Content uploaded by Paola Balla
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Paola Balla on Jan 30, 2023
Content may be subject to copyright.
Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius:
The ways that First Nations women
in art & community
speak Blak to the colony & patriarchy
Paola Balla
Submitted in fulfillment of the award of PhD
by Creative Project and Exegesis
Moondani Balluk
VU Institute for Health and Sport
Victoria University, Naarm/Melbourne
2020
ii
ABSTRACT
For PhD by creative project and exegesis:
Balla, P. (2020) Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius: The ways that First
Nations women in art & community speak Blak to the colony & patriarchy
The concept of ‘artistic terra nullius’ refers to the violent erasure of First Nations
peoples in colony Australia and highlights their absence – particularly Aboriginal
Women – in the white-dominated arts world. This doctoral research by creative
project and exegesis sets out to document and respond to the work of
Aboriginal women in art and community. I have used practice-led inquiry as the
main methodology, informed by my own roles as artist, writer, curator,
community researcher and as a Wemba-Wemba & Gunditjmara, matriarchal
and sovereign woman. Practising community ways of 'being, knowing and
doing' to witness, participate and respond to Aboriginal women's art making and
activism, I developed a new body of visual works and a series of essays,
together with an exegesis relating to the project as a whole.
The exhibition in December 2019 at Footscray Community Arts Centre held two
bodies of work in two spaces. The ontological (or Being) space was a healing
space of unconditional love, one of memory, timelessness, and respite. It has
been created as 'daily acts of repair' in collaboration with other Aboriginal
women and family members in a new process of bush dyeing fabrics, clothing
and rags to become 'healing cloths”, dyed with gathered gum leaves, bush
flowers, plants and Wemba-Wemba family bush medicine gifted to me from my
Aunties. As a three-dimensional space, it makes visible trauma trails and stains
and visualises what respite and healing could look and feel like. Under the 1961
flickering Super-8 image of my great-grandmother, this space also recreates
‘home’, particularly resonating with Aboriginal women’s curation of ‘home’ even
in Mission housing. The second space, an epistemological (or Knowing) space,
was an active studio of photographic based works drawn from matriarchal
family stories, both past, present and future, and archival research. It included
iii
scholarly and other literature on Blak art and representation, in a recreation of
my home studio and office.
These bodies of work were made over a four-year project, drawing on concepts
of de-colonising, Aboriginal feminist standpoint theory (Moreton- Robinson) and
sovereignty. In emphasising making art as both research and artistic outcomes,
I demonstrate art as a sovereign act, based in cultural practice and sovereign
values. Both the exhibition spaces and the exegesis weave across past,
present and future, across research in family, community and the Aboriginal
women’s arts-work, across multiple creative media and stories – in the process
here called ‘Ghost Weaving’. Responding to various modes of oppression,
patriarchy and racism, Blak women’s art is not only a form of resistance to
colonising, to violence, to academia and the white art world. It is also an ethical
foregrounding of other forms of knowing and being.
The exegesis is in two main parts: the written, thesis-element and a series of
appendices which include a pictorial record of the exhibition, links and lists of
related works, including relevant essays.
iv
Declaration
I, Paola Balla, declare that the PhD thesis entitled Disrupting Artistic Terra
Nullius: is no less than 18,000 words and no more than 30,000 words in length
including quotes and exclusive of tables, figures, appendices, bibliography,
references and footnotes. This thesis contains no material that has been
submitted previously, in whole or in part, for the award of any other academic
degree or diploma. Except where otherwise indicated, this thesis is my own
work.
I have conducted my research in alignment with the Australian Code for the
Responsible Conduct of Research and Victoria University’s Higher Degree by
Research Policy and Procedures.
Signature:
Date: October 30, 2020
v
Dedication and Acknowledgements
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I acknowledge Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri Country, Ancestors and Peoples.
I have created the majority of this project on this Country where I live, work and
raise my family.
I acknowledge Wemba-Wemba Country as my matriarchal homelands and my
Peoples. I acknowledge Gunditjmara homelands as my great-grandfather’s
Country and Peoples, Robert Wallace Egan of Purnim.
Thank you to KJ (Karen Jackson), Director, Moondani Balluk Indigenous
Academic Unit, Victoria University for your longstanding support, generosity,
mentorship and leadership. You hold space for others, and I have been able to
do this work because of your work and dedication to community ways. Thank
you to all the Moondani Balluk Mob, past and present, for your solid support
and encouragement.
Seeing the other women on the weaving mat: Thank you Tidda Trisha
Harrison, for teaching me Koorie basket weaving at Victoria University in 2018
and Tidda Kim Kruger, for arranging the women’s weaving circle. I am so
grateful I was able to learn with my daughter, Rosie, and other Tiddas with
Moondani Balluk on this focused healing and cultural practice. Thanks again to
the deadly KJ, Yorta Yorta woman and mentor, for making this gathering time
possible and for holding a culturally safe space, where Blak women are making
and re-creating. Thank you to every Tidda I have worked with over the years at
Moondani Balluk, whose lives have been tragically cut short, as Aboriginal
women’s lives tragically do too often. Lisa Bellear, Liz Von Rhuel, Jamie Binks
and Raelene Clinch, you are all remembered, loved and appreciated for all of
your most deadly contributions, creativity, generosity and sisterhood.
