‘My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia’ examines strengths within the Queensland Art Gallery collection of Indigenous art and recognises three main central themes: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander versions of history; responses to contemporary politics and experiences; and connections to place. These themes are expressed in the three main Gallery spaces as the visual chapters: ‘My history’, ‘My life’ and ‘My country’.
The ‘My country’ thematic is the spine of this exhibition, interrupting, punctuating and reinforcing the claims made over history and contemporary politics, reiterating the meaning of country for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Hetti Perkins’s essay about the works included in ‘My country’ eloquently explains the inextricable links to special sites that these artists continually emphasise through bold and expressive paintings. Each work stakes a claim on behalf of its artist: ‘This is my story, this is my place. I have a dream(ing) that you will recognise my connection to these sacred places as you revere your own holy sites and places of historical significance.’ Every one of these places has been sung about and is still celebrated today in the same manner as holy and sacred sites in Jerusalem, Gallipoli and Kokoda. They are no less significant to First Nations people. The works sing their own songs, songs about place, deeds, ancestors and family.
Interestingly, some of the most iconic Australian songs and poems were written overseas — including Peter Allen’s ‘I Still Call Australia Home’ and Dorothea MacKellar’s ‘My Country’ — and illustrate how being away from home strengthens attachment to it. Many painters in central Australia were removed from their original homelands. Even those still on their lands have been tied to government-approved and administered settlements that are often away from the places of their Tjukurrpa, their dreaming sites. Likewise, a number of artists in this exhibition feel that same yearning for their motherland, painting in response increasingly large and bold works that simultaneously reaffirm their connection to these places and provide a financial means for them to do so.
Some works in the exhibition, such as Uta Uta Tjangala’s Umari Dreaming site 1983, were part of a push to return to ‘homeland’ settlements closer to sacred and ceremonial sites in the artist’s country, while others, such as Wakartu Cory Surprise’s Mimpi 2011, evolved from the collaborative map paintings used in Native Title claims to reclaim country. Some artists use painting to pass on sacred ancestral narratives through a collaborative ‘teaching and learning’ process. Ngayuku ngura (My country) Puli murpu (Mountain range) 2012 is the work of three generations of women: grandmother Ruby Tjangawa Williamson, daughter Nita Williamson and grandaughter Suzanne Armstrong. This work is as much about psychologically and physically ‘returning to country’ as a family as it is a lustrous, beautiful celebration of ngura nganampa rikina (our brilliant country), in the mountain ranges near the South Australia/Northern Territory border.
When combined, many works in ‘My Country’ effectively form a huge map, from near the Queensland/Northern Territory border in the east to the Western Australian coast. Each embodies a profound attachment to sites across the arid centre and western deserts, documenting a vital land, one far removed from ‘dead heart’ ideologies. Other works by senior and important Queensland artists tell of this state’s important places, while Megan Cope’s site-specific installation explores Aboriginal links to highly populated urban spaces by inserting (Ab)original place names on vintage military survey maps. Here, Cope worked with the landscape of the greater Brisbane region, connecting it to her Quandamooka (Moreton Bay and Stradbroke Island) people and grounding the exhibition in the country on which it is held.
The thread that binds all the disparate artists in ‘My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia’ is a desire to share their experiences, and tell stories that bring to light their contemporary lives. From paintings and sculptures about ancestral epicentres, through to photographs and videos that challenge Australia’s established history, to installations responding to the political and social situations affecting all Indigenous Australians, Black life in Australia is presented in all its vibrancy, diversity and beauty.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have made an invaluable contribution to Australian history, politics, society and art, particularly considering the size of our population. Reko Rennie’s commission Trust the 2%ers 2013 uses an urbanised version of his Kamilaroi / Gamilaraay / Gummaroi diamond designs in pink, green, blue and black to claim space and mark territory, musing on their origins as tree carvings. Rennie, proud of being one of the Indigenous two per cent of Australian society, exuberantly exclaims ‘2%er’ in gold paint. Rennie is proud, and rightly so. All Australians should be equally proud of this section of our population, which has contributed so much to our lives, to our place. The works in ‘My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia’ tell important stories from a crucial part of Australian society. The 2%ers.
‘This land is mine / This land is me’ is an extract from the 2013 exhibition catalogue ‘My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia’ by Bruce McLean.
Bruce McLean is Curator, Indigenous Australian Art, QAGOMA
From June until late October, the Gallery presents its largest exhibition of contemporary Indigenous Australian art, which aims to facilitate what Carly Lane describes as a ‘truly national conversation about nationhood’. Celebrate the opening weekend on Saturday 1 June by enjoying a day of discussions, workshops and talks by artists, performers, writers and curators ending with with a night of music, and a chance to see the exhibition after hours. At Up Late, enjoy special musical performances by Archie Roach, together with the Medics and special guest Bunna Lawrie (Coloured Stone).
