Go on, have the day off, like we are.

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“There’s not much you can say in 28 minutes” Professor Marcia Langton *

Poetry Sunday edited by Ira Maine

Today we feature Mr Lionel Fogarty, Indigenous poet. 

This is what Wikipedia has to say of him:

Lionel Fogarty (born 1958) is an Indigenous Australian poet and political activist.

He was born at Barambah (now called Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve) in Queensland where he grew up. He has been involved in Aboriginal activism from his teenage years, mainly in Southern Queensland on issues such as Land Rights, Aboriginal health and deaths in custody. His brother, Daniel Yock died at the hands of police in 1993. His poetry, while in no way dismissable as simply ‘political poetry’, can be seen as an extension of these activities on another front. Common themes are the maintenance of traditional aboriginal culture and the everyday realities of European occupation. Among the most ‘experimental’ of contemporary Australian poetry, his work has sometimes been described as ‘surrealist‘. Certainly large amounts of Indigenous Language, which white Australians sometimes find confronting, are employed but in part as an attempt to further dialogue between Australian cultures.

Fogarty has been involved with not-for-profit poetry organisation, The Red Room Company, participating in Unlocked, a program for inmates in New South Wales correctional centres, as well its creative projects including Clubs and Societies and The Poet’s Life Works.[1]

Partial Bibliography

• Yoogum Yoogum. (Penguin: Ringwood Vic., 1982)
• Ngutji illustrations by Lyn Briggs. (Spring Hill QLD: Murrie Coo-ee, 1984)

• New and Selected Poems, Munaldjali, Mutuerjaraera. (Melbourne: Hyland House, 1995)
• Minyung Woolah Binnung: What Saying Says. (Southport QLD: Keeaira Press, 2004)
• Dha’lan Djani Mitti: Collected Poems. (Cambridge: Salt, 2007?)

FIRST OFF HIS TRIBE CASTRATED.

We ant’s your modem Aborigines

We ant’s your code to heaven

We ant’s your talking without a face

We ant’s your sterilized irrefutably chords.

I the man who not wrote but action the words

Ringing or humming in your mother bear summer night’s daily scents.

I am the one you don’t want me to be those platitudes off the society dirty glib.

I am in your hand when your lovers sit lazy to your carvings.

Worms of hope jump in ears for the smell churn in your air.

Moulding sleepy hostess are contrives in marrow purpose I cunningly let by.

Beaten tourist is I before the mixed pride traded are bones alone.

Vanished coach emu’s flight defiled the every move we made satisfied.

On the ledge a shade cheating feather weathered this totem man gently and were he’s spirit methylates.

We ant’s your herald Aborigines no feral

We ant’s your half stumble benches back for spears can’t broken, for hearing.

We ant’s your bread recognized ray to race

I am sundown up-sun every night you all don’t want me desolate

We ant’s your oration invaders,

Generation will spilt blood yet not our blood rocks.

Mr Lionel G Fogarty VIC MERTON DEC 20 2012 TIME PM 6.30

* 2012 Boyer Lecturer Marcia Langton on John Faine’s Conversation Hour 21 February 2013.  (In fact she said four lectures were about 28 minutes (each) and then made the statement quoted above)

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Ira follows up from Saturday’s Post with his own take on “Under the Radar”  Make of it what you will.   Perhaps he could realign the Solar Array pictured above.

From his private journal.

Despite our elevation, Soggy Bottom is noticeably miles under the TV radar. In times past, in order to preserve the delicately poised, smooth running equilibrium of Chez Nous, I would take it upon myself to venture forth in the thunder and lightning dark to make complex micro-adjustments to our aerial array. Whilst these realignments were being effected, the Light of My Life, through the open window, would advise me as to the effectiveness or otherwise of my  tweaking of the cat’s whiskers.

