Oodgeroo Noonuccal

Oodgeroo Noonuccal ( born November 3, 1920 at the Stradbroke Iceland east of Brisbane in Queensland, † September 16, 1993 ) was named as Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska and was married as Kath Walker. She was one of the Aboriginal Noonuccal - people and a political activist, artist, poet and educator. As a campaigner for Aboriginal rights, she was the first Aborigine who published a book of poems.

Life

Oodgeroo Noonuccal was one of six children of Ted and Lucy Ruska. Her father Ted was a worker who stood up for the rights of workers and was engaged in a workers' strike in 1935. From him she had her strong sense of justice. With the tradition of the Aboriginal Dreamtime they combined the characters of rainbow snake and diamond pythons, she represented in books.

She went unwillingly to school, because she was punished as a left-handed writing. She left the school in 1933 at the age of 13 years at the time of the Great Depression and worked as a domestic help in Brisbane. During the Second World War, she worked from 1942 at the Australian Women's Army Service in the Army Headquarters of Brisbane and taught accounting, typewriting and shorthand. She reached the military rank of corporal and was discharged after a severe middle ear infection from the service.

In 1942, in which it was committed to the service, she married Bruce Walker, an Aborigine who was welder by profession. Your life parted ways when her first son Denis Walker was born in December 1946. In the early 1950s she began to work as a domestic help and gave birth to her second child Vivian Walker. In 1988, she took over their traditional Aboriginal name Oodgeroo ( Myrtenheiden ).

Policy

In the 1950s, she became a member of the Communist Party of Australia. During the 1960s, she has become known both as a political activist and as a writer. She has worked in Queensland in the State Secretariat of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders for the Referendum Aboriginal of 1967 and was active in other political organizations. Oodgeroo Noonuccal was the key figure in the campaign for the referendum in 1967 for the full civil rights of Aboriginal people, the Prime Minister Robert Menzies in 1965 and his successor Harold Holt in 1966 pursued. In 1969 she stood for the Australian Labor Party (Labour Party ) for a choice available, in which they received too few votes for electoral success. It was in 1970 with the Order of the British Empire awarded, they returned in 1988, as the government 's history and Aboriginal rights to the Australian Bicentenary celebration, the 200th anniversary of British colonization, as part of this celebration was not so much noticed and.

Authoress

She wrote many books and was the first Aboriginal writer who published a book. We Are Going in 1964 was her first book. She won several literary prizes, including the Mary Gilmore Medal in 1970, the Jessie Litchfield Award in 1975 and the Fellowship of Australian Writer Award.

She received an honorary doctorate from Macquarie University and a doctorate of Griffith University.

In 1972, she acquired ownership in Minjerribah she called Moongalba ( seat), and established the Noonuccal - Nughie Education and Cultural Centre.

In 1985 she played a role as an actress in Bruce Beresford film The Fringedwellers.