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.

KEVIN GILBERT, Wiradjuri, was born on the Kalara riverbank (Lachlan River) in Condobolin, Central New South Wales. His life's story and creative vision live on in his recorded speeches, art, writing and in the memories of those who knew him. He was a tireless advocate for First Nations rights and responsibilities and leaves a paper trail to follow in the struggle for assertion of First Nations sovereignty and an understanding of the spirituality of the oldest living culture in the world

As the youngest of eight children, Kevin’s early years on the riverbank with his pet kangaroo are lyrically encapsulated in Me and Mary Kangaroo. Losing his parents when seven years old, he was put into orphanages. He escaped with two sisters, returning to Condobolin to their extended family, who were living off the land on the Murie, a fringe camp, and holding onto Wiradjuri knowing. His fine art prints Totality, Corroboree Spirits, Bhoolbene Miggai, My Fathers’ Studio, Lineal Legends and Eagle Men Legend depict this period. Burrawang and Marbung are portraits of two of his Elders, who kept alive Wiradjuri Law, language, culture and traditions. Subina [or Sabina?] is the Clever woman who has the Murie as a base and is renowned for knowing when to turn up for a birth hundreds of kilometres away.

With his extended family he travelled annually on the fruit picking circuit within Wiradjuri territory he described 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 ‘station’ managers; an escape from refugee camps called ‘Aboriginal Reserves’.

To break the poverty cycle, Kevin successfully worked his way to being a well-respected station manager on properties near Condobolin. In 1957 he served fourteen years seven months of a life sentence for murder in Australia's harshest prisons, including five years seven months in Grafton Gaol. As an Aboriginal man, Kevin endured unspeakable mental and physical torture by prison guards.

With limited reading material, he read dictionaries, the Bible and encyclopaedias from cover to cover and developed an extensive vocabulary, enhancing his poetry and enabling him to articulate his vision for a proper foundation for all people in Australia. He asserted, ‘People must grow up proper way in this land.’

In Long Bay Gaol, Kevin started to carve linoleum (‘lino’). He made his own tools ‘from a spoon, Gem [Razor] blades and nails’ and carved ‘old brittle lino off the prison floor’. Left by himself in the printing shop, using printing inks and whatever base was available – paper, card, wrapping paper and cloth – he used the back of a spoon to print his linocuts, revealing a unique vibrancy of spiritual presence. His artwork was first exhibited in 1970 at the Arts Council gallery, Sydney, in an exhibition organised by the Australia Council. Kevin became recognised as the first Aboriginal fine art printmaker. His creative works helped with his release from gaol. The local Aboriginal community in Redfern lobbied for his release when they realised that he was an intellectual writer, who could articulate their subjugation and resilience. Nuns also lobbied for his freedom. A documentary by TV journalist Peter Luck, who had been approached by Kevin’s sister June, drew attention to the need for him to no longer rot in gaol.

When reflecting on the devastating Wiradjuri history of a continuing genocide of extermination, Kevin carved into linocuts Massacre Mountain (1965), Christmas Eve in the Land of the Dispossessed (1967) and, later, Colonising Species (1987).

His creative talents also flourish through poetry, essays and plays. He was the first Aboriginal playwright with The Cherry Pickers (1988) a work written in 1968 while he was incarcerated. It was first workshopped by the Mews Theatre Workshop in Sydney in 1971 and shortly after performed by the Nindathana Theatre company in Melbourne. The Queensland Aboriginal theatre company, Koembba Dejara, in Brisbane, later produced it as their first play out of respect. The Sydney Theatre Company production also complied with Kevin’s condition that the play was to be performed with an all-Aboriginal cast, and in 2001 The Cherry Pickers was directed by Wesley Enoch, a Quandamooka man from Minjerribah, North Stradbroke Island. It was followed by a highly successful international tour to the 2002 Commonwealth Games Cultural Festival in Manchester, Exeter, Brighton, Nottingham and Salisbury, England.

Kevin crafted a range poems, some of which were first published in People Are Legends (1979). Later his poems appeared in The Blackside (1990), and Black From The Edge (1994). He also expressed the depths of culture and history, along with the destructive colonial onslaught, in poetry such as On the road to Queanbeyan, Genocide, Gularwundul’s Wish and Celebrators ’88.

Between 1972 and 1981, Kevin operated an independent discount petrol station with a nursery and art gallery on the Pacific Highway, south of Taree, New South Wales. There he established the Kalari Aboriginal Art Gallery at Kooringhat Gardens to encourage and develop artistic talent in the local community at the Purfleet Aboriginal Reserve, at Purfleet, south of Taree, seven kilometres from his business. Kevin then put into practice his ideas for community development at Purfleet, where he wrote The Purfleet Report, a harrowing social commentary on life and dysfunction in an Aboriginal reserve in the 1970s.

