelegraph as a mark of respect for this tribe and the other Murri clans in the place where we live.
White settlement in Australia has lasted only 8 generations (200 years ÷ 25 years).
Aboriginal settlement in ‘Terra Nullius’ (sic) has lasted more than 1,600 generations (40,000 years ÷ 25 years).
Sorrow for aboriginal dispossession is not enough.
Aboriginal people must have land rights and the economic ability to live in the land.
Lionel Fogarty was a fighter for social justice.
I have heard him speak strongly for many years. He has campaigned like all the others: Sam Watson, Coco Wharton, Dennis Walker, Les Malezer, Bob Weatherall, Vanessa Fisher, Auntie Jean, Lilla Watson, Maureen Watson, Don Brady, Oogeroo, Adrian and Linda Burragubba, Charlie Perkins, Maroochy Barambah, Neville Bonner, Karen Fusi, along with the Musgrave Park people, the Jagera Cultural Association, and the Brisbane Blacks. They have conducted this struggle as far back as I can remember attending ‘smash the acts‘ and land rights rallies in the early 1970s.
I have heard Lionel’s poems and songs on the street against the Queensland ‘Protection Acts’, our colonialist governments, and their settler state. Minyung Woolah Binnung is a poetry book written by Lionel Fogarty.
Lionel was born in 1958, he was a Yugambeh man, and his country stretches far and wide around the south-east corner of Queensland.
I once took the picture of Yugambeh land from the Mistake Mountains [sic] near Cunningham’s Gap.
Who killed the young dancer?
Daniel Yock would still be in his prime if he had lived. Under the old tree on the corner of Russell and Edmonstone Streets in Musgrave Park Aboriginal poet, Lionel Fogarty, said farewell to his brother Boonie (Daniel Yock) who was killed by police nearby on the corner of Edmonstone and Sussex Streets, South Brisbane on 7 Nov 1993.
Wind forward and it is 27th anniversary of Daniel Yoch’s death. It is also NAIDOC week with the big family fun day in Musgrave Park cancelled because of Covid -19.
There are things about the inquiry into Daniel Yoch’s death that trouble me still. Prominent Labor lawyer, Llew Wyville, was appointed to look into Daniel’s death ‘because the optics did not look good’ – Wayne Goss (Premier of Qld).
Goss, an experienced civil liberties lawyer, may have been concerned because it took police over half an hour to drive the two and a half kilometres from Brereton Street West End to the Roma St watch house in the CBD. When they arrived, Daniel was found to be not breathing and to have no pulse. An ambulance was called, but resuscitation was unsuccessful and on arrival at the hospital he was pronounced dead.
On his arrest Daniel had been roughed up, had fallen heavily to the ground and police placed him face down on his stomach in the paddy wagon with his arms handcuffed behind his back. An eyewitness said he had vomit coming from his mouth.
At the inquiry, it was submitted by Mr John Jerrard QC, a former public defender: “… that if an ambulance had been called, Yock would have been in the care of ambulance officers or a hospital when he suffered the Stokes-Adams [heart] attack and would thus have had a better chance of survival.”
A “workers’ inquiry” came to the conclusion – that Daniel had died from a lack of oxygen after being left face down, unconscious, and unable to breath.
No official response was ever granted to this report. Daniel’s death was the 52nd in police custody in the then four and a half years since the federal royal commission into aboriginal deaths in custody.
“The flower of youth, cut down in the night/
Dead in the police van and driven from the site/
Another young warrior has been sacrificed./
His spirit endures, our grieving hearts bled/We still long for the song of the young dancer who’s dead” – Kev Carmody
Ian Curr
13 Feb 2026
The story of The Dancer was posted on the 20th of November 2020 .
Reference
The Young Dancer is Dead – Kev Carmody
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-09/thin-black-line-death-custody-daniel-yock-sparked-wildfire-anger/12813008?nw=0&pfm=sm
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and images of deceased people. They have been used with permission from Lionel Fogarty’s son Kargun “Moojidi” Fogarty.
In 2014, Yugambeh writer and activist Lionel Fogarty was named by poet and scholar John Kinsella as “the greatest living Australian poet”. More recently, Waanyi novelist Alexis Wright described Fogarty as the “poet laureate” of Aboriginal literature.
With his passing last week, one of the most widely-recognised poets of his generation leaves a legacy that will inspire future generations to challenge injustice in institutions of education, literature, government, policing and health.
Fogarty published 16 collections of poetry, from Kargun (1980) to Harvest Lingo (2022), appearing in countless anthologies of Aboriginal writing, Australian literature and poetry.
He facilitated writing workshops for remote Australian communities, for incarcerated peoples and at international universities. He also held solo exhibitions of his painted poems, including last year’s Burraloupoo at Sydney’s Darren Knight Gallery.
Lionel Fogarty’s Burraloupoo installation. Darren Knight Gallery
His energy remained limitless. Towards the end of his life, he painted poems and drafted new work daily. Just days before his passing, he was writing new poetry alongside close friends and reviewing the manuscript of a forthcoming collection, Warrior with a Fighting Stick.
Throughout his life, Fogarty worked tirelessly on political campaigns for Aboriginal peoples’ rights, while earnestly and consistently crafting provocative, complex poetry.
Today, he has a reputation as one of the truly unique voices in world literature. This stands in contrast to the early days, when critical praise for Fogarty’s work largely framed it from an outsider perspective, simplifying his varied, complex uses of poetic language.
