Synopsis
Raised on the Cherbourg mission in Queensland, Dhoompoo Lionel Fogarty became one of Australia’s most radical poets — a writer who didn’t borrow the coloniser’s language so much as destroy it. Prolific, restless and irrepressible, he filmed his own life for decades, creating a vast unseen archive. Yours in Struggle draws from those recordings and footage made by friends in his final years.
The film unfolds as Dhoompoo Lionel wrote: through accumulations rather than straight lines — protest and tenderness, fury and humour, the political and the deeply personal colliding until distinction vanishes. It moves between his shack on Mununjali country, the Cherbourg mission, and the protest lines and hospital wards that marked his last months.
At its heart is one man’s lifelong act of resistance — lived through poetry, love, friendship, and protest.
Lionel Fogarty died in February 2026.
Director
Dhoompoo Lionel Fogarty in collaboration with Mia Tinkler, Charlie Freedman and Alex Vella-Horne
Producer
Snoring Roars with EJ Garrett
Story
In January 2026, Dhoompoo Lionel Fogarty summons his crew to his hospital bedside and reads them poems about his sickness. Facing his “deadening,” he says goodbye to friends and family. At home, he films moments of solitude on his handicam, revealing a mystical, time‑traveling place inhabited by frogs, snakes, and cows. From here, the film reaches back through fifty years of personal video archive he spent a lifetime assembling. It moves like his poetry — non‑linear, mosaic, and furious.
We follow Lionel from protest lines to book launches, back to the Cherbourg mission of his childhood, a dentist’s chair where he explains his film to a nurse who has never heard his name. “I am a famous writer,” he tells her — once a mission boy who couldn’t read or write until his twenties, later the poet laureate of Aboriginal Australia.
The film traces a life forged in love and struggle: his partnership with activist Cheryl Buchanan and their five children; the death of his brother Daniel Yock in police custody; his long friendship with poet Ali Cobby Eckermann. In his final years, isolated in the bush and frustrated by the film’s delays, Lionel retreats into writing and painting — until his beloved home burns down.
Preparing for one last Invasion Day rally, Dhoompoo Lionel is surrounded by friends and grandchildren at his bedside. Yours in Struggle witnesses a life where creativity and resistance endure despite the lasting violences of colonisation.
Production Stage
- Development
- Production
- Post-production
- Completed
- Outreach
DURATION: 80 MINUTES
Issue area
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