Literary Ethnobotany in Aboriginal Australia

Abstract

Aboriginal rights activist, poet, educator, and environmentalist Oodgeroo Noonuccal became the first Indigenous Australian to publish a collection of poetry. Noonuccal's work can be understood as “literary ethnobotany” that gives prominence to the plant-based cultural knowledge of Indigenous people. Her work expresses the idea of plants—and the multidimensional knowledge systems surrounding them—as embodied figures exerting material agencies in discourse with other beings and elements. This chapter reinterprets Noonuccal's poetry as literary ethnobotany that boldly asserts the vibrant materialities of the botanical world. In its emphasis on Indigenous Australian traditions of plants, her writing exemplifies biocultural activism in which native plants serve as potent reagents of cultural sovereignty for Indigenous Australians. Going beyond the dominant Western view of plants as mute objects of appropriation, Noonuccal's narratives of botanical life thus contribute to the revitalization of human-flora relations in Australia.