"We Are Going" by Oodgeroo Noonuccal. Aboriginal Epos, Australian History, Universal Poetry

The first collection of poetry by an Aboriginal author, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, was published in 1964 by Jacaranda Press. "We Are Going" embodies key features of Aboriginal literature and can be interpreted as an Aboriginal epos as well as a document in Australian history. Individual stories often painfully interface with the macro-history of white policies towards Indigenous people. This poetical remembering of a recent and traumatic past becomes a form of recovery from trauma itself, since Oodgeroo’s poetics preserve the memory of a much older past, the one of pre-invasion Indigenous culture. This paper aims at analysing Oodgeroo’s poems in this perspective, by focussing on both their epical and historical features, while keeping in mind their specificity as artistic, literary, and poetic texts. The experience of translating We Are Going for its first Italian edition (Oodgeroo 2013) has been greatly instrumental in coming to terms with the richness and significance of the poems.