Summary Of We Are Going By Oodergoo Noonuccal

(Hello students from St Aidan’s and Corinda High, welcome to the poetry exchange conference today) I’m going to introduce you to two very representative Australian poems. The first poem is ‘no more boomerang’ and the second poem is ‘we are going’. These two poems were both written by a native Australian poet Oodergoo Noonuccal in around about 1985. Noonuccal was a feminist and a political activist who concentrated mostly on how to gain the rights for aboriginal Australians, which also gives her a quite unique perspective of representing indigenous people’s view of Australia as home from both cultural and landscape aspects.

Let’s start by discussing how alliteration, rhyme and irony are used in “no more boomerang” to position us to feel that
The disconnection is really obvious (As we can see here, in line5), Noonuccal uses simile subtly to convey that the indigenous identity as the original owner of the land being taken away through the arrival of the whites by using the word ‘ants’. The insects ‘ants’ as insignificant pests have a connotation of a large group like an army. This positions us to understand how indigenous people would have felt like they were being infested by white Europeans. (Also, in the last stanza)By the effectively used repetition here, the poet sets out a deep sense of how indigenous people are living in a pathetic condition on the land they recognise as ‘home’. This also links back to “no more boomerang”, where Noonuccal demonstrates in both poems that the feeling of connection towards the land as home is diminishing because of the invasion of white Europeans. Overall, Noonuccal successfully positions us to accept her representation of the disconnection feeling indigenous Australians felt towards their native land, through the insightful used simile and