Excerpt from an interview by Trevor Robertson with Kevin Gilbert, broadcast 18 February 1992 by Radio Australia to 50 million listeners worldwide.

Trevor:

I asked Kevin Gilbert if he had hope for the future.

Kevin:

I do have a belief in the future

It’s not hope.

I believe in this country

because there is a spirit in this country

that nurtures life

that nurtures the land

that nurtures the humanity in it.

People should remember

that we are the oldest surviving race

of People, culture of People, in the world.

We are in one way

the world’s most important heritage

just for that link alone.

They know our People

have been on this pace for 50-60 thousand years.

They know, the invader knows this.

We know that our People have been here

from the beginning of time.

We believe

as the experts in the world keep testing

with their modern technology

that they will establish

the integrity of our claims

that we have been here

from the beginning of time

the creation

(in whatever form you see it)

the creation of man, Homo sapiens

and that we are indeed

very, very important to the world.

Not now merely in the physical sense

this sense, the lineal sense of man

the genealogy of man,

but we are very, very important

and will contribute in what we know

and what we can and will contribute

to a world that is desperately I need

of Aboriginal inspiration

Aboriginal caring

a different type of technological approach

and we know that we possess this.

So what I am saying is not a hope

it is a belief.

I know that justice will come

because I know that the rivers here are dying

the land is dying day by day

being killed by the whiteman colonists’ pollution.

Life itself is dying

and the whiteman has nowhere else to turn.

They have to turn

They have to come to grips with the fact

they are relatively unimportant

to the total mosaic of life.

That it is all of us.

It is they that must seek

a new direction.

© Kevin Gilbert

Gilbert spent his later crystallising strategies for the recognition of Aboriginal sovereign independence, which he felt could only be achieved via recognition of First Nations’ unceded sovereignty. He chose the pen and his voice as his weapons:

The pen is mightier than the sword
but only when
it sows the seeds of thought
in minds of men
to kindle love and grow
through the burnt page
destroyed by huns and vandals in their rage[2]

This view was honed in the late 1970s and through the 1980s in the context of the ‘rule of the conflict of laws’ around Land Rights. In 1972 the Labor Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, established the National Aboriginal Consultative Council (NACC), which was wound back to become the National Aboriginal Conference (NAC) as an advisory body to the government.

In 1979 Gilbert set up the National Aboriginal Government as another Embassy on the selected site for the new Parliament House and demanded a sovereign treaty under international law and a Bill of Aboriginal Rights.

The culmination of Gilbert’s decades of thinking around First Nations’ rights was the Treaty ‘88 Committee, which he established and chaired. From 1985 he looked to the year of the bicentenary to articulate the inherent sovereign rights of Aboriginal Nations, self-publishing Aboriginal Sovereignty, Justice, the Law and Land (1987). Having studied the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969) he argued that, under international law, British sovereignty was ‘encumbered root title.’ He sent his book to Aboriginal communities around Australia.

In it, he stated that Captain Cook had been ordered to take possession of the east coast of Australia with the ‘consent of the natives,’ which Cook did not obtain. Instead, the land was taken by theft, unlawful occupation, genocide, rape, and massacre. No war was declared. No sovereignty was ceded. Hence, a sovereign treaty would affirm the legal right to possession and occupancy and protect the human, civil, and sovereign rights of the First Nations. As an internationally enforceable instrument, it could hold domestic governments to account and be part of a new constitution for an independent Australia, freed from the ‘scourge of colonialism.’

The importance of the Vienna Convention is that it defines treaties as agreements between sovereign equals to promote friendly and cooperative relations among nations. For Gilbert, then, a treaty was about a just way forward. As he said ‘With all domestic options exhausted a Sovereign Treaty is our only peaceful way to justice. There can be no reconciliation without a Treaty.’ A treaty would be a proper foundation for black/white relations based on justice and humanity.

Gilbert rejected Nugget Coombs’ Treaty Committee’s request for a domestic ‘Treaty of Commitment’ between Aboriginal people and the government ‘within Australia by Australians,’ as well as the Federal Liberal government’s 1981 diluted offer of a domestic ‘Makaratta,’[3] even though Fraser had initially agreed to discuss a treaty at this time. The Makaratta and the derailing of land rights demonstrated how governments had all the power, as Gilbert said, ‘We’ll always be rubbish men, men without straw, without sovereignty and power in our word or say upon the government.’

After 1985, when the Hawke Labor government not only reneged on its promise of national uniform land rights legislation but also reneged on Hawke’s promise at the Barunga Festival, in the Northern Territory, on 12 June 1988 to negotiate a treaty and declared that sovereignty was not on the agenda, Gilbert issued a press release to the Federal government and governor-general.

Presenting himself a sovereign envoy, he requested the withdrawal of foreign embassies from Aboriginal lands until Aboriginal sovereignty was recognised and protected by international law. This was not just about rights in land, it was the right to negotiate and the right to reparation and compensation.

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 utilising that medium to protest the continual victimisation 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.

Several decades have elapsed since then. Aboriginal artists, from whatever discipline, still have to achieve from behind the eight-ball. In 1971 I attempted to establish a ‘National School of Aboriginal Arts’ where there could be developed the necessary access to training and, more importantly, equipment and psychological support for artists, especially writers. But such a practical and necessary institution still remains a vague hope in the eyes of Black Australia.

