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‘My Country’ but ‘Not My Style’

Sally Butler
Eyeline 81
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Not my style?

Man! the world will end

And you will complain.

I want to do

The things I have not done.

Not just taste the nectar of Gods

But drown in it too.

Shed my grass-root skin.

Emerge!

As woman!

   poet!

      writer!

         musician!

Eat herbs;

Chew grass

Live.

Stuff myself

Of the bitter and the sweet,

Before,

   that thing,

      that thing,

          outside

Comes.

 

Oodgeroo Noonuccal, ‘Not My Style’, 1966.1

 

Not My Style

Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920-1993) was one of Australia’s greatest poets—a Minjerribah (Queensland’s North Stradbroke Island) woman, visual artist and fervent political activist for Australian Indigenous rights, social justice and conservationism. Her leadership in Indigenous self-determination helped forge the Brisbane Aboriginal and Islander Council and the National Tribal Council in the late 1960s. After decades of tireless national and international political campaigns, Oodgeroo galvanised national attention to the ongoing impact of colonisation of the Indigenous population when she returned her MBE (Order of the British Empire) in 1988 in protest against Australia’s Bicentennial celebrations of two hundred years of so-called ‘settlement’. From this point Australia Day became synonymous with Invasion Day and the nation developed an heightened self-consciousness about how the entire population can ‘still call Australia home’.

The recent exhibition at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art titled ‘My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia’ showcased art dating from 1979 that extends this politics of belonging to the present day, but is also grounded in the sentiments of Oodgeroo’s ‘Not My Style’. The essence of Oodgeroo’s poetry drew on her cultural knowledge of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Michael Cook, Civilised #2, 2012. Inkjet print on paper, 100 x 87cm. Edition of 8. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane.

Michael Cook, Civilised #2, 2012. Inkjet print on paper, 100 x 87cm. Edition of 8. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane.

Warwick Thornton, Stranded, 2011. 3D digital video, 11:06min, colour, sound, 16:9 widescreen, ed. 1/5. Commissioned by the 2011 Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund. Purchased 2011. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation. Collection Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. Courtesy QAGOMA.

Warwick Thornton, Stranded, 2011. 3D digital video, 11:06min, colour, sound, 16:9 widescreen, ed. 1/5. Commissioned by the 2011 Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund. Purchased 2011. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation. Collection Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. Courtesy QAGOMA.