Kevin Gilbert (10 July 1933 - 1 April 1993) was a 20th century Indigenous Australian activist writer and artist.

Kevin Gilbert was born into the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi nations in Condobolin, New South Wales. He had an unsettled childhood and was brought up by his maternal grandmother on an Aboriginal reserve. Leaving school at the age of fourteen he had various seasonal and short-term jobs. He received a life sentence in 1957 over the death of his wife during an argument. Despite the harsh and brutal conditions of gaol life he learned printmaking and began writing. In 1971 he was released on parole, a year after his first exhibition and three years after the production of his play The Cherry Pickers.

He became involved in numerous Indigenous human rights causes, notably the Aboriginal Tent Embassy at Parliament house and, his chairing of the Treaty '88 campaign for a treaty between white and black Australia. In 1988 he was awarded the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's Human Rights Award for Literature for editing the Aboriginal poetry anthology Inside Black Australia. He returned it citing the ongoing injustice his people suffered under. He also continued writing and exhibiting his artwork. He died in 1993, survived by six children and numerous grand- and great-grandchildren.

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 as in Think (1971)

My father was white
He killed his wife
She was a half-caste
She was my mother

I am a half-caste
I killed a white
She was my wife

I stay on my
side of the coin
you on the other

When it spins
into the air
next time
who will come
out on top?

Bibliography

Cover of limited edition of Gilbert's first published work featuring a hand applied lino cut made by the author

• End of Dreamtime (Island Press, 1971)
• People are Legends (UQP, 1978)

Non-fiction

• Living Black: Blacks Talk to Kevin Gilbert
• Because a White Man'll Never Do It
• Black from the Edge

Edited

• Inside Black Australia

For children

• Me and Mary Kangaroo(1995?)

External links

Kevin John Gilbert home page, has images of his art-work

References

Kevin Gilbert at National Gallery of Australia