Barbara Nicholson – May 30 2021

National Reconciliation Week – May 27 – June 3

Photo: Blak & Bright

This year’s theme is “More than a word. Reconciliation takes action.”

Barbara is a poet, activist, academic and lecturer. An Elder of the Wadi Wadi people, she was born on the Aboriginal reserve at Kemblawarra and is active across the spectrum of Aboriginal disadvantage. She was a driving force behind Link-Up, an organisation committed to reuniting and supportingpeople affected by Australia’s removal policies. Barbara holds a Bachelor of Arts and Honorary Doctorate of Laws. She has worked as a lecturer in Aboriginal Studies at UNSW and UOW, has taught course work to inmate students at Goulburn Gaol and is part of both the Human Research Ethics Committee at UOW and the Ethics Committee for the Australian Institute of Criminology in Canberra. Barbara is one of the mentors/editors for Verity La’s Emerging Indigenous Writers’ Project. She serves on the Board of the South Coast Writers Centre and is a member of the Black Wallaby Indigenous Writers Group and the First Nations Australia Writers Network. Her scholarship and creative writing are widely published and have been presented at numerous national and international conferences. In 2011, Southern Cross University published three of her poems under the title ‘Selected poetry’ in its Law Review, Volume 14, and she contributed to Anthology of Australian Aboriginal Literature, edited by Anita Heiss, et al., and The Strength of Us as Women: Black Women Speak, edited by Kerry Gilbert-Reed.

Dreaming Inside: Voices from Junee Correctional Centre, Ed. Barbara Nicholson
South Coast Writers Centre, Available at https://southcoastwriters.org/shop
Initiated by Barbara in 2012 as a series of writing workshops, and now auspiced by the South Coast Writers Centre, the Ngana Barangarai (Black Wallaby) project has produced a Dreaming Inside anthology for the last nine years. The volumes showcase the poetry, songs, biographies, and other writing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander inmates of Junee Correctional Centre. Volume 9 differs from those produced in previous years. Due to COVID 19 the Ngana Barangarai tutors were unable to visit the gaol – yet the inmates wrote anyway, many for the first time. Their work remains raw, vivid, honest and insightful. It is an unfiltered glimpse given by those who have spent time ‘dreaming inside’.

Antipodes: Poetic Responses, Ed. Margaret Bradstock
Phoenix, 2011; ISBN 9781921586392
Barbara is one of the contributors to Antipodes, the first collection of Aboriginal and white poetic responses to the ‘settlement’ of Australia. Historical in its sweep, it begins with WC Wentworth’s record of his encounter with the land and its inhabitants, followed by the more sobering reactions of Mary Gilmore, Jack Davis, Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Judith Wright, outspoken and elegiac in their protests over the destruction of Aboriginal tribes and lifestyles. Interspersed are poems from Aboriginal oral traditions, the Voyager period, Jindyworobaks, and some of Australia’s finest established poets. Two hundred years of poetic voices (black and white, sometimes in harmony, sometimes conflicting) comment on colonisation and the culture shock of ‘first contact.’