AUSTRALIA-OBITS-L Archives

From: Deborah Woolmore <>
Subject: [AUSTRALIA-OBITS] Lisa Marie BELLEAR 2-5-1961 - 6-7-2006
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 19:08:04 +1000

THE AGE THURSDAY, JULY 20, 2006 page 14

'Warrior woman' a beacon for Aborigines

LISA MARIE BELLEAR

POET, ACTIVIST

2-5-1961 - 6-7-2006

By JEN JEWEL BROWN



EARLY last Thursday, Lisa Bellear, who was an integral part of the new
face of radicalised Aboriginal arts, said goodnight and went to bed at
her home in Brunswick.

That morning, the widely admired, clean-living, appar­ently healthy
Minjungbul woman was dead. She was found in peaceful repose by morning
light, leaving relatives and friends to comfort each other in a state of
shock. Bellear was just 45, and the coroner reported that she had an
unu­sually enlarged heart.

Bellear was a celebrated poet, Aboriginal activist and spokeswoman,
dramatist, com­edian and broadcaster on 3CR, where she helped found /Not
Another Koori Show /more than 20 years ago. She was also a "relentless"
photographer whose shots represented Australia at the 2004 Athens Olympics.

She documented a quarter century of mostly Aboriginal community,
especially in the fields of politics and the arts. Her passion for
social change saw her contribute to myriad groups - protests at the 1982
Brisbane Commonwealth Games; academics and students she taught and
studied with at universities, including Melbourne and La Trobe; Sorry
Day; National Aborigines and Islanders pay Observance Com­mittee; poets,
feminists; , lesbians; the National Day of Healing; the Stolen
Generations of Australia and Victoria; Brun­swick Power football team,
and the Labor Party. Small wonder her funeral last week at the
Vic­torian Aborigines Advancement League in Thornbury drew a crowd of
almost 1000 that spilled out of the building and into the grounds below.

"If you're a blackfella in this town, you go to a lot of funerals," her
long-term friend and fellow activist Gary Foley said, "but I've never
seen that before, where people wait for the coffin and clap it when it
goes by. It's the sign of an amazing person. She was dynamic ...
inspirational."

One of the pallbearers, painter Richard Bell, recalled how Bellear would
get her photographic subjects to relax. "She had this strategy. She got
them to take a photograph of her. There was an exchange there, between
her subject and herself. People gave themselves freely."

Australia's past record of stiff, long-suffering, staged shots of
Aborigines contrast with Bellear's casual snaps of moments of
solidarity, levity and self-discovery, gifted back to her community.

Former Victorian premier Joan Kirner recalled how Bellear would always
call her "Prem­ier", even when others called her "the guilty party".

Mick Edwards, captain of the Fitzroy Stars football team, told of how
Bellear and fellow poet and playwright John Harding had sponsored him
when he came out of an institution. "Lisa calmed me. She was like a
general; determined and disciplined.'

Lisa's uncle, Bob Bellear, who was given a state funeral in Sydney last
year, was Australia's first Aboriginal judge. He and his brother Sol
helped found the Aboriginal Housing Corporation in Redfern in 1972.

Earlier, in 1961, their sister Joycelyn "Binks" Bellear had died in
Lismore Hospital when her baby was just weeks old. Lisa was adopted out
to a country Victorian family, a situ­ation that eventually became
traumatic, although she remained close to adopted brother John Stewart.

Bellear "escaped" by board­ing at Ballarat's Sacred Heart College before
starting a bach­elor of social work at Melbourne University, where she
topped her graduating class.

She was "one of the only two black faces on campus", accord­ing to the
other, Harding. He said he melted under Bellear's huge beam, and
introduced her to the Harding mob, including his influential mother,
Eleanor, and sisters, arts administrator Janina and artist Destiny Deacon.

"She was always on the go," Harding said."Frenetic energy; Ah-ah-ah -
I've gotta go!' You'd watch her and you'd want to take Valium."

"We all claimed her," said Janina. "She didn't want to find her family,
initially. Destiny held her hand and encouraged her."·

By the time Bellear con­tacted the authorities, her family had left a
letter for her. When they finally met, her grandmother, Sadie, fainted
on the railway platform when she recognised her long-lost kin. For
Bellear, the healing could begin.

Bellear was the author of/ Dreaming In Urban Areas /(UQP, 1996), a book
of poetry, and a founding member of the Melbourne-based Ilbijerri
Abqr­iginal & Torres Strait Islander Theatre Co-op, the longest-­running
Aboriginal theatre troupe in Australia. Its recent street theatre
masterpiece, /The Dirty Mile/, was based on Bel­lear's idea that was
developed by Foley, Harding and director Kylie Belling, winding through
the black past and present of the streets of Carlton and Fitzroy.

And now the self-professed "warrior woman" has "gone back to the
Dreaming", as the funeral program put it. Her body has been taken to be
buried at Mullumbimby cem­etery, close to her mother, as she requested,
and also to her maternal great-grandfather, Jack Corowa, a Vanuatu man
black-­birded and brought to Australia to cut cane.

"Lit a fire in the King's Domain," said mourner Gavin Moore at the open
mike, bring­ing some ashes. Symbolically, that's what Bellear did too.
It wasn't the kind of fire that burns things down, rather the kind that
lights the way.



Jen Jewel Brown is a Melbourne writer and friend of Lisa Bellear.

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