Thank you to my Principal Supervisor, Professor Chris Sonn, your patience,
knowledge and encouragement at every hurdle and delay has been invaluable.
vi
Thank you, Prof Sue Dodd for your insight and encouragement of my visual
practice and exhibition.
Thank you, Professor Tracey Bunda, my Associate Supervisor, Sovereign
Warrior Woman for your knowledge, expertise and guidance and for speaking
strength into me each time I was lost. Thank you Aunty.
Thank you to Professor Marie Brennan and Professor Lew Zipin for your brilliant
work in editing this thesis with such attention, generosity, expertise and
kindness. You brought this all together beautifully.
Thank you to the Families of the late great Lisa Bellear, Moondani Balluk and
Victoria University Research for the incredible support of the Lisa Bellear
Indigenous Research Scholarship throughout my candidature. Thank you to the
Institute for Health and Sport at VU and their support of my research and
exhibition.
I acknowledge my Nan’s cousin, Aunty Melva Johnson, and all my Aunties in
Echuca (my home community) for their tireless work and dedication to
Aboriginal Education, where I was able to complete our community based
Nyerna Studies, Bachelor of Education Program VU (2001); without it I would
not have reached this point.
I acknowledge the esteemed Elder, Aunty Margaret Lilardia Tucker and her
1977 autobiography, ‘If Everyone Cared,’ which I cite with the greatest respect
and appreciation. Auntie’s book contains a retelling of the Mok Mok story. I
have been inspired by Mok Mok since I was a child, and enact a version of Mok
Mok in my photographic works. My grandmother Rosie’s signed copy of ‘If
Everyone Cared,’ was gifted to me by my mother Margie at the start of my PhD
project.
To the team who helped me install the exhibition and bring it all together; Simon
Kilvert, for building the Mission House, and installing the show with assistance
from Allister (FCAC). Thanks to VU crew, Samuel Keast, Roshani Jayawardana
vii
and Rama Agung-Igusti for helping me on install days and Sam for the beautiful
exhibition catalogue.
Thank you to Bernie Fitzgerald Senior Producer, FCAC, Ben Beare, Facilities
Production Coordinator FCAC, and Dan Mitchell Senior Producer: Indigenous
Cultural Program, FCAC, for hanging the largest work in the Roslyn Smorgon
gallery, Lovescapes, Wemba-Wemba Country (2016). Thanks to Ashley
Buchanan, theatre lighting technician, for stunning lighting of the Unconditional
Love Space. Thanks to All About Graphics who printed the photographic works,
the Wemba-Wemba Lovescapes wallpaper and expertly installed it.
Thank you to Dr Vicki Couzens for a wonderful interview at the start of this
project. Although I moved away from formal interviews, and it is not included, I
appreciate your life long work in Koorie art and community and your
encouragement of me over the years. I will return to this work of interviewing
Aboriginal women artists for a book in future. Thank you to the Indigenous
Advisory Group at FCAC, including Vicki, Robbie Bundle, KJ, Narweet Carolyn
Briggs, Aunty Annette Xiberas, Uncle Larry Walsh for your support and
encouragement. Thank you to everyone at FCAC, your support is invaluable in
making Blak art in a local community space.
Thank you to my incredible Elders, Aunties & Uncles, Yaryins, Cousins, Tiddas,
Brothers, Trans Siblings and non-binary Siblings and family of friends for your
encouragement and love.
Thank you to Nayuka Gorrie, Annette Sax, Megan Cadd-Van Den Berg, Gina
Bundle, Pauline Whyman, Tarsha Davis, my mother Margie Tang, Rosie Kalina
and Katen Balla for learning bush dyeing and making healing cloths with me,
walking the Maribyrnong, gathering and yarning with me.
I acknowledge the support of the Australia Council’s International Market
Development Fund and Performance Space New York to participate in the First
Nations Dialogues in January 2018 and January 2019 during my research.
viii
Thank you to the following festivals, galleries and curators for showing my PhD
works between 2015-2020; Kingston Art Gallery, Melbourne (2016), Tarnanthi
Indigenous National Art Festival (2017) and ACE Open, curated by Kimberley
Moulton, Yorta Yorta and Liz Nowell; State of the Nation, Counihan Gallery,
curated by Kimberley Moulton, Melbourne (2016); Walan Yinaagirbang Strong
Women, First Draft Gallery, curated by Emily McDaniel, Kalari Clan, Wiradjuri
Nation, Sydney (2017); Lucky, Bundoora Homestead, curated by Sophia Cai
and Claire Watson, Exhibition Advisor: Yhonnie Scarce (2018); In Character,
Verge Gallery, curated by Peter Johnson and Tesha Malott, Sydney (2019) and
Affirmation at Koorie Heritage Trust (2020) curated by Gail Harradine,
Wotjobaluk/Jadawadjali, for the postponed international photographic festival,
PHOTO2020.