Bafflingly, these complex aerial fine tunings, together with the trans-casement exchange of essential bulletins, were only ever required directly after the rain came bucketing down,never before, and not until I was settled comfortably in a semi- comatose reverie. (which brings me abruptly to another flaw in the ointment) Outside, in the howling maelstrom, clad in my waterproof Thos. Cook, I discover that raising my arms in order to grasp the aerial adjustment wand has immediate and dire consequences. A huge part of this is the instant shocking ingress of about a gallon of freezing water straight down the back of my neck courtesy of my newly acquired sea going sou’wester.  At these moments it is impossible to hold back.  An involuntary scream alerts the entire household to my predicament and brings hordes of hooting, convulsed kids to the window.  Even the adults are driven to tear-stained  paroxysms of uncontrolled laughter at the sight of this shocked, drenched and  freezing scarecrow, rooted to the spot as his nether regions are infamously and aqueously outraged.

Out there on the edge, on the brink of triple pneumonia, soaked and battling yet another thunderous downpour, I make the final crucial adjustments. When I stump steaming back in, trailing clouds of umbrage, every one of the boding tremblers has found urgent employment elsewhere.

The Light Of My Life, insistent, rids me of every soaked stitch.

What? Here?, in the porch? Now?

 Peremptorily she ushers me off, barely decent, in the direction of the bathroom.  By the time I’ve showered, changed and re-entered the fray the entire family is deeply absorbed in the latest, picture perfect episode of Pride and Prejudice.

Ignored, I move unnoticed through the throng, a consoling measure of red wine my only thought.. I am  keenly aware that although I had, against impossible odds, provided the family with this latest Jane Austen extravaganza, no single member of this  family (except Herself, albeit giggling helplessly), touched as much as a thankful forelock. Crisis averted, it was now crystal clear that this entire ungrateful lot expected me to quietly resume my memorable, long-time role as The Forgotten Man of Soggy Bottom.

Like Mr.Darcy before me, perhaps one day my good points, my skills, my astonishing aerial abilities, not to mention my remarkable capacity to survive repeated doses of triple pneumonia, will be publicly acknowledged. Until that time, we quiet achievers, we true battlers must gird our loins, get a grip and soldier on, buoyed only by the hope that perhaps one day credit will finally be given where credit is due.

Design Doctor 118 Small Minds

Important comments from Laura Norda and Terry Nullius

LN:  Speaking of small minds – really Terry where do these C & P fellows get off?  They seem to have absolutely no idea of the importance of good communication, of building strong teams, of keeping everyone on the same page.  Involvement and ownership builds loyalty.

TN:   Laura, you’ve missed to point.  That being that this is typical of planning departments, and of government generally.  More petty laws being formulated by more petty bureaucrats.  We don’t want to live in a Nanny State!  Be decisive, tell people what they want, what is good for them.  They really don’t want to think, they want to be told.  Yesterday’s Mine Tinkit was a case in point.  Everyone goes home happy when those who so obviously and professionally know what is good for the client, the customer if you will, make the proper decision and carry it out.  Everyone can see how it works.  Transparency at its best.  Look, Laura, you involve too many people (and often, in my experience, two is too many), and confusion reigns, pathetic compromises are made.

Next ?  Maybe Ira Maine “Under the Radar”

MEMO:  To Quentin Cockburn QC, from Cecil Poole, CP & Bar
Quentin,

I really cannot see what this is about.

Regards

Cecil

A great example of consultation can be found here  (Thanks to Musical Dispatch from the Front)

“There’s not much you can say in 28 minutes” Professor Marcia Langton *

Well, try this!

I MEMORY by Mr Lionel Fogarty

‘Dear earth why hurt don’t work

Why the thing not meant still happen

As if pies are in the sky

Come over to the bright side were cold

Olds the young age in holders fold.

Come together were all shade off green

Blue’s the mooring after pain gone.

Made by your hand, solitary superficial

Attention beclouds your out coma’s

Do stimulative your pulse toward our road.

All to one and one to all.

