Jen Jewel Brown
Early on July 6, Lisa Bellear said goodnight and went to bed at her home in Brunswick. That morning, the widely admired, clean living, apparently healthy Minjungbul woman was dead. She was barely 45, and the coroner reported that she had an unusually enlarged heart.
Bellear was a celebrated poet, Aboriginal activist and spokeswoman, dramatist, comedian and broadcaster on 3CR, where she helped found Not Another Koori Show. She was also a "relentless" photographer whose shots represented Australia at the 2004 Athens Olympics.
Bellear's passion for social change saw her contribute to myriad groups — the 1982 Brisbane Commonwealth Games protesters, the academics and students she taught and studied with, Sorry Day, National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee, feminists, poets, lesbians, the National Day of Healing, the Stolen Generations of Australia and Victoria, Brunswick Power football team and the Labor Party. Small wonder her funeral at the Victorian Aborigines Advancement League in Thornbury drew a crowd pushing 1000.
"If you're a blackfella in this town, you go to a lot of funerals", commented long-term friend Gary Foley, "but I've never seen that before — where people wait for the coffin and clap it when it goes by. It's the sign of an amazing person."
Lisa's Uncle Bob Bellear was Australia's first Aboriginal judge. He and his brother Sol Bellear helped found the Aboriginal Housing Corporation in Redfern in 1972.
In 1961, their beloved sister Joycelyn "Binks" Bellear died in Lismore Hospital when her baby Lisa was just weeks old. [Lisa] was adopted out to a country Victorian family.
Bellear boarded at Ballarat's Sacred Heart College before starting a Bachelor of Social Work at the University of Melbourne, where she topped her graduating class. She was "one of the only two black faces on campus", according to the other one, [John] Harding. "She was always on the go. You'd watch her and you'd want to take valium."
"She didn't want to find her family initially", [said Janina Harding]. When they finally met, Bellear's grandmother Sadie fainted on the train platform as she recognised her long-lost kin. For Lisa, important healing could begin.
Bellear was the author of Dreaming in Urban Areas (1996) and a book of poetry, and a founding member of Melbourne-based Ilbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Theatre Co-op. Its recent street theatre masterpiece, The Dirty Mile, was based on Bellear's idea and developed by Foley, Harding and director Kylie Belling.
Now the self-professed "warrior woman" has "gone back to the dreaming", as the funeral program put it.
[Jen Jewel Brown is a Melbourne writer and friend of Lisa Bellear. Abridged with the permission of the author and the Age newspaper, where a longer version appeared on July 20.]
From Green Left Weekly, July 26, 2006.
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