I acknowledge ACCA and Max Delany and all the artists and community
involved in the Sovereignty exhibition (2016-2017) to bring South Eastern
Aboriginal art back into that space after a twenty-two year absence after Hetti
Perkins and Claire Williamson curated Blakness; Blak City Culture, at ACCA in
1994, and for support of my work as a Koorie woman curator.
I’d also like to acknowledge the editors and publications that commissioned
writing from me during my candidature and organisations which invited me to
speak. I am grateful to have had so many fantastic opportunities to share the
work of Aboriginal women during my candidature. Thank you to all those deadly
women for your contributions to truth telling in art and community.
Thank you to my family and my safe place: my husband Anthony, and our
children Rosie, Katen, Hollie and Kylle; and my little guardian Kwe for your
loving and patient support throughout this long project. I’d especially like to
thank Anthony for collaborating with me on the Mok Mok photography (and
many of my projects) and for always being there; Rosie for the make-up and
making of healing cloths with me. Thank you to Katen for making a special
healing cloth for the Mission House with me.
ix
To my mother and Matriarch, Margie Tang, you are a sovereign warrior woman,
and healer. Thankyou Mum for contributing to this project so profoundly and for
your deadly speech at the exhibition opening. Thank you to my brother Johnny
for your love and my niece Maggie for posing up for Auntie’s photos. Thanks to
you and Rosie for collaborating with me on the research we did at AIATSIS in
Canberra on Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri Country to retrieve our
Wemba-Wemba family materials, film footage, photographs, stories and audio
recordings of Nanny Nancy and Uncle Stanley ‘Stoon’ Day.
Thank you to my grandmother Rosie Tang nee Egan, an artist and poet who
told me at nine years of age to “get educated, beat them at their own game and
go as far as you can”. Nan, as you were not allowed to go further than grade 3
as a Black child, I honour you in this work for teaching me to value education as
emancipation.
x
DEDICATION
To all the Aunties who bush dye, make work for and with community and work
closely with Country for healing and wellbeing from plant knowledges. To my
Mother and Grandmother, artists and poets, fighters and story tellers who
showed me how to dye clothes and shoes and make the best out of what you
have.
To my great grandmother Nanny Nancy Egan, née Day, who featured in the
exhibition super 8 footage and has been a constant presence in my life, despite
passing away in 1961, thirteen years before I was born. In Echuca, at around
1998, Aunty Melva Johnson, my grandmother’s cousin, and daughter of Uncle
Stanley, ‘Stoon’ Day, told me the story of how Nanny Nancy was stopped in the
main street of Echuca during the 1967 Referendum by a white woman, who
thrust a how to vote card into her hand.
Nanny Nancy looked down at the paper, said, “This will do nothing for my
People!” and promptly ripped the paper up and threw it over her shoulder, and
strode away proudly from the white woman. Alexis Wright writes in her seminal
paper, “What Happens When You Tell Someone Else’s Story,’ that imagination
must never be underestimated. My imagination soars and is nourished by this
story, so generously and considerately shared with me by Aunty Melva. Aunty
knew I needed to hear that story at that time. I was a young single mother,
staying with my two-year-old daughter in my Aunty Maureen’s already
overcrowded home so I could undertake the Nyerna Studies Bachelor of
Education VU program to become a school teacher.
Thank you to my great-great grandmother Papa Mariah Day, a traditional
midwife and ‘liberated woman’ who has also been a constant presence in my
life through the reverence our family has for her, the way she is kept alive in our
stories, gatherings and memories as matriarchal peoples. Papa undertook the
long and risky 1500 km round trip to Sydney alone, from Moonahcullah to
attend and participate in the first Day of Mourning, January 26, 1938 in
Elizabeth Street Sydney organised by William Cooper and other members of
xi
the Aborigines Advancement League at the time to protest the unjust treatment
of all Aboriginal Peoples in Australia.
To Aunty Barbara Walker, my Grandmother’s sister, to Aunty Walda Blow my
Grandmother’s sister cousin-you were my other Grandmothers, who always
loved and encouraged me, thank you.
During my candidature, between 2015-2020, we lost loved family members,
Aunty Tanya Day; we remember her as a beautiful, strong Yorta Yorta and
Wemba Wemba woman, and the unpunished injustice of her Death in Custody.
We lost my Aunty Walda Blow, Yorta Yorta and Wemba Wemba warrior woman
and community leader. We lost my yaryin, my little Sister Cousin, Sharon
Walker, mother and staunch community woman. We lost our Tidda Raelene
Clinch.
