AustLit

Roberta Sykes was born in Townsville and grew up in Queensland. Sykes attended St Patrick's College in Townsville, but left school at fourteen and worked at a variety of jobs. As a black woman, she suffered racism and violence. By the late 1960s, she was active in the Queensland black movement, particularly the One People of Australia League. In 1972, she was the first executive secretary of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra. She later established the Black Women's Action group and lectured widely while working for government departments such as the New South Wales Health Commission. During the 1980s, Sykes attended Harvard University after raising funds and securing support from the Australian Council of Churches. She received both her Masters and Doctorate in Education from Harvard University.

Sykes returned to Australia and continued to write and lecture in various institutions while contributing to many government reports and discussion papers, including the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and reports for the New South Wales Department of Corrective Services. She was also Chairperson of the Promotions Appeal Tribunal at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Sykes was a guest lecturer at universities and tertiary institutions throughout Australia, and was in demand as an international speaker.

In addition to writing books about the Aboriginal experience in Australia, Sykes also wrote poetry and biographies. Her most significant work is the three-volume autobiography Snake Dreaming (1997-2000). Although the Snake Cradle volume of the trilogy won awards and high praise, the question of Sykes's Aboriginality continued to be raised in heated discussion. While she appeared to have claimed Aboriginal heritage, the possibility that her father was an African-American serviceman frequently resurfaced in commentary about her achievements.

Lionel Fogarty was born on Wakka Wakka country at Barambah, now known as Cherbourg Aboriginal Reserve near Murgon, Queensland. His traditional background is the Yoogum and Kudjela tribes and he has relations from the Goomba tribe.

After being educated to ninth grade at Murgon High school, he worked at a variety of local casual jobs, went ringbarking, worked on a railway gang, and came to Brisbane when he was sixteen.

In the early 1970s Fogarty became actively involved in Aboriginal politics after a realisation of the injustices experienced while growing up on the Reserve. His involvement in the political struggles of the Aboriginal people has been through various organisations including the Aboriginal Legal Service, Aboriginal Housing Service, Black Resource Centre, Black Community School and Murrie Coo-ee. As a legal and political activist, and as a community leader, his work has also been directed towards the reality of Aboriginal deaths in custody.

Fogarty has travelled widely throughout Australia and the USA as an ambassador for Murri culture and Aboriginal causes. In 1976 he travelled to the USA to address a meeting of the American Indian Movement of the Second International Indian Treaty Council in South Dakota. Attending this forum furthered his commitment to fight injustice and gave him a broader perspective of international struggles. In 1993, in the International Year of the World's Indigenous People, he undertook an extensive reading tour through Europe.

Lionel Fogarty began writing poetry out of a commitment to the Aboriginal cause, a belief that land rights is the basis of Aboriginal people's hope for a future not based on racism and oppression, and as a way of expressing his Murri beliefs and continuing to pass on his own knowledge and experience. His first work Kargun (1980) was published when he was twenty-two and further volumes of verse have continued to be published. With the approval of his elders he has published a children's book Booyooburra (1993), a traditional Wakka Wakka story.

His work New and Selected poems: Munaldjali, Mutuerjararera was nominated for the NBC Banjo Awards Poetry Prize in 1996. He has subsequently been shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in 2016, the Victorian Prmier's Literary Awards Prize for Indigenous writing in 2014. His 2012 work Mogwie-Idan: Stories of the Land won The Kate Challis RAKA Award in 2015.