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

This land is mine/This land is me Australia’s most famous poet might have been had he been born Black. Musicians in the pre-modern era were marginalised while their music was appropriated. Bennett connects this practice to the appropriation of designs from First Nation and traditional societies by an art world intent on liberating them from their original contexts and mitigating meaning until a modern art design remains. Bennett’s cubist-inspired banjo sculpture takes aim at the appropriation of African traditions by one of Europe’s most important art movements, while his mirror- lined box of ‘Coon Sticks’ (a confectionary produced in Melbourne in the early 1900s) is: ‘a metaphor for complexity and the indescribable (with language) "reality" of the human mind with its constant flow of thoughts, knowledge, memories of the past, experience of the present and imaginations of a better future'. 12 Richard Bell considers the same history in Bell's Theorem (Trikky Dikky and friends) 2005, but he goes one step further, listing the names of visual artists he believes have appropriated Aboriginal designs or misrepresented the art and culture of Aboriginal people in their works. One of the most important social movements toward positive change in recent decades has been the Reconciliation Movement, which gained momentum in the wake of then prime minister Paul Keating’s 1992 ‘Redfern Address’, perhaps the most significant and stirring oration concerning Indigenous people and issues by any Australian politician. In the address he asked Australians to imagine themselves in the shoes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in a particularly poignant passage: . . . it might help us if we non-Aboriginal Australians imagined ourselves dispossessed of land we have lived on for 50 000 years — and then imagined ourselves told that it had never been ours . . . Imagine if ours was the oldest culture in the world and we were told that it was worthless. Imagine if we had resisted this settlement, suffered and died in the defence of our land, and then were told in history books that we had given up without a fight . . . Imagine if we had suffered the injustice and then were blamed for it . . . It seems to me that if we can imagine the injustice then we can imagine its opposite. And we can have justice. 13 Richard Bell’s I didn’t do it 2002 looks at the popular backlash against this move toward social change and equality. Unfortunately, not all Australians were touched by Keating’s words. Instead, collective amnesia and forfeiture of responsibility for Australia’s colonial history dogged this campaign, and continues to tarnish political, social and historical debates surrounding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and issues. Bell’s I didn’t do it takes aim at this ideology, explaining that, to some extent, every Australian is living off the wealth of colonisation and the deprivations of Australia’s First Nations. Former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s ‘Apology to Australia's Indigenous Peoples’ was another move toward recognising the hurt to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, brought about by past policies and practices: We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country . . . For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry. 14 Bindi Cole’s brave work I forgive you 2012 was created in response to this apology, and to events that have affected her family for generations, such as the government- mandated forced removal of mixed-race children from Aboriginal families. In February 2013, the fifth anniversary of the Apology, and on the passing of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples Recognition Bill 2012, 15 Prime Minister Julia Gillard commented that: . . . there is no record of any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander person taking part [in building our national charter] . . . No mention of their dispossession, their proud and ancient cultures, their profound connection to the land or the unhealed wound that even now lies open at the heart of our national story . . . No gesture speaks more deeply to the healing of our nation's fabric, than amending our nation's founding charter . . . We are bound to each other in this land and always will be. Let us be bound in justice and dignity as well. 16 Despite these hard-won victories, Bell, Albert and many other Aboriginal people view these speeches and apologies as piecemeal or as an emotional sideshow distracting people from the ultimate goals of self- determination, land rights (over Native Title) and recognised sovereignty for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. In recent years, Albert’s Sorry 2008 has been installed backwards to highlight this point. Bindi Cole Wathaurung people VIC Frederina 2009 Pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper, ed.2/8 Purchased 2011 with funds from the Bequest of Grace Davies and Nell Davies through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Oneofthemost importantsocial movementstoward positive change in recentdecades has beentheReconciliation Movement . . . with ideologies that correlate Aboriginal people with flora and fauna, not humanity. The black ‘hoodie’ that the artist dons alludes to the growing numbers of disaffected Aboriginal youths for whom the gap between their realities, and those of the general Australian populace, continually widens. Importantly, the exhibition also examines issues of racism in three realms of contemporary Australian society — sport, music and art — which are often theatres for racial tension, despite Indigenous Australians making significant impacts. Ron Hurley’s Bradman bowled Gilbert 1989 unites the contrasting lives of two depression-era sporting heroes — Donald Bradman and Eddie Gilbert. Even in an impoverished era, Australians paid handsomely to watch these enormously popular sportsmen play. But on one day in 1931, Gilbert, considered one of the world’s fastest ever bowlers, did the unimaginable. He bowled Bradman for a ‘duck’, which led to controversy over Gilbert’s bowling action. 10 Soon the Queensland Cricket Association instructed the Protector of Aborigines in Queensland to ‘return Gilbert to the Cherbourg Aboriginal Mission at once’. He was scarcely heard of again until news of his death emerged in 1978 after he had spent the preceding 29 years in a Brisbane psychiatric hospital. 11 From the world of music, Gordon Bennett’s If Banjo Paterson was black 1995 imagines what the life of 19 18