Gilbert’s release coincided with the rise of militant Aboriginal protest, including the Black Power movement, in the 1970s. A young generation of Aboriginal activists, impatient for change, initiated political strategies to demand redress by the Australian state. Determined to effect change, Kevin joined the Gurindji Land Rights campaign and helped mastermind the Aboriginal Embassy in Canberra in 1972, which he could not physically attend on account of his tight parole conditions. The Embassy was precipitated by Liberal Prime Minister McMahon’s announcement on 26 January 1972 that the Commonwealth would lease Aboriginal People their own land following a decade’s long campaign by the Yolngu People in Arnhem Land and others for Land Rights. This demonstrated the difficulties First Nations Peoples faced in finding justice within Australian law. He travelled extensively to Aboriginal communities. In the north he was advised by a Lawman: Go for Land Rights. You may make mistakes, learn from them. 

For the next decade, Gilbert worked on developing a political language and platform for First Nations liberation, contributing to and editing magazines of the Black resistance, including Alchuringa, Identity and Black Australian News. He also published two seminal works–Because A White Man’ll Never Do It (1973) and a collective voice of oral histories Living Black (1978)– the product of his experiences of contemporary Aboriginal life and consciousness. In these searingly bleak portrayals of Aboriginal treatment, he saw poverty and dysfunction as the direct result of colonisation. Within thirty years Because a White Man’ll Never Do It (1973) became an Angus & Robertson Classic and Harper Collins keep it in print. He exposes the reality of surviving genocide in the oral history Living Black (1977), which won the National Book Council award in 1978, while People Are Legends (1979) elucidates the humanity within survival.

Kevin advocated that the remedy for the historic violation of Aboriginal Peoples’ human and sovereign rights is not band-aid measures and white man’s paternalistic intervention, but the assertion of pre-existing unceded Sovereignty, Land Rights, reparation and discreet non-dictatorial assistance. 

In 1979, as a Liaison officer for the New South Wales government ‘Select Committee Upon Aborigines’, he travelled to Aboriginal communities across the State. He called on Aboriginal communities to claim more than the ‘concentration camp reserves’ and to demonstrate that their culture, language and traditions are alive – to counter the ambient notion that there was no Aboriginal Law and culture left in New South Wales.

Kevin developed a narrative for the assertion of Aboriginal sovereign independence, which he knew could only be achieved with recognition of First Nations unceded Sovereignty. He chose the pen as his weapon:

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[1]

This view is 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 he joined briefly. The NACC became too pro-active and was wound back to become the National Aboriginal Conference (NAC), an advisory body to government. In 1979 Gilbert set up the National Aboriginal Government (NAG) as another ‘Embassy’ on the selected site for the new Parliament House in Canberra and demanded a Bill of Aboriginal Rights and a Sovereign Treaty under international law, drawing on the previous community consultations by the NAC for part of its content he called their ‘shopping list’.

The culmination of Kevin’s decades of thinking around First Nations’ rights was the Treaty ‘88 campaign, which he established and chaired – with a slogan ‘Fair Go Mate! Treaty’88!’. From 1985 he looked to the year of the 1988 Bicentenary to articulate the inherent sovereign rights of First Nations. He defined the legal argument for justice and self-published Aboriginal Sovereignty, Justice, the Law and Land – includes Draft Treaty (1987). By studying the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969) he understands that Sovereign Treaties are constitutional and that, under international law, British sovereignty is an ‘encumbered root title’. He sent his book to all the Aboriginal communities he could find an address for. 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 is 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, 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’– a country that can finally celebrate its own Independence Day.

The importance of the Vienna Convention is that it defines treaties as agreements between sovereign equals, as a means to promote friendly and co-operative relations among Nations. For Gilbert, then, a Sovereign Treaty(ies) is 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 Sovereign Treaty would be a proper foundation for black/non-First Nations relations based on unceded First Nations sovereignty justice and humanity.

Gilbert rejects Nugget Coombs’ Treaty Committee’s request for a domestic ‘Treaty of Commitment’ between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nations and the government ‘within Australia by Australians’. He made it very clear he was NOT an Australian, but a citizen of the Sovereign Wiradjuri Nation. He also rejected the Federal Liberal government’s 1981 diluted offer of a domestic ‘Makaratta’,[2] even though then Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser had initially agreed to discuss a Treaty at this time. The Makarrata and the derailing of Land Rights demonstrated how governments hold 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 12 June 1988 promise at Barunga, in the Northern Territory, to negotiate a Treaty and declared that sovereignty was not on the agenda, Kevin Gilbert issued a press release to the Federal government and Governor-General. Presenting himself as a sovereign envoy, he requested the withdrawal of foreign embassies from Aboriginal lands until Aboriginal Sovereignty is recognised and protected by international law. This is not just about rights in land, it is the right to negotiate and the right to reparation and compensation.

