About KEVIN GILBERT (1933–1993)
Kevin Gilbert, Wiradjuri, was born on the bank of Kalara, Lachlan River in Central New South Wales. He was an artist, freedom fighter, poet and grassroots activist for First Nations human rights and sovereign rights.
Kevin’s early years on the riverbank with his pet kangaroo are lyrically encapsulated in Me and Mary Kangaroo. The youngest of eight children he was orphaned at the age of seven and quickly learnt what it meant to be Black and poor in Australia. His early life included stints in orphanages, fruit picking, and returns to his mother’s People living on their Homelands. In 1957 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the killing of his wife. He served fourteen and a half years in some of Australia’s harshest prisons.
Kevin Gilbert educated himself in prison, where he developed his artistic and poetic talents, became a writer and an accomplished artist in oils and linocut. He used these abilities to demonstrate to white Australians the injustice and inhumanity shown towards his People. Kevin fought for Aboriginal rights throughout his life, joining the Gurindji campaign and had an instrumental role in the establishment of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in 1972, and its re-establishment on a permanent basis in 1992.
Widely recognised as a pioneering Aboriginal writer, Gilbert broke through the publishing barriers in the First Nations’ space becoming one of the first published poets.
His numerous published works indicate his status as a leading literary and political figure. His play The Cherry pickers is the first play written by an Aboriginal person, and Because a White Man’ll Never Do It is the first major political work by an Aboriginal person. Kevin’s literary talents have become increasingly recognised – his oral history Living Black won the National Book Council Award in 1978. In 1988, Gilbert was awarded the Human Rights Award for Literature for the poetry anthology Inside Black Australia, but he refused to accept the award from the Governor General on the grounds his people did not have human rights in their own country.
Literature and art, however, were just one side of Gilbert. His vision for an Australia with integrity led him to use his creativity as chairman of the Aboriginal Sovereign Treaty ‘88 Campaign, which called for the assertion of First Nations’ and Peoples' sovereign rights and ownership of Australia. Gilbert documents and defines the legal argument for First Nations’ sovereignty in his book Aboriginal Sovereignty, Justice, the Law and Land (includes Draft Treaty).
In 1992 he received a four-year Creative Fellowship for his ’outstanding contribution to the nation’. Kevin Gilbert died in April 1993 aged fifty-nine.
His inspirational legacy lives on in his vision, his humanity, speeches, poetry, and his art which is exhibited widely, including in national institutions, and in the memories of those who knew him.