I dedicate this work to all of them, to all my Matriarchs and to my children.
xii
ABBREVIATIONS:
PLR Practice Led Research
PAR Participatory Action Research
VU Victoria University
TERMS:
Blackfullas Aboriginal Person/People-not gender specific
Blak Curator Clare Williamson along with fellow curator Hetti
Perkins said in a written program of the 1994 collaborative First Nations
exhibition Blakness; Blak City Culture: "Destiny Deacon developed the term
'Blak' as part of a symbolic but potent strategy of reclaiming colonialist language
to create means of self-definition and expression." Ms Deacon began using the
word and spelling 'Blak' in her work, taking on the 'colonisers' language and
flipping it on its head. Deacon asserted an expression of urban Aboriginal
identity that is authentic - bearing little, if any, resemblance to the coloniser's
'boxed in' one-dimensional definition of Aboriginal Australians that, even today,
continues to be derogatory and misinformed.
Yaryin ‘sister’ in Wemba-Wemba language
Tidda ‘sister’ in Koori English
Kalina ‘to love,’ Wemba-Wemba language
Moonahcullah
‘place of many waters,’ in Wemba-Wemba language; Moonahcullah is
surrounded by the Edward River, Colligen Creek, Tumugeri Creek and the
lagoon
xiii
Table of Contents
VOLUME 1: EXEGESIS, INCLUDING REFERENCES
ABSTRACT II
DECLARATION IV
Dedication and Acknowledgements v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v
DEDICATION x
ABBREVIATIONS: xii
TERMS: xii
Table of Contents xiii
List of Figures 2
CHAPTER 1: EXERCISING ABORIGINAL WOMEN’S SOVEREIGNTY: LINKING ART,
RESEARCH AND ACTIVISM 1
CHAPTER 2: GHOST WEAVING: A CRITICAL OVERVIEW AND REFLECTION ON CREATING
THIS BODY OF WORK 14
Blak women’s work: the art of disruption and survivance 14
Disrupting colonialism in methodology 15
Yarning Methodology replacing “Interview” 19
Decolonising through Remembering: Aboriginal Matrilineal research in art 22
Reparative aesthetics: made by daily acts of repair for healing 24
Working up Aboriginal Women’s Standpoint by working on Country 26
Mok Mok: To disrupt and flip the colonial gaze with performative photography 28
xiv
Going Home to Country: creating the photographic project of six generations of my Matriarchy,
including my daughter and myself 30
Research contributing to critical analysis of my own practice as an artist and researcher 32
Photography for sovereign matriarchs 32
Curating Sovereignty 35
Visiting International Indigenous and colonised exhibitions 36
Recovering family archival records 38
Curating a space of resistance through cultural architecture: Blak Women’s Houses 40
Learning how to bush/eco dye cloths for healing and survivance by gathering stories through yarning
while gathering bush-dyeing materials on Country 46
Bringing the Exhibition together, a long labour and birthing process 50
Ghost Weaving the past, the present and the future 50
CHAPTER 3: THE EXHIBITION: UNCONDITIONAL LOVE AND MATRILINEAL KNOWLEDGE
WORK 52
The ‘Unconditional Love ‘Space: Healing cloths, the recreation of ‘Home’ and mission house under the
matriarchal gaze 54
The Epistemological space: Refusing exclusion: representing Blak Women’s knowledges 64
1. Mok Mok 65
2. Family … And the matriarchs sang 67
3. The studio/office 71
4. Lovescapes, Wemba-Wemba Country, 2017 73
Reflecting/exhibiting 75
CHAPTER 4: SPEAKING BACK AND SPEAKING BLAK 77
xv
Reasserting curation and criticism 79
Speaking Back to the university 82
The need for continuing matriarchal art and activist traditions 83
Ghostweaving Sovereignty 91
REFERENCES 96
VOLUME 2: APPENDICES
Appendix A List of Works: Unconditional Love Space
(Performance Space, FCAC)
Appendix B List of Works: Photographic works and studio installation
(Roslyn Smorgan Gallery, FCAC)
Appendix C List of selected essays published during candidature with links
Appendix D List of selected exhibition catalogues with links
Appendix F Ethics Plain Language Statement
2
List of Figures
Figure 1. Paola Balla Unconditional Love Space, (2019) Mission House 54
Figure 2. Paola Balla Unconditional Love Space, (2019) Clothes Line, (detail) 57
Figure 3. Paola Balla (2019) Clothes Line, Unconditional Love Space 60
Figure 4. Paola Balla, Kalina Moonahcullah, (2019) (detail) 61
Figure 5. Paola Balla (2019), Still from Super8 film footage, Hercus (1961), view from inside
the bush dyed cloth Mission House 63
Figure 6. Paola Balla (2016), Mok Mok Cooking Show I 66
Figure 7. Paola Balla (2015), and the matriarchs sang 67
Figure 8. Paola Balla (2018), Margie the Matriarch 68
Figure 9, Paola Balla, 2014, Born in Sovereignty, Live in Sovereignty 69
Figure 10 Childhood Memories, Rosie Tang, nee Egan, (1988) 70
Figure 11. Paola Balla, Studio Wall Collage (2019) 71
Figure 12. Paola Balla, Lovescapes: Wemba-Wemba Country (2017) 74
Figure 13 Paola Balla (2014) Untitled, 88
1
Chapter 1: Exercising Aboriginal women’s sovereignty:
Linking art, research and activism
For an Aboriginal woman artist and academic, there are many challenges in
undertaking a PhD by exhibition and exegesis. In particular there is the ethical
responsibility to my community to exercise sovereignty in refusing the
colonised-and-colonising domains of both art and academic worlds. My
Exhibition, Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius: The ways that First Nations women in
art & community speak Blak to the colony & patriarchy, emerged from an
Aboriginal women’s standpoint (Moreton-Robinson, 2013) for creative portrayal
and research of Aboriginal women’s humanity, resistance and disruptions. It
was held at Footscray Community Arts Centre (FCAC) in December 2019. The
exhibited artwork drew on visual, embodied and material practices, and on
literary and archival research including that of my matriarchal herstories.