With the approaching 1988 Bicentenary Kevin promoted a Boycott. Joined by many, this culminated in huge protests at Mrs Macquarie’s Chair on Sydney Harbour and the March for Justice and Freedom in Hyde Park, attracting world-wide attention.

To coincide with the 1988 opening of the new parliament house in Canberra, Kevin commissioned and exhibited the ground-breaking group photographic exhibition Inside Black Australia: Aboriginal Photographers’ Exhibition. In the catalogue he writes:

…inspired by the need to communicate with the wider community the possibility in this great land; to begin developing a dialogue based on justice, so that ultimately we can begin to develop all people and encompass them in a code of spiritual being and national conduct, which not only reflects the essence of life itself and the continuum for being, but also will enable us, upon, attainment, to project that magnanimity of spirit throughout the world.

For his anthology Inside Black Australia (1988) of over forty poetic voices, the Governor-General was to present him with the Australian Human Rights Commission’s 1988 Human Rights Award for Literature, but he publicly refused it on the grounds that Aboriginal Peoples continued to be denied basic human rights in their own land.

Throughout these years his creative outputs–books, artworks and photographs–sustained him and his family spiritually and emotionally. The peace of an off-grid family life in the bush by the river proved a source of limitless inspiration for his creativity, while he first lived under canvas with young children, then upgraded to a corrugated iron humpy. Later the family lived in a battered transported home which he depicted in the poem

One-way ticket in a two-way land

The gang-gangs came

to our hill today

screeching wheeling settling

in the old gum tree near our window

remarking a remarkable event

our window out of plumb

with the rest of our house

that is out of plumb

with every straight horizontal parallel

joist bearer or other regular point of reference

within a house.

Out of the house

the insane cacophonous sound

encircles the birds

in an aura of substantial reality

resembling intelligent order

making comparisons

compromise possible somehow.

The iron-age industrial revolution

converted us to plasticity

moulding extruding our psyche

into a non-recyclable abnormalness

ravaged packeted commercialised

in cosmopolitan areas

of higher technology

and computerisation

video flashing generative leaps

to bio-chip organisms

orgasms in vitro

a sudden sad departure

from intelligible communication

with real life things

such as gang-gangs

and meaningful lifestyles

and some metaphysical thing

mentioned in legends

called happiness.

When snow fell on the grassy slopes, he crystallised its ephemeral essence in

Everlasting Transience

The perfect peace of silence sounds

new life

to the drought-parched earth

and brightly coloured parrots crouch

unseen as the bough bows down

the cattle bunch to an afterthought

of a legend of long ago

remembering somehow another life

and joy in a flake of snow

The sounds of silence echo to

the joys of a child's embrace

while rivers leap in a sombre glow

to fling on a deep wild race

the dogs cavort to the touch of grace

while away on the farther hill

the kangaroo bounds to his retreat

for the hunter seeks him still

in the chain of life the space of time

there's time for the heart to thrill

and leap to meet the sweeter face

of snowflakes on the hill

the gum trees dip their leaves at last

in a sighing graceful flow

to the truth of love and life

as writ

by God in a flake of snow

The children as young

as I once was

and as pure if I may be bold

captured the treasure for later life

to serve them well when old

and cried when the first wet winter sleet

washed the snow away

they'd seen it all

the pure sweet form

and the pain of its loss today

the lasting sense of beauty felt

so brief in a flake of snow

like life like love like time

as writ

by God in a flake of snow.

At bedtime Kevin would tell stories to his children and Me and Mary Kangaroo (1994) was born along with other bedtime favourites.

In 1990 he travelled extensively with his family, wrote songs and poetry and recorded some of his poetry in Flashes of Essence, while in Alice Springs at the Central Australian Aboriginal Music Association (CAAMA). While in ‘the Centre,’ artists insisted that he take their works east to sell, resulting in key exhibitions at Canberra’s Alliance Francaise, Albert Hall, and the Hackett School among others. He carved Colonising Species for the Canberra Contemporary Art Space group exhibition ##Narragunnawalli, with the blood of the oppressed dripping on the Crown, depicting the turning point for justice, and heralding the High Court Mabo decision.