I am presently engaged in restoring and editioning my first series of lino prints, which are to be purchased by the National Art Gallery. In between rolling the inks, I try to raise sensibilities on the need for a Sovereign Treaty between Blacks in Australia and whites. I know that the instrument of justice, human rights, dignity, must be stated in the most unequivocal terms and be enshrined within the protection of an international covenant. Any other legislation, where the thieves are the judges, the politicians can always repeal at will. Until there is a sovereign treaty under international law, art, conscience, honour are meaningless for the majority of white Australia, who, as an old revered friend of mine, Xavier Herbert, said: “Australia shall remain … not a Nation, but a community of thieves…”

© Kevin Gilbert

in The Struggle Continues, Artlink, vol 10, no 1 - 2, 1990.

In 1992 Kevin was awarded a Prime Minister’s four-year Creative Fellowship for his ‘outstanding artistic contribution to the nation’.

Kevin has been widely recognised as a pioneering Aboriginal writer – he is the first Aboriginal playwright with The Cherry Pickers. He wrote the first major political work Because a White Man’ll Never Do It.

His oral history Living Black won the National Book Council Award in 1978.

In 1988 Kevin was awarded, and refused, the Human Rights Award for Literature for the anthology Inside Black Australia.

His poetry in Black from the Edge won the RAKA award.

Kevin was also the first Aboriginal fine art printmaker, and his linocuts and photographic murals have been hung in the Australian National Gallery exhibitions.

Captain Cook Essay Award#

2025 ‘What We Owe’one of three artists at Griffith Regional Art Gallery, NSW.

2024 ‘Dhuluny: The war that never ended’ Bathurst Reginal Art Gallery

2023/2024 ‘Artists in Focus, Kevin Gilbert’, Level 2, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation.

2024 ‘Prints from Studio One’. Tuggeranong Arts Centre, Canberra,group exhibition https://the-riotact.com/canberra-was-australias-printmaking-capital-a-tuggeranong-arts-centre-exhibitions-shows-why/743860

2022 ‘Imbas: a well at the bottom of the sea’, 2022, 23rd Biennale of Sydney, Wharf 2/3.

2016   ‘Tomorrow, Today, Yesterday’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

2013 ‘I Do Have a Belief: Kevin Gilbert (1933-1993) Art Retrospective’, Belconnen Arts Centre, ACT

2004     Athens Olympics, Greece

2001 ‘Intermission’, Wharf 2 Gallery, Sydney Theatre Company, Sydney

-        Kevin Gilbert Retrospective, Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-op, Sydney

2000   ‘Breath of Life: Moments in Transit towards Aboriginal Sovereignty’

-        Visions of Australia National Tour, CHOGM, Durban, South Africa, 

-        Rebecca Hossack Gallery, Soho, London

1999. Umbrella Gallery, Townsville

1998 Indigenous Pathways, Toowoomba

1997   Tandanya – National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, Adelaide

-        The Armidale Aboriginal Cultural Centre and Keeping Place, Armidale

-        Moree Plains Gallery, Moree

-        Australian Centre for Photography, Paddington, Sydney

-        Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth

1996     ‘Breath of Life: Moments in Transit towards Aboriginal Sovereignty’, Canberra Contemporary Art Space

1995     Yiribana, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

1994   ‘Tyerabarrbowaryaou II – I shall never become a white man’

-        Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

-        5th Havana Biennial, Havana, Cuba

-        Urban Focus, National Gallery of Australia

1994   ‘Who’s Afraid of Red, Black and Yella’

-        Museum of Ethnology, Rotterdam

-        Legends from Down Under, Boomerang Galerie, Amsterdam

-        New Tracks – Old land

-        Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon

1993

-        Memorial Tribute, Gallery One, National Gallery of Australia

-        New Tracks – Old Land

Australian Galleries, Green Street, Soho, New York

Northern Territory Museum of Arts and Sciences, Darwin.

Queensland Aboriginal Creations, Brisbane.

Redcliff Entertainment Centre, Redcliff, Queensland

1992

-        New Tracks-Old Land, Massachusetts Collage of Art, Huntington Gallery, Boston Massachusetts

-        Painting Our Dreaming Alliance Francaise Gallery, Canberra

-        ’92 Pressin, Spiral Arm Gallery, Canberra

1991   ‘Tjukurrpa Nganampa Kantyila Kanyintjaku – Keeping Our Dreaming Strong,’

-        Hackett, ACT

-        Alliance Francaise Gallery, Canberra.

-        Social Images, Gorman House, Canberra.

1990     Desert Art, Albert Hall, Canberr

1989

-        ‘Narragunnawalli’, Canberra Contemporary Art Space

-         ‘Inside Black Australia’, Aboriginal Photographers Exhibition,

-        Showground, Wagga Wagga,NSW.

-        Trades and Labour Club, Newcastle, NSW.

-        Queensland Museum, Brisbane.

-        Museum of Victoria, Melbourne.

1988     ‘Inside Black Australia,’ Aboriginal Photographers Exhibition, Albert Hall, Canberra

-        Leftbank Bookshop,

-        Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney.

-        Centreprize, London.

-        Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-Op, Sydney

1975     Koorainghat Gardens Art Gallery, Taree, NSW

1971     Robin Hood Gallery, Sydney

1970     Arts Council Gallery, East Sydney

National Gallery of Australia

National Museum of Australia

Museum of Australia Democracy

Canberra Mueum and Art Gallery

Art Gallery of New South Wales

Bathurst Regional Art Gallery

Queensland Art Gallery

Queensland Museum

West Australian Art Gallery

Powerhouse Museum

Tandanya Aboriginal Art Gallery

Museum of Victoria

Queensland University of Technology

Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, NSW

Private collections