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

Every work in ‘My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia’ represents a form of engagement with country. In the chapter ‘My country’, the succession of paintings, sculptures and installations offers a whirlwind virtual fly-by over our vast continent and islands. The ridges of sandhill country, the undulating depths of the sea, brilliant flashes of light, the shimmer of saltpans, winding tracks and river courses, the vast plains of the inland and the infinite reaches of the skies are all mapped in works of incredible variety and form. Some of the paintings telescope into the minutiae of country, while others suggest the breadth of the landscape through their ambitious scale. Megan Cope’s panoramic wall installation Fluid Terrain 2012 literally charts the topography of the greater Brisbane region, casting a numinous cartography over the built environment. For those of us who live in an urban landscape, perhaps away from our traditional homelands, Cope’s work bridges the parallel worlds we inhabit of what was before and what is now. In recent years, a ‘Welcome to country’ has become a standard protocol observed at public events to begin procedures by formally recognising the custodians of the land where the event is held. Variations include an ‘Acknowledgment of country’ where the speaker is not from the region in which the event is taking place and so pays respect to the traditional custodians. Our people generally acknowledge the people of the country we are in when invited to participate in a public forum of any scale — and in any part of the world — and customarily begin by stating our own cultural identity by way of introduction. This practice has become widespread in schools throughout the country and is enacted at the highest levels of government. On a broad level, this is a political statement of affirmation tied to the land rights and sovereignty movement, and on a personal level is a simple matter of what Richard Bell would call ‘etiquette and manners’. 1 Rhoda Roberts traces this protocol to the foundational days of the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust in the 1980s, where the practice grew — appropriately — My country Hetti PerkinS Doreen Reid Nakamarra Pintupi/Ngaatjatjarra peoples WA/NT Untitled (Marrapinti) (detail) 2008 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas Purchased 2009 with funds from the Bequest of Grace Davies and Nell Davies through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 25