Herstories is a term inspired by Black and Indigenous scholars as an alternative
to ‘history’. This exegesis, itself a creative task, is a form of Aboriginal women’s
work, utilising a ‘practice-led research’ methodology Arlander (2010, p329) to
disrupt Australia’s artistic Terra Nullius. The exegesis thus offers critical
analysis and reflection on the development of the creative works from a
decolonising and sovereignty-affirming Aboriginal women’s standpoint.
In this exegesis, I use a combination of Koorie English and some of my family
language, Wemba-Wemba. I am a Koorie woman; and my Peoples are Wemba-
Wemba and Gunditjmara. I only use Wemba-Wemba language names or terms
because it is the dominant matriarchal Day family lineage of my mother and all
my grandmothers, which makes me a Wemba-Wemba woman first. I am also a
member of the Egan Family and Gunditjmara woman through the patriarchal
line of my great grandfather. In this work I use a number of terms to name
Aboriginal People, including Aboriginal, Koorie, Indigenous and Blackfullas,
Black or Blak. I acknowledge that, in an Australian context, where I use the term
‘Indigenous’ it also includes Torres Strait Islander Peoples; however, I
2
respectfully state that as an Aboriginal woman I cannot speak to or about Torres
Strait Islander Peoples with any authority.
In showing care for language and lineage, I pay particular respects – in my
thesis project, and in broader arts practice and writing – by ensuring attribution
of the word Blak to Destiny Deacon, the acclaimed photographic artist and
KuKu and Erub/Mer Torres Straits woman. In the exhibition catalogue for the
1994 exhibition, Blakness: Blak City Culture – at ACCA (Australian Centre for
Contemporary Art), in collaboration with Boomalli Aboriginal Artist Co-operative
– curators Clare Williamson and Hetti Perkins wrote: ‘The term ‘Blak’ was
developed by Destiny Deacon as part of a symbolic but potent strategy of
reclaiming colonialist language to create means of self-definition and
expression’ (Perkins and Williamson, 1994 pp 20-31).
In conversation at the 2020 at the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, Deacon clarified
further:
I just wanted to take the 'C' out of 'black.' I was able to convince
Hetti Perkins and Claire Williamson to alter their curated urban
Indigenous exhibition to 'Blakness: Blak City Culture (ACCA,
Melbourne) without the 'c' in 1994!," Deacon explained at the
Cairns Indigenous Art Fair at the Cairns Art Gallery this year for
the exhibition QUEEN'S LAND- BLAK Portraiture. (in Munro
2020, n.p.)
This Blak womanist act of resistance, dropping the ‘c’ to de-weaponise the term
‘black cunt’, is an act of disruption that has grown through use, particularly by
young Aboriginal women on social media (e.g., C.Watego, M.Onus, C.Liddle,
A.McQuire) and in new and emerging Aboriginal arts dialogue and Blak arts
businesses.
Distinguished Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Goenpul woman of the
Quandamooka nation, argues that: “We are involved in a constant battle to
authorise Indigenous knowledges and methodologies as legitimate and valued
components of research” (2013, p.331). Building on Martin Nakata’s (2007,
p.213) development of the concept of Indigenous standpoint in research,
3
Moreton-Robinson insists that social positions, especially gender, must be
taken into account in standpoint methodology, emphasising the need for a
specific Australian Indigenous Women’s Standpoint:
The relationship between Australian Indigenous women’s
knowledges and experiences will be different to that of
Indigenous men because of our embodiment, our relations to
different country, people and ancestral creator beings and our
social location. I am not arguing that Indigenous men and
women do not share a body of cultural knowledge. What I am
arguing is that our experiences will differ because as
Indigenous women our social location within hierarchical
relations of ruling within our communities and Australian society
also factors into our standpoint as researchers within the
academy as does our different disciplinary training.
(Moreton-Robinson, 2013, p.339)
This doctoral work starts from and contributes to documenting Aboriginal
women’s knowledge, work and experiences. In recovering and remembering, in
making and making anew, Aboriginal women artists such as myself are working
alongside many other Indigenous groups around the world. Linda Tuhiwai Smith
points to 25 such decolonizing projects, including (while not excluding other
approaches):
Claiming, Testimonies, Story-telling, Celebrating, survival,
Remembering, Indigenizing, Intervening, Revitalizing,
Connecting, Reading, Writing, Representing, Gendering,
Envisioning, Reframing, Restoring, Returning, Democratizing,
Networking, Naming, Protecting, Creating, Negotiating,
Discovering and Sharing (2000, pp 143-160).
