Aboriginal poetics have always existed. Or, at least, they fulfil every sense of always that we have access to: yaburuhma, the kind of eternal that spirals out a constant across time and space; forever, the kind of promise we make to spread between every time. Since the land, since the land made us shape, since the land gave us voice, since we had learned enough to inscribe it back, since we took up tools tossed here by the uninvited. We sing it back as it is sung back to us in every bird song, every branch ache, every wave heave. The form has changed, as have we, but the songlines still hum in the soil while we read and write upon it.

Aboriginal poetics have always been caught in the gaze of too little, too much. After the publication of We Are Going (1964), critics slandered Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s verses as too radical, more propaganda than poetry. Some speculated whether she had written them at all. In 1973, Ruth Doobov wrote of My People (1970), a collection dedicated to those fighting for treaty, that Noonuccal ‘is not in a position to have a very sensitive appreciation of European verse rhythms, but at the same time she cannot use the structure and techniques of the poetry of her Aboriginal ancestors.’ Despite the commercial and cultural success Noonuccal’s work attracted in and beyond the nation, the poems of protest, remembrance and celebration she performed on the shores of her beloved Minjerribah and for the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders alike,