Bernard Black – a profile

You know Bernard Black. Everyone knows Bernard. He is an indelible image on the history of our time. The writer you think of whenever the words “Australia’s Leading Indigenous Writer and a Living National Treasure” pop into your mind. Who could forget his towering, gum leaf encrusted, Akubra hatted presence at the Reconciliation Conference or the close-up televised image of the tears dropping from his sensitive, smoothly clean-shaven, manly face, projected onto huge screens all around the country, as the Prime Minister said “Sorry”.

He is a fixture at writers’ festivals. No word-fest is complete without his long, flowing, dark locks – that make him seem like the tribal elder of all Australia. The great wooden staff from his birth-tree, which he bought from a Peking street-stall, gives him the air (say the broadsheets) of a modern Moses leading his people on their journey of reconciliation from the central Australian desert to Canberra. The accusatory monologues, during on-stage…