In the body of art I created – in which visual art creation is also a researching of
Aboriginal women’s practices of resistance and disruption – I worked from my
Standpoint as an Aboriginal woman, from visual and literary research, from my
matriarchal herstories and responding to how Blak women resist, in and through
the visual works. The exegesis shows that creating multiple strands of art and
cultural practice emerges from thousands of years of connected practice as
sovereign people. It speaks back and Blak to an ongoing patriarchy and
4
coloniality with attempts at healing and daily acts of resistance and repair. I
created new visual photographic works which: (a) honour matriarchal
knowledge and ways of being; and (b) respond to the broad body of Aboriginal
women’s work.
The overarching problematic for the project is two-fold: the responsibility, from
an Aboriginal Woman’s standpoint, to establish healing spaces of sovereignty
and to chronicle/counter herstorical traumas. Together, the exhibition and
exegesis make creative and critical-analytical sense from Aboriginal women
standpoints connected to my matriarchal herstorical lineage. By generating and
sharing new works, previously unheard stories and experiences, the exhibition
opens dialogue and opportunities for healing from transgenerational traumas of
colonisation and structural violence. Further implicated, and surfaced in the
exegesis, are the symbolic violences of omission and negation of Aboriginal
presence – in art and academic fields, reflecting the broad range of public
spaces where dominant colonial narratives continue to prevail as historical
legacies. This thesis speaks back and Blak, forcefully, to what Professor Tracey
Bunda and I have discussed as ‘Artistic Terra Nullius’.
In speaking Blak to the arts establishment and western colonialising academia
through this work, my dual exhibition and exegesis developed a meta-
methodology which, in dialogue with thesis Associate Supervisor, Professor
Tracey Bunda, Ngugi/Wakka Wakka woman, we named ‘Ghost Weaving’. This
term signifies the multi-fold art and cultural practices I wove together to conduct
the research and community cultural work of the project, combining historical,
cultural and ‘survivance’ (Vizenor 2008) practices that embody past, present
and future.
Anishinaabe Chippewa writer and scholar, Gerald Vizenor created the term
‘survivance’, defined in his essay, ‘Aesthetics of Survivance; Literary Theory
and Practice,’ as:
The theories of survivance are elusive, obscure, and imprecise
by definition, translation, comparison, and catchword histories,
but survivance is invariably true and just in native practice and
5
company. The nature of survivance is unmistakable and in
native stories, natural reason, remembrance, traditions, and
customs and is clearly observable in narrative resistance and
personal attributes, such as the native humanistic tease, vital
irony, spirit, cast of mind and moral courage. The character of
survivance creates a sense of narrative presence over
absence, nihility, and victimry.
Native survivance is an active sense of presence over absence,
deracination, and oblivion; survivance is the continuation of
stories, not a mere reaction, however pertinent. Survivance is
greater than the right of a survivable name. Survivance stories
are reannuncations of dominance, detractions, obtrusions, the
unbearable sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry.
Survivance is the heritable right of succession or reversion of
an estate and, in the course of international declarations of
human rights, is a narrative estate of native survivance
(2008, 1).
The conceptual as well as methodological threads involved in this project’s
‘Ghost Weaving’ processes are developed further in Chapter 2. A key outcome
of the overall project is the active provision of ‘heritable right’ as a decolonising
move of Sovereignty.
The exhibition included two different spaces: one focussed more on Aboriginal
women’s ontology or ways of being, in creating a matriarchal ‘healing space’
that foregrounds unconditional love connected to Homelands and community;
the other focussed more on Aboriginal women’s epistemology or ways of
knowing, representing my Studio space in which I continually explore
connections to community and family knowledges. It demonstrates connections
to the work of generations of women, including Aboriginal women artists, who
inspired me. Across these exhibition spaces of ontological and epistemological
emphasis, runs an activist impulse that the exegesis attends to as Aboriginal
women’s axiology or ways of pro-acting ethically.
As Prof Moreton-Robinson (2013, 337) emphasises:
The constitutive elements of Indigenous social research
paradigms are axiology, ontology and epistemology …
6
informed by our embodied connection to our respective
countries, all living entities and our ancestors; our
sovereignty…. Ontology is defined as our way of being …
Axiology is our way of doing … [involving] a set of ethics …
Epistemology is our way of knowing …
Elsewhere Prof Moreton Robinson (2013, 337) clarifies further: “Axiology,
ontology and epistemology are all interconnected.” She points out that: “when
researching within Indigenous communities all elements of your methodology
are totally interconnected, as it is culturally required” (337).
