Synopsis

“I want the whole film to last
for a long time – not like commercialism
but like culture –
I want people to return to it
when they bored with other stuff.
I want to inspire young people,
who through the film can see it
and feel it, to keep fighting and creating”

Lionel Fogarty didn't learn to read or write until his early twenties. For the fifty years that followed, he made language his most dangerous weapon.

Raised on the Cherbourg Aboriginal mission in Queensland, Fogarty became one of the most radical and uncompromising voices in Australian literary history — a poet who didn't borrow the coloniser's tongue so much as ‘destroy it completely’. Prolific, restless and irrepressible, he documented his own life on video for decades, accruing a vast personal archive that almost no one has seen. Yours, in struggle is built from that archive, alongside intimate footage shot by his friends, the filmmakers, in the last five years of his life.

The film is structured the way Fogarty writes: not in straight lines, but in accumulations — protest and tenderness, fury and humour, the political and the devastatingly personal, pressing up against each other until the boundary between them collapses. It moves between his beloved, ramshackle shack on Mununjali country, the Cherbourg mission of his childhood, and the protest lines and hospital wards of his final months.

At it’s heart this film asks, what does the struggle cost? Not in the abstract, but in the terms of one man's life. The film follows the interior world of a man who has been in a state of creative urgency and material precarity for his entire adult life.

What did it take for Fogarty to become who he was: a partnership with Cheryl Buchanan that anchored the Brisbane Black activist movement and then fractured under its weight; the kids and grandkids that gave him life; the death of his brother Daniel Yock in police custody and the volcanic grief that reshaped his voice; the friendships that taught him rest; the estrangements; and the long years writing alone in a time-travelling house that eventually burned to the ground. What does a warrior need to survive? Love, friendship, art — not as consolations, but as the conditions that make resistance possible at all.

Lionel Fogarty died in February 2026. This film is his final act of resistance, posing an urgent question directed at everyone who watches it: will you join in the struggle?

Lionel’s house in Undullah, July 2022, Lionel Fogarty Archive

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Yours, in struggle The documentary from Lionel Fogarty

Yours, in struggle
The documentary from Lionel Fogarty