Kevin John Gilbert (10 July 1933 – 1 April 1993) was an Aboriginal Australian author, activist, artist, poet, playwright and printmaker.
[3] and Child’s Dreaming[4] His extended family would annually travel on the fruit-picking circuit within Wiradjuri territory as "…a temporary release from near starvation … and above all, it meant some independence, some freedom, from under the crucifying heels of the local police and the white station managers; an escape from refugee camps called 'Aboriginal reserves'".
In his own words:[8]"As a Black artist with all the contemptible misery and heart burnings of a poet, I suffered sitting in white dominated classrooms of rural Australia while white teachers lasciviously railed about ‘naked’ Aboriginals, who were described as heathen, too ignorant to know the basic manner of impregnating females, ‘whistle-cock’ sub-incisions, murderous, cannibals, no law or government, minute cerebral indices etc., only to be latterly ‘saved’ by the ‘glorious’ forefather pioneers who attempted to ‘smooth the dying pillow’ of the ‘pitiful remnants’.
Asking questions, demanding answers and making refutations, we were inevitably sent from the classrooms to go out and sweep the yards, pick up scraps, clean the toilets, for, to conform with the late 1940s and 50s white dream of ‘assimilation’, we had to be made to prove we were incapable of any higher educational potential, save that of achieving fourth class primary level.
Of course I couldn’t afford oil paints, so I started with lino prints, and was most pleased with the imagery and body involvement of utilizing that medium to protest the continual victimization and genocide against Blacks.
"In prison, Gilbert produced the first lino prints ever made by an Aboriginal artist, and were his first efforts at creative expression.
[9] His works have been extensively exhibited nationally and internationally in Havana, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Boston, Massachusetts, Portland, Oregon, Durban, London, and Athens.
[1] The critic and publisher Katharine Brisbane, described her response after viewing an early performed reading of "The Cherry Pickers as 'I was overawed with a sense of privilege at being allowed into the domestic life of a people whose privacy had, for so long and for such good reason, been guarded from white eyes'.
A more complete moved reading was held in 1970 and 1971 in Sydney and the play was subsequently nominated in 1970 for the Captain Cook Memorial Award.
[11] The play's narrative mixes traditional creation myths, rituals, political diatribes, clever dialogue and humour.
Particularly in his early verse, Gilbert uses the poetry as an apologia in respect to his own life whilst challenging the morality of the wider society.
Along with his political work which was about the Aboriginal people in the 1970s, Gilbert wrote a number of plays and sketches, including Ghosts in Cell Ten, The Blush of Birds, Eternally Eve, Evening of Fear, and Everyman Should Care.
[12] Many of these seem to have never been staged but stylistically seem to pre-empt much of the work of First Nations writers and practitioners of the 1990s, such as Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman.
He was at that time editor and sole journalist on the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs' newspaper, Black Australian News.
[24] For the last year of his life, in 1992, he was active in the re-establishment of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy after its 20th anniversary on a permanent basis, and it remains the spearhead of the Sovereignty Movement to this day.
[25] Gilbert features in an episode in the 2013 documentary television series Desperate Measures, in which his daughter, poet Kerry Reed-Gilbert, presents aspects of his life.
1990: Desert Art, Albert Hall, Canberra 1989: Narragunnawalli, Canberra Contemporary Art Space Inside Black Australia, Aboriginal Photographers Exhibition, Showground, Wagga Wagga,NSW; Trades and Labour Club, Newcastle, NSW; Queensland Museum, Brisbane; Museum of Victoria, Melbourne.