My country, I still call Australia home: Contemporary art from Black Australia

This land is mine/This land is me Joan Nancy (Wir Innbe Ngali) Stokes Warrumuungu people NT The Killing Fields at Attack Creek 2002 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas Gift of Karen Brown in memory of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2013. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program (father of author Steele Rudd), an early settler of southern and south-western Queensland, make special note of the killings of Jiman (Iman/Yiman) people following their resistance and killing of a group of settlers at Hornet Bank: My occupation frequently took me over the Dawson country, necessitating my travelling via Hornet Bank, Booroonda and Mount Hutton. Often have I ridden over the very ground where the police came up with the murderers of the Fraser family and saw the bleaching bones of the dead blacks strewn here and there — a gruesome sight! — full-ribbed bodies, fleshless arms, disjointed leg-bones and ghastly grinning skulls peeping out of the grass. 7 Vincent Serico’s final work, Carnarvon collision (Big map) 2006, tells Jiman contact history in the lead up to the Hornet Bank Massacre (1857), as passed down through his Jiman family links, relaying the history held by a people so brutally treated that they were thought by some to have been exterminated. The survival of Aboriginal people along the colonial frontier created new problems for settler society. A huge number of displaced people from devastated societies became fringe dwellers, living off the invaders’ scraps. Those who were not useful to land barons as unpaid or underpaid labourers were moved onto state reserves and Christian missions, where their lives were controlled by church and government officials. Dale Harding, a Brisbane-based Bidjara and Ghungalu artist, has created an arresting simulacrum of a nineteenth-century ‘king plate’, inscribed with the code ‘W38’. King plates were used by colonial authorities to identify those Aboriginal people they recognised as leaders, or appropriate liaisons — as ‘king’, ‘queen’ or ‘prince’. In Harding’s case, the plate manifests the codification of his grandmother at Woorabinda Aboriginal Mission. ‘W’ refers to Woorabinda and ‘38’ is the number that was used by mission authorities to identify her — she was reduced to an alphanumeric code on a case file. Harding’s rusted cast-iron crescent identification tag imagines Australia’s quite literally buried history. (These gorgets are often found by farmers ploughing fields.) Harding, by creating this object, has excavated his family’s history and unearthed debates about the systems that classify Indigenous Australians and that still seek to control lives. Warwick Thornton’s 3-D video Stranded 2011 sets up another dichotomy that has left an indelible mark on The opening two verses of this epic song about Australian life, by Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly, provide an insightful glimpse into a critical dichotomy in Australian history and society — a dichotomy that is at the heart of ‘My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia’. The first verse, sung by Kelly, describes a white Australian’s experience tirelessly working a piece of mortgaged land to make a living so he can come to call it his own. The second, by Murri musician Carmody, voices his people’s immutable spiritual and physical connection to the very same place over thousands of years. Both make an unflinching claim over this land by jointly declaring, ‘They won’t take it away, They won’t take it away, They won’t take it away fromme’, and asks if either claim is more legitimate than the other. In the exhibition, the artists present their own claims, countering existing ideas about history, place and society in contemporary Australia. ‘My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia’ presents stories and experiences from artists of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage 2 that form part of a wider Australian narrative. The exhibition’s title recalls perhaps the best- known, ‘unofficial’ Australian anthem — Peter Allen’s ‘I Still Call Australia Home’ (1980). The song has been ‘owned’ by Australians and Australian corporations, yet the lyrics relate to a fairly specific section of Australian society — travellers and expatriates reminiscing about, and trying to re-establish links with home. 3 Once part of a QANTAS ad campaign, one version featured an Indigenous children’s choir singing in Kala Lagaw Ya — the language of the people of the western Torres Strait Islands — even though most Indigenous Australians do not identify with homesick expatriates in Rio, New York or London. The title, ‘I Still Call Australia Home’, also references the remix ‘Still Call OZ Home’ and blog post by Aboriginal hip-hop group The Last Kinection. 4 This remix stemmed from their divergent experiences with the overriding philosophies of the original — their history and their exposure to elements of racism in sections of Australian media and society compelled them to contribute this poignant verse: They invaded, degraded and polluted our land, Stole all the children and raped our women, But no matter how long or how far I roam, I still call Australia home. Their lyrics give new meaning to the phrase ‘I still call Australia home’. They declare that we, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, have survived, we have not gone away, and this is still our land: ‘We still call Australia home’. Finally, the exhibition title also considers the idea of country. ‘My country’ is a declaration used by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and people across the entire continent to refer to the homelands their ancestors lived on before colonial processes and conflict caused their removal or exodus. It refers to the place their spiritual being and the essence of their identity still belong. Aboriginal artists often title their works My country — it is a simple yet unflinching statement about their land, where they are from, where they belong. In this exhibition it is a rallying call uniting all country that makes up Black Australia; but it also refers to the constructed nation — also now our country. ‘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’. My History Indigenous histories have emerged as a strong current in contemporary art over the past two decades. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from across the country have begun to add their histories, held in oral traditions or state and family archives, to the known, taught and accepted versions of Australian history. Some see this as a program of ‘revisionism’, where artists are heavily engaged in questioning established narratives. Others see it as part of a ‘two-way history’. ‘History wars’ and ‘culture wars’ notwithstanding, each artist records their stories, re-examining ‘whose point of view gets recorded, whose voice matters’. 5 Joan Nancy Stokes’s suite of paintings are among the most powerful works in this exhibition, depicting a massacre of Warrumuungu people at Attack Creek on the Barkly Tableland near Tennant Creek. 6 Why are these people being displaced from their country, marched by men on horses, then lined up and shot? Did they kill a European’s cow? Did they protest their dispossession too strongly? Does it matter? The works are emblematic of the tragedy and futility of war and conflict. Stokes’s paintings present one of numerous accounts of massacres of Aboriginal people, held and passed on in oral traditions, but often excluded from official records. Details of other massacres continue to emerge from early frontier settlers’ personal records. The memoirs of Thomas Davis 15 14