In this project, ontology, epistemology and axiology are co-produced. Ontology
is featured in the art-and-exegetical affirmation of spaces in which Aboriginal
sovereignty expresses; epistemology into art-and-exegetical recovering of
matriarchal-herstorical knowledges; and axiology in the activism that acts to
speak Blak and decolonise wider fields of art exhibition and academic
disciplines. Since this is a thesis based around visual art creation and
associated photographic and textual materials, there is no separate ‘literature’
chapter. There are, however, significant passages where both art and literature
by others are drawn upon as relevant to my art creation and exegetical
explication, especially (but not exclusively) in Chapter 4.
In early 2020, after the Exhibition in December 2019, as I worked to finalise this
exegesis, the conjoined crises of bushfires, coronavirus, the coronial findings of
my Aunty Tanya Day’s Death in Custody and the connected Black Lives Matter
activism disrupted me. Individual acts of work began to feel self-centred, and it
was difficult to focus in the midst of colliding crises. Yet, for Blackfullas, the
ongoing and generational experience of survival, struggle, grief, loss and
traumatic legacy is far too familiar. We have become used to dancing with
genocide, practised at resisting and disrupting the ongoing colonial project, and
dedicated to affirming our sovereignty that, as ontologically who/what we are,
can never be destroyed. The 2020 disruptions have thus been rechannelled as
fuel for exegetical thinking further about the exhibition’s expressions of artwork.
I adapted ‘Practice Led Research’ (PLR) to my thesis purposes, as both an art
praxis of pro-action, and critical-analytical reflection on this praxis, bundled – or,
7
‘ghost-woven’ – in taking up an exhibition-and-exegesis as ‘academic research’.
In this way I sought to bring my ‘academic thesis’ into the ontological,
epistemological and axiological service of Indigenous women’s standpoints.
Situating myself as a Blackfulla is part of my standpoint and specifically
acknowledging I am a (cis) straight Aboriginal woman from a strong matriarchal
lineage that, culturally and politically, emerges and evolves from past into
present and towards transformational futures. That is, the PLR methodology
needed to be decolonised, as its literature is predominantly white in its
assumptions and perspectives. For example, Malins’ introductory chapter to
PLR gives its history and origins in the UK (emulated in Australian universities
and creative arts research), with the first creative thesis being undertaken in
1978 described in unequivocally colonial terms:
Thanks to early pioneers and brave settlers, research in Art and
Design can claim some territory and draw some boundaries.
The diverse and eclectic characteristics of our particular
landscape are becoming clearer and more confident – we now
have new routes, alternative perspectives and creative
constructions (Malins 2007, 26-32).
Whilst I understand this “new” field of art research was undertaken by artists
developing research frameworks and processes, the whiteness of their
language is stark. Indigenous artists, in the face of colonisation, have continued
to make art through research practices that were developed out of necessity to
survive and speak back to colonial violence, erasure and genocidal practices
that include looting Indigenous cultures, human remains and material culture for
museum collections and for white artists to steal, copy and emulate not only in
form but concepts and intellectual property.
As a Blackfulla artist and researcher, I thus contribute to ‘decolonising
methodologies’ (Smith 1999) that support Indigenous cultural, relational and
ethical responsibilities through artistic-activist research that resists and
responds to the limited and derivative western art canon and to white
dominance in community arts and art institutions. In the context of doctoral
research in the colonised institution of the university, the place of art-as-
8
research embodies the western separational epistemologies of individualism
and the mind-body binary.
In providing a rationale for PLR, Arlander points out that:
Practice-based and art-based research frequently has a
practical, critical or emancipatory knowledge interest, whereas
artistic research seems to find contact points with philosophical
research, sharing its speculative freedom. Nevertheless,
research involving artworks or artistic practice inevitably has an
empirical dimension (Nevanlinna 2002). The motivation for
artistic research is rarely mere knowledge production as such.
Most artists turn to research either because they disapprove of
existing artistic practice, they have a vision or dream or they
want to experiment and play (2010, 329).
This rationale allies with Aboriginal women’s standpoint which refuses
separations of knowing, being and acting in the political-ethical act of making art
in-and-for our communities. Furthermore, by refusing this separation, I also
avoid the problem of ‘how to present artworks and performances as research
outcomes, or as demonstrations of research outcomes’ (Arlander 2010, 329)
since our research is both a process and an outcome.
In Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in Visual Arts, Graeme Sullivan cites the
work of Indigenous artists and their research and speaks of ‘transformative
research as a braided metaphor,’ (2010, 113-114). Although I relate to
‘braiding’ as consistent with Ghost Weaving, I take his definition as predicated
on being only in the realm of “humans”, thereby excluding our non-human
relations as Indigenous Peoples. Another definition to describe PLR in my
project might be expressed as follows:
… an artwork can be considered to be a site where knowledge
is created and meanings are made. Research about works of
art communicate new insights into how objects carry meaning
about ideas, themes and issues. As an object of study, an
artwork is an individually and culturally constructed form and
thus can be examined as a form of knowledge
(Sullivan, 2010, 71).