In 1991 Kevin drew attention to the 200 years of undeclared frontier wars and genocidal massacres by carrying a large white cross on a lone walk down Anzac Parade in front of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and claimed one of the alcoves for ‘those who died in defence of our land’.[3] [4] [Subsequently, since 2015, on Anzac Day, the Commemoration of the Frontier Wars annually follows the main RSL procession to the Australian War Memorial.]

He was instrumental in permanently re-establishing the Aboriginal Embassy on its 20th anniversary in 1992 and spent the last year of his life there, ensuring it remained the spearhead of resistance and resurgence against the occupying colonial power. Kevin carried a profound conviction that the Aboriginal Embassy is the vehicle through which there will be a resolution to the underlying conflict over the opposing sovereignties in Australia. He produced the audio recording, Being Sovereign, focusing on the handing over of the Declaration of Aboriginal Sovereignty to the Minister of the Crown inside old Parliament House on 28 January 1992 after a long standoff with authorities.

Kevin Gilbert is the first Aboriginal fine art printmaker, and his art has been extensively exhibited nationally and internationally and is part of permanent collections at major Australian art institutions, including the National Gallery of Australia and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. He is also recognised as an iconic poet, playwright, author and activist. In 1992 he was awarded an esteemed Australian Artists Creative Fellowship. He was posthumously awarded the prestigious Ruth Adeney Koori Award (RAKA) for his anthology, Black From The Edge (1994), which was highly commended in the ACT Book of the Year award. Child's Dreaming (1994), a whimsical poetry anthology for children, Me and Mary Kangaroo, Viking (1994) and Puffin (1996), and Black From The Edge (1994), were published posthumously. His autobiographical memoir for children Me and Mary Kangaroo was short-listed for the 1995 Australian Multicultural Award.

The Blackside, People Are Legends and Other Poems (1990) made him the first Aboriginal poet to have an anthology published in the French language. Professor Marie-Christine Masset translated this poetry as Le Versant Noir: Le Peuple est Legendes et autres poems. The book  was published by Le Castor Astral in Paris in 2018.

Kevin Gilbert died in Canberra on 1 April 1993, and a Memorial was held at the Aboriginal Embassy on 8 April.

Kevin Gilbert’s work has been included posthumously in numerous exhibitions including the 1993 USA tour of New Tracks – Old Land; in 1994 his work was exhibited in Urban Focus at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; in Tyerabarrbowaryaou II: I shall never become a whiteman at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Sydney Harbour and in Cuba at the 5th Havana Biennial. The exhibition Breath of Life: Moments in Transit Towards Aboriginal Sovereignty (1996), edited by Eleanor Williams/Gilbert, highlights the core of the struggle for justice and toured nationally to Canberra, Adelaide, Armidale, Moree, Sydney, Perth and internationally to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Durban, South Africa and to the Rebecca Hossack Gallery in Soho, London, England. In early 2000 Kevin Gilbert was honoured by the ACT Writers Centre along with Professor Manning Clark, A.D. Hope, Miles Franklin and Dorothy Green.

He is fondly remembered as the ‘Land Rights Man’, ‘Treaty Man’, ‘Rainmaker’ and was an inspirational leader, likened to the Dalai Lama, Gandhi and Martin Luther King[5]. Koori-way, Kevin Gilbert remains ‘The Land Rights Man’ and his aspirations for justice live on in his vision for the way forward as:

I believe if there is to be an Australian culture, it cannot be an imported, ersatz culture. Cultures and the people are developed from the land they occupy.

Culture has to be developed from the heart, from the depths of human integrity, the depths of human passion, the depths of human creativity and I believe that, if there ever is to be a sound overall culture for this land, it has to involve everyone and it must involve everyone and it must evolve or be based upon those fine aspects of the human family – integrity, justice, vision. Creativity, life, honour …

‘Only those who love the land and love justice will ultimately hold the land.’ K.G.

[1] From ‘Seeds of thought’ in Black from the Edge (1994)

[2] ‘Makarrata’ was a Yolngu word alleged to translate approximately as ‘things are Okay again after the fight’, which represented an inequitable compromise as things were not Okay and the fight was not yet over. Later it became clear that a Makarrata has a revenge component and blood has to be drawn and/or a life taken.

[3] Amanda Uhlmann, ‘An Ainslie Man’s Lone Protest at the ‘Continuing Massacre’, The Canberra Times, 3 September 1991.

[4] https://indigenoushistories.com/2014/04/23/acknowledgement-sought-kevin-gilbert-aboriginal-australians-and-the-war-of-invasion/

[5] David Headon, ‘Modern-Day Warrior who Wielded His Pen Like a Sword,’ The Canberra Times, 18 April 1993.

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