Untie theses untied waves

Earth be the push down fade out wrong

You’re in struggle

Subdued at the puller component

Belligerent code fisticuffs that cup off

Tea for teases is chase thought

Every darkened demand.

Freeway teeth a distant humming on backloads

Across gathers wanting to feel eucalyptus sunlight greeting.

Cursed commuted composed honourable

Caged society saw fattened offenses.

Govern bind body at crime the mountain

Weep truth to the integrity for a summit pleasant providence

Confinement never fine folly apology

When exchange anguishes the soul.

Serenity in singular can be

Grown on any age lines

The harvest vest pasture

In the kitchen

Groans an riddles

When the love will last

The space won’t

Rat the human race

As rage lay about

Open my paper tray when the ray ragged

Mr Lionel G Fogarty   10 an 11 Nowra
(biographical notes here)
Mr Fogarty is a C & P Associate

* 2012 Boyer Lecturer Marcia Langton on John Faine’s Conversation Hour 21 February 2013.  (In fact she said four lectures were about 28 minutes (each) and then made the statement quoted above)

MINE TINKET  A brief history.  (Ira Maine bio here)

Academics have it that our commonly used  ‘Good on you!’ is almost certainly derived from the traditional Irish way of giving thanks which was invariably accompanied by a blessing. In fact, in common Irish parlance the blessing alone served as a more than adequate response without the need for  an additional ‘thank you’.

As an example, (and I quote the late Prof. O’Higgins here) were I to do a good deed or kindness to a native of that country, almost without exception the grateful response would be;

‘Ah, the blessings of God on you!’

Henning-Blore has it, and is supported in this by both Princeton’s Adam Sharkey and Joyce Barnacle of Dublin’s Trinity College that this blessing transferred to Australia and, in a short time lost God, assumed a leaner demeanour and became our instantly recognisable ‘Good on you’.

Professor Tom Carmody-Stack, in his admittedly abstruse contribution to the ‘Mine Tinkit’ debate,  believes that the same sort of connection exists, astonishingly between Chaucer, Piers Plowman and Romeo and Juliet!.

Here are one or two examples;

In Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ the servant Mayne is sent off in search of the hilariously hopeless Troilus.

Pandarus cries out to the simpleton Mayne;

What of Troilus, simpleton?. ‘

‘Methinks… mythinks…’

‘Ho, fool, what dost thou think?’

‘Aah, mine thinks.. mine thinkesh..’

Think thou of Troilus, oaf !!’.

‘Mayne thinketh…he is clomben on the stairs!’

In Piers Plowman the famously lisping double entendre;

Before the plough, her hills rise soft above me,

Her bounty mad to feel mine thinketh in.

The parallels here between ploughing and the act of procreation are hardly subtle, but are yet most capably drawn. And here again is that recurring, seemingly indispensable ‘mine thinketh’ sailing masonically through the years, immune to the vagaries of fashion, robust, resilient, unstoppable.

Carmody-Stack also points out how cleverly Shakespeare continues this progress, subtly sliding ‘mine thinket’ in and out of his plays so as to virtually go undetected to the untrained eye.

‘Mine thinketh the lady doth protest too much.’  Hamlet

‘Thine must be wrong, if all mine think it right,

To seek the cauldron in this fearsome night’. MacBeth.

Or, in The Bard’s retirement speech, from the boards of the Globe Theatre;

These years applause were meat and drink to me,

These plays were mine and how mine thank-ed thee!.

Not since John Dover-Wilson have we seen such penetrating intellect illumine the stormy developmental years of the English language. The subtleties that the good Professor has uncovered have gone unnoticed for far too long and deserve a wider audience than that available in the hallowed groves of academe.

That said, more recent research has discovered the continued use of this phrase amongst literary luminaries from Hazlitt to Wordsworth and on to Eliot.

The absence of the ‘th’ sound in all European languages (except English) easily explains the regular either/or use of ‘think’ or ‘tink’ depending on circumstance.