Can We Understand Justice Without Listening to Those Who Have Lived Injustice?
Kevin Gilbert’s The Blackside: People Are Legends and Other Poems speaks about justice in a very different language.
Land is more than a place we inhabit.
It can be memory, identity and belonging.
Gilbert does not begin with a theory.
He begins with people, memory, land and lived experience.
An Aboriginal activist, writer and advocate for land rights, Gilbert used poetry to communicate anger and suffering, but also strength, dignity, belonging and love. The six poems selected for the Agora Dialogue readings grew from actual comments or circumstances of Aboriginal people. Gilbert described them as testimony to a people’s determination to endure and to carry the story of that endurance to their children.
The first poem, Where Nomads Tread, introduces the land itself.
The Australian landscape is vast, ancient and severe. But it is not empty.
It teaches.
This idea becomes central to the poems that follow.
What does land mean to a people?
Is it simply something that can be owned, bought and sold?
Or can land also be memory, identity, spirituality and belonging?
In The Blackside, Gilbert connects Aboriginal identity directly to the Australian environment. Native trees survive the heat and fire because they belong to that land. Imported trees remain foreign to it.
The image is simple but powerful.
Gilbert is speaking about more than trees.
He is speaking about belonging.
Aboriginal people are not outsiders trying to find a place in the country. Their identity has grown within the land itself. The poem therefore transforms what might have been treated as a source of racial disadvantage into a statement of dignity and pride.
Mister Man takes this relationship much deeper.
The poem grew from Gilbert’s response to a discussion in which, according to the note accompanying the reading, a judge failed to understand the Aboriginal relationship with tribal land.
The speaker asks another person to experience the land rather than merely look at it.
Rocks, trees, caves, soil, birds, wind, sun and stars are not separate objects.
They are part of a living relationship between person, people and country.
This creates a profound question:
Can we understand another person’s idea of ownership if we do not understand what the land means to them?
For Gilbert, the connection is so deep that the distinction between the person and the land begins to disappear. Identity lives within country, and country lives within identity.
The poems then become more confronting.
In People Are Legends, Gilbert describes the forces that can destroy a people not only physically, but culturally and spiritually.
The attack is on memory, identity, roots and the ability of people to understand themselves through their own traditions.
This raises another difficult question:
Can a people survive physically while something essential in their identity is being destroyed?
Aboriginal Query makes the accusation even more direct.
The speaker asks what more can be taken after culture, dreams and much of the substance of a people’s life have already been damaged. The poem asks why one culture continues trying to examine, reshape or destroy something it has never truly understood.
These are painful poems.
But it would be a mistake to read them only as poems of anger.
The introduction to the collection explicitly identifies love alongside justice and human rights.
Gilbert wants the reader to see.
And seeing requires more than sympathy.
It requires us to recognise the humanity of another person without first demanding that the other person become like us.
This may be one of the most important ideas in the reading.
Justice is not simply about giving everyone the same legal definition of property, progress or civilisation.
Sometimes justice requires us first to ask whether our definitions themselves have prevented us from seeing another way of understanding the world.
The poems therefore leave us with difficult questions.
Who has the power to define what belongs to whom?
Can land be understood only as property?
What is lost when one culture judges another entirely through its own values?
Can political and legal equality repair the destruction of memory and identity?
What does justice require after dispossession has already occurred?
Can reconciliation exist without understanding?
And perhaps most fundamentally:
Can we truly recognise another person as equal if we refuse to listen to how that person understands their own life, land and identity?
Gilbert’s poetry does not offer a neat political formula.
It does something more basic.
It asks us to listen to voices that history has often ignored, and to understand that survival itself can carry memory, resistance and dignity.
Perhaps this is why the title People Are Legends matters so much.
The legend is not distant history.
It lives in people.
It lives in memory.
It lives in country.
And it survives through the telling of the story.
Justice begins not only with speaking for others, but with learning how to hear them.
- Artemis Kechagioglou is a political writer and analyst exploring political philosophy and contemporary social thought through comparative and critical reflection.
- Dinos Toumazos is Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Agora Dialogue, an independent organisation dedicated to deeper reflection, critical thinking and engaged citizenship.