Lionel Fogarty (b. 1958), Yugambeh/Kudjela poet and activist, was born at Barambah, the Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve, near Murgon, Queensland. In the early 1970s, realising the injustices he had experienced growing up on the reserve, he became involved in Indigenous rights, working with the Aboriginal Legal Service, Aboriginal Housing Service, Black Resource Centre, Black Community School and Murrie Coo-ee. He campaigned for land rights and protested against Aboriginal deaths in custody – his eighteen-year-old brother, Daniel, died in police custody in Brisbane in 1993; 4000 people marched in silence in the city's streets. Fogarty's first collection of poetry, Kargun, was published in 1980. He has since published a further twelve volumes including the Scanlon Prize-winning Connection Requital (2010), Mogwie-Idan: Stories of the Land (2012), which won the Kate Challis RAKA Award, Eelahroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Mobo-Mobo (Future) (2014), and a children's book Booyooburra (1993). He has been shortlisted for the NBC Banjo Awards Poetry Prize, the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards Prize for Indigenous writing. Fogarty's experimental and politically charged poems are interweaved with Indigenous languages and reflect his love for his people and Country.
