John Muk Muk Burke – February 10 2019

Mukky is a Wiradjuri man who left school at 15 and worked as an itinerant labourer, factory worker and bottle washer before becoming a teacher, lecturer and writer. After attending Auckland Teacher’s College in New Zealand, Mukky taught music and art in schools in New Zealand, Darwin and the outback Northern Territory. He later gained a degree in English and Philosophy and lectured at the Centre for Aboriginal Studies at Northern Territory University and Charles Sturt University. Mukky has been guest editor of Northern Perspective and served as a Unaipon judge 1998-2001. In addition to his volume of poetry and novel, Mukky has co-edited Ngara: living in this place now with Martin Langford, and contributed to Dreaming Inside: Voices from Junee Correctional Centre where he was a tutor. Mukky has recently retired to enjoy life in Wagga Wagga where he spent his early years.

Night Song and Other Poems
Northern Territory University Press, 1999; ISBN 9781876248314
Taste the echo of my Rainbow
Feel his flesh fade into Nothing
like a Wafer on your tongue.
Come we feast silently together.
(From the poem ‘Us’.)
This volume of poetry won the national Kate Challis RAKA Award in 2000.

Bridge of Triangles
University of Queensland Press, 1994; ISBN 9780702226397
Chris Leeton is tormented but also sustained by his growing need to cross over into the landscape of his Aboriginal ancestors. After the night of the flood, his Wiradjuri mother resolves to take her four children away from their riverbank home and her unhappy life with Chris’s white father. In the struggle to keep the family together in Sydney’s grim commission housing, Chris witnesses poverty and despair. In time he comes to understand that they are exiles in their own land. He senses that it is his generation which must cross the bridge back to that landscape which defines his people’s existence.
This novel won the 1993 Unaipon Award