Magabala Books is devastated at the passing of visionary poet, wildflower lover, researcher, data activist and friend, Charmaine Papertalk Green (CPG). 

We grieve a world without CPG; the communities and spaces she held, the truth-telling work that will never be, the conversations we will no longer have. Our thoughts are with her family, who feel this loss deepest. Dear CPG, there was so much we dreamed of doing with you. 

And there I was in my mother’s womb gathering data (CPG, ART 2022).

CPG was born at Eradu (between Geraldton and Mullewa) on Southern Yamaji country. She was a member of the Wajarri, Badimaya and Nhanagardi Wilunyu cultural groups of Yamaji Nation in Western Australia and lived in the Mullewa area until her passing.

CPG first started her visionary work in the late 1970s as a visual artist, poet and writer. She was instrumental in the incubation of the nationally and internationally touring exhibition Ilgarijiri – Things belonging to the Sky, which was a groundbreaking Yamaji Art collaboration with the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy Curtin University, the Australian Government and the City of Greater Geraldton.

Her strength and vision saw her become one of our foremost poets. Her publications include Just Like That (Fremantle Art Press 2007); Tiptoeing Tod the Tracker (Oxford University Press 2014); collaborations with WA poet John Kinsella, False Claims of Colonial Thieves (Magabala Books 2018) and ART (Magabala Books 2022); Nganajungu Yagu (Cordite Publishing Inc.’s 2019); and numerous anthologies and other publications. CPG was shortlisted for many of the country’s top awards and won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award in 2020 in the poetry category.

CPG was proud to be Chair of Yamaji Art and a Director of the Western Australian Art Centre Hub, ensuring truth-telling and culture within the arts was always championed. Her groundbreaking PhD at Edith Cowan University on Data Sovereignty and her work as a research fellow at the WA Centre for Rural Health earned her the inaugural Kurongkurl Katitjin Research Medal.  

CPG has left behind a legacy that spans multiple communities, who are now struggling with the silence left by her passing.  But we find strength in the knowledge of her life and what she left us. In the words of CPG’s longtime collaborator and friend John Kinsella: “light comes from everywhere, so does darkness, and there’s a story there lighting the ways” (ART 2022).

We know CPG is now with her own mother and Ancestors, surrounded by the wildflowers she loved on Yamaji Barna. 

Like a feast laid out
On a long table in
Front of me
My eyes welcome 
The sight of my
Ancestral lands
Singing in Wildflowers

CPG
(False Claims by Colonial Thieves 2018)