“
When I met Oodgeroo, I met my mother: not just Dossie’s poise, eyes and Lindt-like skin, but the funny-bugger with a steak knife, buried, a serrated intensity that unsettled me—a boy of elocution lessons and an easier ride, 25 a man of lighter brown travelling, whose tab of overt intolerance came in at insults and one lost girlfriend. I wasn’t there when indignity did its daily round—rarely blunt, rather, a pointed 30 needling that cut near the core, left wounds that broke their stitches every morning I did know that the sharp steel about Oodgeroo was also about my mother. On campus—
”
”