Lionel G. Fogarty, Eelahroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Möbö-Möbö (Future)

"Lionel Fogarty’s Eelahroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Mobo-Mobo (Future)... is an unflinchingly uncomfortable read interrogating colonialism’s crooked paths with devastating impact. Fogarty combatively stakes his voice somewhere between Aboriginal English and Standard Australian English as he confronts the social and political realities of contemporary dispossession, racism and victimisation and the painfully recalcitrant attempts by the non-Indigenous Australian hegemony to address Indigenous injustice and disadvantage." —Plumwood Mountain Review

“Sometimes angry, defiant, sometimes sad, and always in love with people and country, Lionel Fogarty is cosmically off the scales, holds multitudes, is wise, riddling, and funny too. Like all romantics the word is energy, wilderness and invention, but the modern is where he’s going. If these poems were dice, they’re all loaded. There’s no voice comes close to this intensity. And if you want something predictable and ‘correct’ (in terms of language and rhetoric) go elsewhere. ‘Here comes the tranquility incarnation.’”—Adam Aitken

“Once again Lionel Fogarty presents a collection of poems unique in the telling. From bar room brawls to constitutional referendums, past loves and hopes for the future, these new poems obliterate the landscape, holding the reader in a place of Aboriginal contemplation.”—Ali Cobby Eckermann

Lionel G. Fogarty is a Yugambeh man, and was born on Wakka Wakka land in South Western Queensland near Murgon on a ‘punishment reserve’ outside Cherbourg. Throughout the 1970s, he worked as an activist for Aboriginal Land Rights and protesting Aboriginal deaths in custody. In 1993, his younger brother, Daniel Yock, died while in police custody. He has published numerous collections of poetry, including most recently the award-winning Connection Requital and Mogwie-Idan: Stories of the land.