Kevin Gilbert (author)

Kevin John Gilbert (10 July 1933 – 1 April 1993) was an

Gilbert won the 1978 National Book Council prize for writers, for Living Black: Blacks Talk to Kevin Gilbert (1977).

Early life

Gilbert was the youngest of eight children, born on 10 July 1933 to a Wiradjuri mother and an Irish/English father.^[1] He was born on the bank of the Kalara/ Lachlan River just outside Condobolin in New South Wales^[2] and at age seven he and his siblings were orphaned. He was raised by his eldest sisters and extended family on an Aboriginal reserve. He left school at the age of thirteen and picked up various seasonal and short-term itinerant jobs.^[1]

His book Me and Mary Kangaroo reflect a childhood of intimate connection to his mother's Wiradjuri country.^[3] and Child’s Dreaming^[4]

His extended family would annually travel on the fruit-picking circuit within Wiradjuri territory as "…a temporary release from near starvation … and above all, it meant some independence, some freedom, from under the crucifying heels of the local police and the white

On 12 June 1954, he married Goma Scott.[5] In 1957, Gilbert murdered Goma, apparently because of her infidelity.^[6] He received a life sentence. In prison, he educated himself and developed his artistic talents. He was released on parole after 14 years.^[7]

In his own words:^[8]

"As a Black artist with all the contemptible misery and heart burnings of a poet, I suffered sitting in white dominated classrooms of rural Australia while white teachers lasciviously railed about ‘naked’ Aboriginals, who were described as heathen, too ignorant to know the basic manner of impregnating females, ‘whistle-cock’ sub-incisions, murderous, cannibals, no law or government, minute cerebral indices etc., only to be latterly ‘saved’ by the ‘glorious’ forefather pioneers who attempted to ‘smooth the dying pillow’ of the ‘pitiful remnants’.

Asking questions, demanding answers and making refutations, we were inevitably sent from the classrooms to go out and sweep the yards, pick up scraps, clean the toilets, for, to conform with the late 1940s and 50s white dream of ‘assimilation’, we had to be made to prove we were incapable of any higher educational potential, save that of achieving fourth class primary level. And we had to conform to work patterns. White Australia, like its corrupt confrere white South Africa and America, wanted Black houseboys to service their peculiar life styles.

"I attained a fourth class primary education level before leaving school at fourteen. Only in prison did I finally have access to reading materials. I attended an art class to try and paint a recurrent image in my mind of an old Aboriginal sitting at the entrance of a cave filled with painted images, while looking out and down over a wide valley filled with eagles. Of course I couldn’t afford oil paints, so I started with lino prints, and was most pleased with the imagery and body involvement of utilizing that medium to protest the continual victimization and genocide against Blacks. I was lucky enough to be able to scrounge some old lino from the prison workshops, inks from the prison printing shop, and had the good fortune of being in the printing section when a reasonably humane guard was in charge and graciously turned a blind eye to my extravagant use of inks, printing paper and to the fact that I virtually tucked myself away in a quiet corner of the workshop each day and did my own thing. Initially, I had to have my poems and prints smuggled from the prison. Exhibitions of my work brought a focus of attention from the printmaking world, when the works were exhibited at the Robin Hood Gallery and the Arts Council Gallery in Sydney. The exhibitions confirmed my resolve to use my poems, writing and art to open up the question of the continuing denial and injustice against Aboriginals, in an effort to bring the reality of the white Australian inhumanity into the open."

Art

In prison, Gilbert produced the first

After his release (around 1971), Gilbert established the Kalari Aboriginal Art Gallery near Taree, NSW.^[9]

His works have been extensively exhibited nationally and internationally in

Writing career

The Cherry Pickers

While in prison Gilbert also took up writing. In 1968 he started to pen the play The Cherry Pickers, which was smuggled out of gaol on toilet paper. It was first workshopped and presented in a reading at the small Mews Theatre in Sydney 'in the open air' with Bob Maza and other Aboriginal actors reading the parts. The play is significant that it was the first play written in English by an Aboriginal and also the first play to be performed entirely by an Aboriginal cast.^[1] The critic and publisher Katharine Brisbane, described her response after viewing an early performed reading of "The Cherry Pickers as 'I was overawed with a sense of privilege at being allowed into the domestic life of a people whose privacy had, for so long and for such good reason, been guarded from white eyes'. A more complete moved reading was held in 1970 and 1971 in Sydney and the play was subsequently nominated in 1970 for the Captain Cook Memorial Award.

The play was performed in its full form by Melbourne's

Particularly in his early verse, Gilbert uses the poetry as an apologia in respect to his own life whilst challenging the morality of the wider society.^{[citation needed]}

Other writing

He authored Because a White Man'll Never Do It in 1973.

In 1972, another play by Gilbert, The Gods Look Down, was produced at the Wayside Theatre, a small alternative theatre in Sydney. The production, directed by Barry Donnelly, is described as a dance drama. Gilbert's notes for the program, describe it as "an emotional fantasy using subconsciously emotive scenes based on modern spiritual drift and identity loss, which is actually the present search for a spiritual force or a god". The play is poetic and semi-abstract and moves from dialogue accompanied by movement to movement-based explorations of love and sexuality.

Along with his political work which was about the Aboriginal people in the 1970s, Gilbert wrote a number of plays and sketches, including Ghosts in Cell Ten, The Blush of Birds, Eternally Eve, Evening of Fear, and Everyman Should Care.^[12] Many of these seem to have never been staged but stylistically seem to pre-empt much of the work of First Nations writers and practitioners of the 1990s, such as Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman.^[10]

In 1978, the National Book Council presented him its annual book award for his book Living Black: Blacks Talk to Kevin Gilbert. The book included interviews with various Black commentators of the day including musician and dancer Robert Jabanungga.^[13][14]

In 1988 he was awarded the

From 1972 onwards Gilbert was active in numerous Aboriginal human rights causes and most notably in supporting the establishing the Aboriginal Tent Embassy at the Old Parliament House in Canberra.^[21]

Gilbert wrote a

For the last year of his life, in 1992, he was active in the re-establishment of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy after its 20th anniversary on a permanent basis, and it remains the spearhead of the Sovereignty Movement to this day. He is known for embracing the term "Black".^[citation needed]

In the lead-up to

• 1970: The Cherry Pickers nominated for a Captain Cook Memorial Award[2]
• 1972: Commonwealth literary fellowship^[23]
• 1978: National Book Council prize for writers, for Living Black: Blacks Talk to Kevin Gilbert^[14][2]
• 1978:
  FAW Patricia Weickhardt Award to an Aboriginal Writer^[26]
• 1988: Awarded
  Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's Human Rights Award for Literature for editing the Aboriginal poetry anthology Inside Black Australia, but refused the award^[27][14]
• 1992: Prime Minister's four-year Creative Fellowship for his "outstanding artistic contribution to the nation"[14]

Posthumously

• 1995: Kate Challis RAKA Award for poetry, for Black from the Edge^[2]
• 1995: Highly commended in the ACT Book of the Year^[2]
• 1995: Me and Mary Kangaroo shortlisted for the
  Australian Multicultural Children's Literature Awards^[2]