Vale Charmaine Papertalk Green

It is with great sadness that Fremantle Press notes the passing of Charmaine Papertalk Green, poet, author, storyteller, visual artist and social science researcher – a proud Wajarri, Badimaya and Wilunyu woman of the Yamaji nation, who was born at a railway siding along the Greenough River and raised in the small Midwest WA town of Mullewa. In 2023, she was inducted into the WA Women’s Hall of Fame, and at the time of her passing, was Chair of Geraldton’s Yamaji Art Centre.

Charmaine Papertalk Green was the author of five books, most recently Nganajungu Yagu (Cordite Books, 2019), which won the 2020 ALS Gold Medal, and the poetry collection ART (published by Magabala Books in 2022, and co-written with John Kinsella), which was shortlisted for the 2023 ALS Gold Medal.

Her first poetry collection was Just Like That and Other Poems, published with then Fremantle Arts Centre Press in 2007. That publication marked the arrival of a poetic force – unflinching, political, purposeful, urgent and courageous. Just Like That was praised by her editor and now long-time admirer and collaborator, John Kinsella, as ‘compassionate and empathetic’, containing poems of ‘empowerment and conviction’.

In November this year, Fremantle Press will publish Rivers Flow, an anthology of First Nations–authored stories and poems inspired by First Nations singer-songwriters, Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter. Rivers Flow includes a poem from Papertalk Green, titled ‘Truth-telling Menu’s Sad Rations’. Her tribute to these formidable artists ends with words that could equally describe her own life’s work: to honour injustices and carry forward what is needed to heal.

Papertalk Green’s cultural and artistic contributions and her fearless and constant advocacy in the work of Indigenous empowerment and reconciliation are immeasurable.

With John Kinsella’s permission, we include here a poem to honour her passing. We offer our deepest condolences to the family of Charmaine Papertalk Green, to all those whose lives she touched and improved, and the great many people who loved her.

Grief

            in memory of ‘CPG’

How can I continue how can I write

what doesn’t need to be written

when I cannot speak of loss

or make devotion in a way

that accords with country
and culture when for all friendship

and respect and all sharing and making

of yarns and books I am still

part of the false legacy the consequence

the incursion into physical-spiritual spaces

that I cannot and should never claim

to comprehend or claim in any way

whatsoever. Here are the collisions

and rips in language and here

are the residues of a disrupted

endocrine system a shock

that searches for medicine

that cannot be found but reaches

for what’s to hand. What right

to grieve from outside from the edge

of the solar system where fragments

of bodies search out the sun

as if not in its calling, the reach

of solar winds. How will I speak

in the future of a way through,

a way back, a way to say

what needs to be said?

            John Kinsella