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

History Always Repeats happening in the world outside my family home — being superseded by an almost palpable sense of stultifying greyness as the 1970s began. In the last year of the 60s, when the USA beat Russia in landing a man on the moon, I stood in my family’s backyard in a small construction village in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, a five-year- old balancing on an upturned box, being steadied by my dad, looking through his surveyor’s telescope at the glowing orb in the night sky, not quite comprehending how a human being could be all the way up there . As one of about 20 families on site, our life was isolated but idyllic, swimming in creeks and waterholes, having free rein in the surrounding bush, the night skies unimpeded by city lights. It was not till a couple of years later, after another move following Dad’s work, that I was brought face-to-face with the ugly troll of racism in small-town country Australia. Ours was the only mixed-race, black–white family that I was aware of, something that was clearly unacceptable to the equally small-minded citizens who were offended by the invisible, but nonetheless improper , cultural boundaries that had been transgressed by my parents, of which my brothers and I were the unpalatable outcome. I also recall the annual ANZAC marches of the time being low-key small-time events, far removed from contemporary melodramatic extravaganzas, which appear to have a view warped by patriotic fervour/ fever, a need to hang onto an increasingly romanticised, fictionalised past. These celebrations also conveniently exclude recognition that Indigenous servicemen and women had made the same, selfless — often supreme — sacrifices as their non-Indigenous countrymen and women. They too fought on distant shores, in distant wars, only to have their contributions denied or denigrated on their return to their traditional homelands, as poignantly portrayed in Koori artist, Lesley-Anne Murray’s screen-print Black soldier from the 1994 series ‘My grandfather’. Likewise, at that time Australia Day, 26 January, did not even register. And rightly so, for how could we happily, knowingly celebrate events in which, on the one hand, we were supposed to participate as good Australian citizens, while on the other, deny the history of what had been (perpetrated and) perpetuated, and to this day continues to have such negative impact upon Indigenous people. The 60s and 70s also thankfully brought an increasing awareness of cultural and racial inequality here and abroad, with civil rights protests making the news. Protests in the USA were echoed in the Charlie Perkins/ University of Sydney-led Freedom Ride through rural New South Wales in 1965, and the Gurindji Walk Off from Vestey’s Station at Wave Hill in the Northern Territory (1966). The 1967 referendum and the resultant Constitution Alteration (Aboriginals) 1967 act was heralded as the only acceptable outcome of decades of dissent. Unknown to the general public, waves of cultural exchange had/have been occurring for centuries along the northern and western coastlines, with Dutch and Portuguese colonial exploration parties, and Chinese and Macassan 2 seasonal traders and trepang fishermen, visiting and spending time with diverse Indigenous nations. Aspects of these ongoing visits merged into Indigenous culture across the northern regions through language, dance, customary practices and marriage. The resulting children were the reflections of these contacts. Later generations brought new waves of visitors: gold diggers; pearl divers; Afghan cameleers; adventurers and latter-day buccaneers; missionaries; land-grab barons; blackbirders and their quarry (kidnapped South Sea Islanders); ethnographers and anthropologists (academically trained or self-taught); outsiders and insiders, all seeking their very own holy grail, driven by the need to lay claim to some thing upon which their name could be endowed, engraved, eradicating the original, true name or place. These connections, these multi-faceted layers of shared history, were fraught, fractious, devastating and irreversible, but also occasionally of mutual benefit and shared respect — at least until financial gain became the imperative desire. Traces of centuries of contact remain in place names and attributives: Groote Eylandt (named Great Island in 1644 by Dutch explorer, Abel Tasman); the Torres Strait, (named after Luis Váez de Torres, second-in-command on a 1605 Spanish expedition led by Pedro Fernandez de Quirós); balander, (a Kriol term used by Yolngu in Arnhem Land and on the Tiwi Islands for ‘white man’, derived from ‘Hollander’, referring to early Dutch colonisers), and so forth. These traces are also evident when one looks at the names of many of the country’s leading contemporary Indigenous artists represented in ‘My country’, and they resonate throughout their art works. This is manifested through myriad methodologies: in spoken and written political protest, petitions, lamentations, declarations — both poetic and polemical; or reflected in the visual and performative methods of customary practices and contemporary song and dance, theatre, television, film; through experimental visual art and performance, What if there was an Invasion Day [Dis]Honours List in response, a compilation of all those individuals who have profited from the denial of basic civil rights for the hundreds of distinct First Nations upon which this continent’s wealth continues to be mined? Would the list include descendants of past robber/pastoral/ mining barons, whose status, estates and reputations are little else but ‘empires built upon the bones of the dispossessed’? 1 This country suffers from a severely schizophrenic identity crisis; one moment suckling at the teat of old Mother Country, Britain, the next, suckling at the pert breast of the new Motherland, the USA, both thousands of kilometres and another hemisphere distant. Allegiances may have shifted from a colonial super-power to a neo-colonial super-power, but the song remains the same, off-key and dissonant. Let’s think of Australia as an off-kilter travelling showmen’s boxing troupe. The cry goes up: Roll up, roll up! Round one – ding! In Aboriginal colours, The Red, Bla(c)k and Gold spars with the Red, White and Blue — a bit of biff as the sparring partners face up and square off against each other, only the odds are nowhere near being even, the outcome seems to be a foregone conclusion, the match fixed. Round two — ding, ding! Representing the Torres Strait, Blue, Green, Bla(c)k and White, shape up to the constellation of the Southern Cross, as appropriated by red(neck), white & (true) blue would-be wild colonial lads. At the end of the twentieth century, Waanyi activist (and brilliant colourist) Gordon Hookey mightily delivered a sucker-punch to the conservative collective solar plexus with his work, King hit (for Queen and country) 1999. A punching bag is covered in Hookey’s signature caricatures and stream-of-consciousness text, including then Liberal PM John Winston Howard obscenely kowtowing to the newly minted Queen of Xenophobia and Bigotry, Pauline Hanson, who is depicted as a tool of the puppet-master, her senior advisor David Oldfield. Hookey’s boxing gloves, swathed in the colours of the Aboriginal flag, delivered a knock-out ONE–TWO! right back in the right-wing kisser. Gratifying, even if only symbolic. As we have been so often told, symbols are powerful, even if they do not deliver real outcomes. When I was growing up, a child of the 60s and 70s, disinterest in flag waving and nation building seemed the commonly held position of most of the adults around me. People appeared more interested in what was happening globally and I can clearly recall the optimism of the late 60s — as reflected by my understanding of what was Opposite Gordon Hookey Waanyi people QLD/NSW King hit (for Queen and Country) (detail) 1999 Synthetic polymer paint and oil on leather punching bag and gloves with steel swivel and rope noose Purchased 2000. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant 77 76