Fogarty transforms conventional English grammar, expression and spelling in an effort to decolonise what he sees as a broken, colonial communication system.
His poems invite creative interpretation, while being underpinned by a view of art as a means of communication and understanding. In a 2011 interview with Australian poet Michael Brennan, Fogarty memorably noted, “poetry is only useful if it changes the bloody law!”
Conversations like rivers
Giramondo
Fogarty recently received the prestigious Red Ochre award for lifetime achievement in artistic excellence.
Harvest Lingo won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Poetry (Queensland Literary Awards) and was shortlisted for most major poetry awards in 2023. The physical awards were objects to him. During a recent visit to his home, several awards were seen used as coasters for paint bottles. And yet the titles were important in continuing his activism.
In 1974, under the corrupt Bjelke-Petersen government, Fogarty (then 16), Denis Walker and John Garcia were arrested and charged with various offences related to menacing and intention to extort after requesting funds from the University of Queensland to build a community school on Palm Island. After a national campaign, the “Brisbane Three” were exonerated, with all charges dropped and the case thrown out.
Fogarty recounted recently how after being released from prison on those charges, he learnt to read critically while laying low with forerunners of the Australian Black Panther movement.
The activism that defined his life was founded in his connections to community. Fogarty counted among his literary inspirations the letter writers and storytellers of Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve, where he was born in 1957.
Even at this year’s Day of Mourning protest in Brisbane, Fogarty was escorted in a wheelchair from hospital to speak at the rally, supported by friends. He read many poems to the thousands gathered there, including his soon-to-be-published, Promotional Palestinian Justices.
Fogarty supported campaigns to establish several community organisations (including the Aboriginal Legal Service, the Aboriginal Housing Service, the Black Community School and two Black Resources Centres) with activist and educator Cheryl Buchanan, Guwamu woman, mother of six of his children and publisher of five of his poetry collections.
While Fogarty’s output was prolific, his greatest art may have been conversation. A conversation with him was like the flowing rivers of his beloved Yugambeh Country. One could easily be caught in the flow, meditating about a meaning or particular phrase. Words, names, suggestions and stories ran freely: names and places were like floating branches to listeners caught in a current moving at a pace determined by the storyteller.
At every turn in the river, Fogarty would check if the meaning had been conveyed and understood, in the manner and earnestness of his telling. The experience must be something like Fogarty’s childhood memories of sitting around the Cherbourg campfire, listening to stories carried by the peoples comprising the hundreds of language groups living there “under the act” (a phrase referencing the powers of the then government over the lives of Aboriginal peoples within reserves).
Author and academic Philip Morrissey has suggested the curling smoke with its “chains of association” inspired Fogarty’s poem, Remember Something Like This:
Long ago a brown alighted story was told
as a boy looked up on the hall walls
water flowed to his eyes
Fogarty’s activism and art reflects a global understanding of Indigenous solidarity. In 1976, he addressed the International Indigenous Treaty Council, on the lands of the Yanktonai Dakota peoples, on the subject of Aboriginal Australian rights to self-determination. In this visit, he would meet Oglala Lakota activist Russell Means, Lakota spiritual leader Leonard Crow Dog and American artist and poet Jimmie Durham.
‘Shouting in winds’
One of the most significant events of Fogarty’s life was the death of his brother Daniel Yock in police custody in Brisbane, 1993. Yock, a founder of the Wakka Wakka Dance Company, was racially profiled by the police, assessed as being disorderly and alleged to have pulled a stake from the ground to threaten police. He was brutally taken into custody. Unconscious, Yock was dragged into the paddy wagon, face-down, and died within hours.
This tragedy and its aftermath for the Aboriginal communities of Queensland (and particularly Cherbourg) would lead to mass protests seeking justice over the crime. Fogarty would spend the rest of his life speaking out against Aboriginal deaths in custody.
Goodreads
In the wake of the event, Fogarty produced some of his best poems. Two highly political poems of grief and anger appear in his best-known collection, New and Selected Poems: Munaldjali, Mutuerjaraera (1995).
And yet, it would be many years before he published new poetic works again, publishing Minyung Woolah Binnung in 2004. This collection combined poetic language and illustrations, a first for Fogarty. This practice pointed back to illustrations used in his former speeches and forward to the striking and colourful painted poems seen in the Burraloupoo exhibition.
Through his poetry, Fogarty anticipated questions of his own death, a subject marked by his sense of his own poetic achievement, while frequently tracing connections to the disproportionate numbers of Aboriginal deaths in custody. Indeed in his first published poetry collection, he wrote of his own death in a poem called 15th June 1978.
In the poem, Fogarty asks his fellow poets to honour his achievements in the following way:
When i die i want the poets to be loud
shouting in winds
shattering with shot gun noises
Living for future children
to see trueness.
Almost 40 years on from Kargun, Fogarty wrote in Signing My Death in Lion and Hell:
The pains comes and goes
Me eyes are blending
Me ear hear nothing
My mind can’t keep up
To me writings.
[…] I am dead singing death
Living in this moment
One thing I know doesn’t want to have a white death
Spiralling line-by-line towards the end of the page, Fogarty described a future where his writings may outstrip his physical body.
After reading the above poem with family and friends from his hospital bed this past January – filmed for an upcoming project with Documentary Australia – Fogarty remarked, “The whitefellas love my death poems”,
SEE https://theconversation.com/a-legacy-to-challenge-and-inspire-farewell-lionel-fogarty-poet-and-activist-276047
RIP Lionel ❤️