Oodgeroo’s poetry also led her into controversy, this time played out in the pages of literary journals as well as newspapers. We are going was the first published collection of poetry in English by an Aboriginal writer. The book was popular, selling over 10,000 copies in seven editions.^[33]It became a common refrain in the popular media that Oodgeroo was the first published Aboriginal poet. As John Collins put it, she ‘immediately became a public person’.^[34] Oodgeroo sometimes suggested that her Aboriginality increased interest in her poetry. She commented in an interview in 1988 that We are going ‘sold mainly out of curiosity value’, a remark she had also made in the foreword to The dawn is at hand, her second book of poetry, in 1966.^[35] Ian Turner also suggested this, reviewing We are going for the Australian in 1964. Like the painter Albert Namatjira, he suggested, ‘Mrs Walker is having a succes de surprise’, which he thought reflected ‘on the audience, not on the poet’.^[36] Even by 1971, SE Lee, writing in Southerly, described her as ‘something of a curiosity (an aborigine [sic] who is also a poet)’.^[37]

Oodgeroo had joined the Realist Writers’ Group in Brisbane. These groups existed throughout Australia, and aimed ‘to promote the discussion and production of socialist realism in literature’.^[38]She had also first become politically active through a brief involvement with the Communist Party, because of the party’s opposition to discrimination towards Aboriginal people, leaving when she discovered other members wished to write her speeches for her.^[39] As she recalled in a speech given in 1993, close to the end of her life, one of the early criticisms of her poetry when she began writing was that it was not her work, but that a ‘well-known Communist’ was ‘writing it for her’.^[40] As well, she recalled:

Similarly, Oodgeroo was quoted in Woman’s Day/Woman’s World in 1980 observing that her work was first said to be the work of a ‘white person’, and later, ‘when it became widely known it was my poetry they said it must be the white genes giving her the brilliance’.^[42]

Yet a further controversy surrounding Oodgeroo’s poetry was literary, as many reviewers denigrated her poetic skills, sometimes suggesting that any merit her work possessed stemmed only from its message, providing a voice for Aboriginal people which was authenticated by her own Aboriginality. Reviewing We are going, poet Jill Hellyer wrote in Hemisphere in 1964 that Oodgeroo’s poetry had ‘considerable and definite promise’ but that the collection’s ‘quality’ was ‘uneven’ and that ‘an attitude of preaching’ sometimes weakened the poems.^[43] Oodgeroo’s poetry was subject to considerable criticism as being mere propaganda rather than literature.^[44] For instance, Katharine England, in the Adelaide Advertiser, commented in 1971 that Oodgeroo ‘is no poet’.^[45] England considered that her ‘forte is protest: she is a militant and dedicated fighter for social justice’.^[46] Likewise, Hellyer suggested Oodgeroo’s focus on ‘the theme of her race’ was something that ‘must limit her eventually unless she ceases to regard herself as a propagandist for her people’, and argued that her ‘pleadings are most powerful when they do not become obvious’.^[47]In 1967, Lee’s review in Southerly suggested that ‘it is difficult to imagine’ that even those of her poems best in poetic terms would be ‘considered for publication’ if it were not that ‘their author happens to be an aborigine [sic] passionately concerned about a very great social wrong … currently troubling many consciences in the white community’.^[48]

Oodgeroo herself at times referred to her poems as simple or as propaganda. She said in a 1990 interview, after agreeing with the interviewer that her poems were ‘propaganda’, that this was because of the need to get ‘seventh generation white Australians’ to listen, which required ‘shock tactics’, and she added that ‘I’d rather hit them with my words than pick up a gun and shoot them’.^[49] Judith Wright later noted that ‘[i]f there was one forbidden territory in poetry’ in the era in which Oodgeroo began writing ‘it was “propaganda and protest” literature, especially in verse’.^[50] In this context, Oodgeroo’s poetry became contested in terms of its literary merit. Moreover, defining what was political poetry was not always straightforward. In The dawn is at hand, Oodgeroo considered only one poem to be ‘propaganda-like stuff’, a view with which Lee emphatically disagreed.^[51]Confusion among literary critics about how to understand Oodgeroo’s poetry suggests the variety of ways in which a life may be controversial. In these criticisms, the demand for civil rights for Aboriginal people was not explicitly questioned, as the criticisms were framed in terms of literary merit. Yet such criticisms carried the potential to suppress Oodgeroo’s political message, by arguing that politics did not belong in literature, and by denying Oodgeroo literary acceptance while she used her poetry to carry her message.