Herb Wharton (born 1936) is an Indigenous Australian former stockman and now internationally recognised poet and novelist.A Murri man, his maternal grandmother was Kooma, and both grandfathers Irish. He was born in Yumba, an Aboriginal camp in the south-western Queensland town of Cunnamulla.Wharton has worked as a stockman, a drover and a labourer, but did not begin his writing career until in the 1980s, when he was around 50, he sat down under a tree and began to write.