ABSTRACT
Kevin Gilbert was one of Aboriginal Australia’s most strident voices. He died in
early 1993 and like most Aboriginal men he failed to reach sixty years of age.1 He
experienced fourteen and a half years in some of the worst prisons in Australia yet
still managed to author many visionary works dedicated to the search for justice for
Aboriginal people. A dominant focus of Gilbert’s quest for justice was a campaign
for a treaty between indigenous peoples and the Australian state that began in
earnest in the late 1970s (see Harris, 1979, Gilbert, 1993) and garnered considerable
support throughout the 1980s. The idea had significant potential as Australia, unlike
New Zealand and North America, was colonised purely by forceful assertion.
