xoaqwepo: love poems for mums

##title##

Born Roberta Barkley Patterson in Townsville, Queensland, Sykes was raised by her mother and purportedly never knew her father. Sykes says in her autobiography that his identity is unknown, but her mother, Rachel Patterson, told a reporter in 1973 that Sykes's "father was a Negro soldier... His name was Master Sergeant Robert Barkley of the US Army".

Mom Poems

Sykes left school aged 14 and, after a succession of jobs, including a nurses assistant at the Townsville General Hospital from 1959 to 1960. She moved to Brisbane and then to Sydney in the early to mid-1960s where she worked as a strip-tease dancer at the notorious Pink Pussycat Club, 38a Darlinghurst Road, Kings Cross under the stage name, [pseudonym] of "Opal Stone". She became a freelance journalist and got involved in several national indigenous activist organisations. She was one of the many protestors arrested at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in July 1972. She was involved in the creation and early development of the Redfern Aboriginal Medical Service, although other participants say that her autobiography exaggerates her role in this.[who?]

I love You Poems,

Sykes's early poetry was published in 1979 in the book Love Poems and Other Revolutionary Acts. The first edition was limited to a thousand copies (with the first 300 numbered and signed). A mass market edition was published in 1988. Her second volume of poetry was published in 1996. In 1981 she ghosted the autobiography of Mum (Shirl) Smith, an indigenous Australian social worker in New South Wales. She won the Patricia Weickert Black Writers Award in 1982.