The Municipal Gum Essay

The Municipal Gum by Oodgeroo Noonuccal portrays the miserable, hopeless and despondent living conditions of the Aboriginal people. It expresses the feelings of the Indigenous people who are deprived and displaced from their native culture and native land by the white people. The general theme and the ideas addressed in this poem includes raising awareness of the tremendous discrimination and prejudice by white Australians against the aboriginal people. The discrimination is developed strongly within the content of the poem, with some imageries holding powerful messages and meanings. It can therefore be seen that the poem is about the tremendous discrimination by the white Australians towards the aboriginal people.

The mood of the poem is sorrowful,

sad and subdued. Words like dolorous and hopelessness are signposts to the mood of the poem. The description of the music also supports the emotions. The poet explains the difficulties Aboriginal people had to face when they were uprooted from their native land and culture. The white Australians built city streets and removed aborigines from their homes and made them dispossessed. Aboriginal people were imposed by a foreign culture and traditions by the white people. The indigenous Australians were disgraced, degraded and deprived of their dignity like the cart horses. This supports the mood and the emotion of the poem as being sad, unhappy and grief-stricken.
The poet uses poetic devices throughout the poem to create emotions and help share her messages with the reader.

Oodgeroo Noonuccal uses personification, metaphors, and imagery to show how the gumtree in the city is like Aborigines who have been forced to implement and adopt white peoples’ ways and traditions. An example of a personification shown in the poem is “the gum tree is dolorous”. This is used to describe the gum tree’s emotions. The line in the poem “What have they done to us” portrays that the aborigines also face the same sadness. In the poem, the phrase “O fellow citizen” is also a personification because the poet is giving human qualities to the gum tree. The poet gives citizenship status to the tree to reflect the Aboriginal belief that all living things and the surrounding land them deserve respect. Oodgeroo uses metaphors in the poem such as ‘Hard bitumen around your feet’. This means that the gumtree has been placed in the cityscape where it is suppressed and not allowed to spread out. This links to the pain, misery, and suffering endured by the aborigines. The poet uses a rhetorical question “What have they done to us?” at the end to accuse against those who have displaced and suppressed the

aborigines.
I really enjoyed reading Municipal Gum as it allows me to understand how the Indigenous Australians were treated and how their lives changed in Australia. The poem also uses a lot of poetic devices which makes the poem effective and more interesting. I also like the descriptive language and phrases used to describe the poem. The poet uses vivid language and describing phrases to present her ideas. It is used to make the message of the poem more meaningful and expressive. I feel that the poem is extremely effective in portraying the miserable life of the aboriginal people. Municipal Gum is a poem written by Oodgeroo Noonecaal to advocate for her people and all things wronged by the controlling behaviour of the white Australians. It is also written to express the feelings of the indigenous people who were displaced and had miserable living conditions.