Aboriginal rights activist, poet, educator, and environmentalist Oodgeroo Noonuccal became the first Indigenous Australian to publish a collection of poetry. Noonuccal's work can be understood as “literary ethnobotany” that gives prominence to the plant-based cultural knowledge of Indigenous people. Her work expresses the idea of plants—and the multidimensional knowledge systems surrounding them—as embodied figures exerting material agencies in discourse with other beings and elements. This chapter reinterprets Noonuccal's poetry as literary ethnobotany that boldly asserts the vibrant materialities of the botanical world. In its emphasis on Indigenous Australian traditions of plants, her writing exemplifies biocultural activism in which native plants serve as potent reagents of cultural sovereignty for Indigenous Australians. Going beyond the dominant Western view of plants as mute objects of appropriation, Noonuccal's narratives of botanical life thus contribute to the revitalization of human-flora relations in Australia.
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According to the United Nations, there are 370–500 million Indigenous people in the world belonging to 5,000 distinct cultural groups across 90 countries. Although they live in nearly every region of the planet—from Australia to the Arctic—about 70% are found in Asia. What’s more, their traditional homelands contain up to 80% of the planet’s imperiled biodiversity (UNESCO, 2019). The exigent environmental issues of the present—climate change, biodiversity loss, water contamination, and myriad others—are particularly acute for Indigenous communities who rely on imperiled ecosystems for their livelihoods. While they constitute only 5 percent of the global population, Indigenous people represent 15 percent of the world’s poor and 33% of the world’s critically poor (Asia Pacific Forum of National Human Rights Institutions, 2013, p. 3). In the contemporary context, Indigenous people’s traditions of biodiversity conservation reflect significant inequalities in global knowledge production and dissemination in which Western societies continue to reinforce the legitimacy of their own cultural ideas, values, and frameworks. North-South asymmetries are especially evident, for instance, in the practice of bioprospecting involving “the characterization of living organisms (e.g., plant species) in respect to the presence of commercially valuable chemical compounds” (Skirycz et al., 2016, p. 783). This chapter’s aim, then, is to investigate the ways in which Indigenous literary expression provides an agent of biocultural sovereignty. More specifically, the chapter focuses on local plant-based cultural knowledge production, preservation, and dissemination through a close reading of the poetry of Indigenous Australian writer-activist Oodgeroo Noonuccal.
With the release of We Are Going (1964) and The Dawn Is At Hand (1992), Aboriginal rights activist, poet, educator, and environmentalist Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–93), née Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska, became the first Indigenous Australian to publish book-length collections of poetry. In “Nona,” excerpted above, references to resin, berries, and reeds signify the combined literary-ethnobotanical dimensions of her work vis-à-vis the beautification of the female body through the application of plant materials. When read in conjunction with her prose writing, Noonuccal’s poetry can be understood as an expression of literary ethnobotany that gives prominence to the plant-based cultural knowledge of the Indigenous communities of coastal Queensland. As a case in point from the prose narrative The Rainbow Serpent (1988, p. 20), authored with her son Kabul, Noonuccal speaks of the Dreaming—a time known as Alcheringa among Aboriginal people—and the actions of the benevolent Creation Ancestor Biami: “The pine trees, they burst into flower. That’s his way of telling us it’s time to hunt the big mullet fish.” Botanical wisdom such as the human-pine-mullet interrelationship encodes the idea of plants—and the multidimensional knowledge systems surrounding them—as embodied figures exerting material agencies in discourse with other beings and elements. The material vitality (flowering) of the plant (pine tree) signifies the maturation of other beings (mullet), signalling the appropriate time for particular human activities (fishing) to take place. This chapter reinterprets Noonuccal’s poetry as an expression of literary ethnobotany that boldly asserts the vibrant materialities of botanical life. In its emphasis on reclaiming Indigenous Australian traditions of plants, furthermore, Noonuccal’s literary ethnobotany exemplifies the idea of biocultural activism. Her work affirms that, in their material bearing within the landscape, native plants serve as potent reagents of biocultural sovereignty. Going beyond the dominant Western view of plants as mute materials to be appropriated by imperialist practices such as bioprospecting, Noonuccal’s narratives of botanical life contribute to the revitalization of human-flora interactions and traditional ecological knowledge systems in Australia.1
Oodgeroo Noonuccal remains one of Australia’s most influential Indigenous poets, writers, and campaigners. Wiradjuri author Anita Heiss and Koori poet Peter Minter (2008, p. 40) characterize Noonuccal as “the grandmother of Aboriginal poetry [who] travelled widely overseas, representing Aboriginal writing and culture.” Heiss further observes: