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,

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