This was the beginning of many a foray into the world outside Australia. In 1972 she was guest lecturer at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji; in 1974 the official Australian envoy at the International Writers' Conference in Malaysia; in 1975 the guest of the PNG Government at the PNG Festival of Arts; and in 1976 delegate and Senior Advisor to the Second World Black Festival of the Arts held in Lagos, Nigeria (surviving a plane hijack on her way home).

In 1978-79 she won a Fulbright Scholarship and Myer Travel Grant to the United States of America and was Poet-in-Residence at Bloomsburg State College, Pennsylvania.

In these same years, almost as if it were a necessary antidote to travel, she established Moongalba, or ‘sitting-down-place', a five-hectare piece of coastal bushland on North Stradbroke Island where archaeological evidence shows that her ancestors had been in occupation for over 20 000 years. There in her caravan she welcomed visitors of all ages and races.

For many Aboriginal and Islander children from the cities, this was their first experience of the natural way of life of their ancestors. For people of other races it was a rare insight into another culture. To date, over 28 000 children and adults have learned about Aboriginal foodgathering practices, participated in a revival of arts and crafts, and listened to Aboriginal story tellers, and by so doing have come to understand, and more particularly respect, the often fragile but sustaining interrelationships of Australian nature.

Kath was the subject of Frank Heiman's film Shadow Sister (1977) for which she received an International Acting A ward and membership of the Black Hall of Fame. In 1970 the first edition of her anthology My People (Jacaranda Press) was published, and she wrote of her childhood in Stradbroke Dreamtime (1972: Angus and Robertson). As well as being a writer she was also an artist in her own right. She illustrated her own book (Father Sky and Mother Earth, Jacaranda Press, 1981), and in 1986 a volume of her paintings (Quandamooka: The Art of Kath Walker) was edited by Ulli Beier and published by the Aboriginal Arts Council with Robert Brown and Associates.

The eighties also saw further travel. In 1985 she was a member of the Australia/China Council party which toured China, and poems written on this tour (Kath Walker in China) became the first collection written by an Aboriginal to be co-published by Australian and Chinese publishing houses and presented in Chinese and English.

In 1986, at the invitation of Secretary-General Gorbachev, she was a delegate to the International Forum for a Nuclear Free World for the Survival of Humanity held in Moscow. On her way home from Russia she lectured in New Delhi on ‘Aboriginal Grass Roots Culture'. And somehow in the same year she managed to be both actor and script consultant for Bruce Beresford's film The Fringe Dwellers.