Inspired by songs that reference Australianness, including Peter Allen’s iconic anthem, ‘I still call Australia home’, this major exhibition kicks off the Gallery’s winter exhibition program. Exhibition curator Bruce McLean, Curator, Indigenous Australian Art, is among the next generation of curators directing discourse in Australian contemporary art. ‘My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia’ features over 300 works by more than 130 artists from every state and territory across Australia, and dominates the ground floor of GOMA, presenting a truly national conversation about nationhood as experienced and told by contemporary artists of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage. It forms part of a wider Australian narrative about being Aussie: notions of mateship and courage epitomised by the Anzacs of World War One, a fair go for all in the lucky country, and our love of football are some of the better known. But there is more to it than mateship, meat pies and sport; alternative, competing and even reaffirming narratives glimmer in the stories and experiences of every Australian. ‘My Country’ goes some way toward presenting these other narratives.
Drawn from the Gallery’s Collection and including works by Vernon Ah Kee, Brook Andrew, Destiny Deacon, Archie Moore, Doreen Reid Nakamarra, Judy Watson and many more, the exhibition spans more than three decades to present the artists’ relationships, connections and conceptions of Australian-hood. Two installations have been commissioned specifically for the exhibition: Trust the 2% 2013 by Reko Rennie and Fluid Terrain 2012 by Megan Cope, which can be found in the Gallery’s Foyer and River Room respectively. A plethora of new and old media, such as paintings, linocut and digital prints, film, photography, natural pigments, light installations, and delicate paper sculptures, flesh out these Australian stories and experiences via the three themes — ‘My country’, ‘My life’ and ‘My history’ — that steer the exhibition. Each story, experience and work of art relates to each artist’s ‘understanding of this shared physical, political, social and cultural space and place’. 1
Visitors to ‘My Country’ will likely walk away with a new schema that links ‘Black’ and ‘Australian’ together, in our history, in the present, and in the future. In this respect, the exhibition is both ambitious and timely. It is ambitious because it attempts to introduce a new conversation about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It addresses our experiences of being Australian, a condition and identity marker often overlooked by and for the First Peoples of this country. What it is to be Australian is an interesting experience to consider; admittedly this is only something I reflect on when I’m outside of my usual routines and surroundings or away from home. As an inclusive and forwardthinking nation, it is time to think beyond pre-existing narratives and fixed notions about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, art and culture.
Musical lyrics, penned in different times and circumstances, also punctuate the exhibition’s stories, experiences and themes. The inclusion of musical references is clever, and is also one of the defining features of the exhibition, showing great curatorial creativity. McLean especially references eminent black singers and songwriters, including Australian hip-hop group The Last Kinection, throughout the exhibition. By doing this, he makes obvious the role that ‘both art and music have in shaping national and cultural psyche and identity’ and draws attention to that fact that every biography has a corresponding soundtrack.
‘My Country’ deliberately holds little back. It celebrates and challenges a broad spectrum of views about what it means to be Australian. The artists ‘tell it like it is’, articulating experiences without fear or favour or conforming to dominant views held in or outside their communities. The highs and lows, the joy and pain, and the continuities and contradictions of being Australian fold in and away from each other across the exhibition. ‘My Country’ shows that art does mirror life.
Symmetries and convergences are evident across the exhibition and its three themes. Alongside the conversations set out by McLean and the artists, audiences will undoubtedly build their own associations between individual works in the show. Suites of prints by Banduk Marika and Michael Cook and a painting by Trevor Nicholls demonstrate just one of the many links within the exhibition. Individually, the works present complex stories and experiences, but together they narrate more widely shared, lived experiences within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across Australia. Marika’s black and white linocut prints of the Djang’kawu sisters show a creation narrative of the Yolngu people of north-east Arnhem Land; Michael Cook’s digital prints from his ‘Civilised’ series 2012, depict Aboriginal men and women wearing and carrying the tools of the three Cs — Christianity, civilisation and colonisation; and Nicholls’s two-part painting From Dreamtime 2 Machinetime 1979 portrays two different scenes — figures in the top half of the canvas exist in nature, while the figures in the bottom half reside in a built environment. All three works reflect different parts of a single story about being Australian. They also reflect the continuum of life, how we are born, transformed and deal with the ensuing fractures, dualities and adjustments we encounter — and, in this case, the life of a Black Australian. ‘My Country’ also features a consortium of individual works in which its power is at once paramount and immediate. Bindi Cole’s large wall installation I forgive you 2012, featuring the statement drafted in emu feathers, is one such work.
‘My Country’ is a...
