Having traced my way across the Pacific to North America to discuss the poetries of Baraka and Sanchez, in this chapter I will shift the discussion back to “country,” to a deeply felt present of which the Murri poet-activist Lionel George Fogarty is an essential part. I have avoided arranging the discussions in this book geographically (that is, counterposing Oodgeroo and Fogarty in Australia with Baraka and Sanchez in the United States). In doing so, I mean not only to avoid using binary oppositions or a hierarchal structure in discussing these poets, which is a tree-like image of thought that their poetries themselves resist, but also to highlight the transpacific affinity between Fogarty and the Black Arts movement poetry that preceded him. Furthermore, reading Fogarty with Oodgeroo in hindsight will reveal how Fogarty's poetry is both thematically influenced by, yet structurally distinct from Oodgeroo's work. In addition to highlighting Fogarty's radical originality, this also gives the reader a sense of the developments and transitions in Aboriginal political activism over the past 70 years, and the impact of these changes on the tone and style of Fogarty's poetry.

Since the 1970s, Fogarty has been at the forefront of his peoples’ struggle for human rights and land rights. He was, and still is, an exemplar of revolutionary politics rooted in poetics. In his poem, “Kath Walker,” Fogarty writes: “I was born in 1957/The year after I became a realist/I am a full blooded black Aussie” (New and Selected, 57). Being a “realist” figures sharply in Fogarty's literary identity. Of his people, he writes: “we belong to the day to day realities” (New and Selected, 112). His poetry identifies dispossession as the main cause of sociopolitical and cultural oppression: “We all have attempted suicide since whites came to our homes / We’ve hurt, cried and died” (New and Selected, 22). In response, Fogarty promotes land rights as the basis for an Aboriginal future without oppression. “LAND RIGHTS IS LIFE's RIGHTS,” he writes in his poem, “CAR O BOO BUDJARI” (Jagera, 10, capitalization original).