9
Sullivan expands on braiding by describing the practice led research of Badtjala
artist, scholar and researcher, Fiona Foley as primarily responding to the
silence around Indigenous history:
….old postcards, memorabilia, and everyday artifacts often
serve as more accurate historical traces that hold the clues
from which Foley can fashion her critical responses. And here
images are wrought in the rawest of form, yet they offer cues
that can be read as the narrative threads that remind and
provoke, render and rouse, and in ways where experience is
both seen and felt (Sullivan 2010, 182-183).
Fiona Foley herself states of an Australian public art realm and public dialogue:
Because there is no analysis of the work it doesn’t have a
historical context, it is not spoken about, therefore there is no
history of the work. So important historical moments like that in
Australia are ‘written out’ and that’s very disturbing for me when
the work isn’t critiqued in some form…Australia only sees
things as a dichotomy of black and white cultures, and
everything is reduced to a core between Indigenous and non-
Indigenous, and for me that’s not where it’s at (in Sullivan,
2010, 182).
Ghost Weaving includes emphasising the personal as political in my works and
draw on Toni Morrison’s description: ‘If anything I do, in the way of writing
novels (or whatever I write) isn’t about the village or the community or about
you, then it is not about anything.’ Morrison goes on to reject the apolitical view
of art according to which:
[I]f a work of art has any political influence in it, somehow it’s
tainted. My feeling is just the opposite: if it has none, it is
tainted…It seems to me that the best art is political and you
ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and
irrevocably beautiful at the same time (1984, 344-345).
I am also driven by Anzaldua’s description of why she was impelled to write:
To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover
myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-
autonomy. To dispel the myths that I am a mad prophet or poor
10
suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that
what I have to say is not a pile of shit. To show that I can and
that I will write, never mind their admonitions to the contrary.
And I will write about the unmentionables, never mind the
outraged gasp of the censor and the audience. Finally, I write
because I’m scared of writing but I’m more scared of not writing
(Anzaldua, 1981, 169).
In Anzaldua’s words, I recognise my impulse to make art and writing as parallel
practices that feed each other. I make art because I have always ‘researched’
my survivance and that of my matriarchs in this medium. Even when I was
unsure how to name this process, I made art. I have always written my
survivance and that of my matriarchs because it made representable my
experiences, which were so traumatic that they became surreal stories in the
disassociation I often slipped into to survive them. I make art and write because
I, too, am more scared of not doing so, and don’t know who I am without these
practices.
The exegesis and the exhibition are themselves joined in the effort of Ghost
Weaving. The exegesis explains the process of development of the creative
works presented in the exhibition as continuing matriarchal knowledge work,
and its enactment as both ontological and political-activist expression of our
Sovereignty. As I explained in my curation of the Sovereignty Exhibition at
ACCA in 2018:
Sovereignty itself is an inalienable, innate and intimate right; its
expression can be found buried within artistic works, gently
emerging from inherited practices, or boldly spelled out in new
artistic forms …..
The sovereignty of Indigenous peoples is being asserted in a
cultural revolution of Indigenous activism, action and voice
(Balla, 2018, 13).
And,
To be sovereign is in fact to act with love and resistance
simultaneously (Balla 2017, 15).
11
The Exhibition and Exegesis deal together, as joint works, with the legacies of
trauma and colonialism, violence and erasure but they also act as an
expression of Sovereign love and solidarity.
Within the overall problematic outlined above, I aimed to address a range of
questions in this arts-practice-led research:
• In which ways do Aboriginal women artists in Australia de-colonise
the contemporary art field that maintains the existing single colonial
story?
• How do Aboriginal women artists refute, resist and disrupt the
patriarchal, colonial white art and colonial sites of power, such as
major art galleries, institutions and museums?
• In which ways do Aboriginal women artists present knowledge in
their art and develop this from their practice?
• Considering that these women artists represent their families,
communities and familial narratives by telling stories that are drawn
from family, history and cultural knowledges, narratives and lived
experiences, how do Aboriginal women translate, transform and
materialise these multiple knowledge systems?
• How are Aboriginal women artists expressing and responding to key
critical national and local issues relating to justice, land rights,
ecology, identity, sovereignty, treaty and matriarchal and cultural
maintenance, and generating new cultural processes and stories?
• How have I, how do I, and how will I, continue as both an Aboriginal
woman artist, curator, educator and writer to join these Aboriginal
women artists?
• How do I reflect on, critique, value, understand and expand upon the
knowledge I have inherited, developed and continue to know and
learn as both a researcher, Aboriginal woman, artist and story teller
and story keeper and protector of knowledges I am privileged into by
my family, in particular, my matriarchs?
12
To address these questions, I embarked on PLR that is multi stranded,
complex, pluralistic, and intersectional. That is I consider the intersection of
class, race, gender and identity that informs my approach to Aboriginal
Women’s standpoint. My work began with drawing on the stories of my
matriarchs, entrusted and taught to me by my matriarchs. Since art practice is
itself research, in making and creating new works from materials, I have been
involved in creating new meaning and re-contextualising both historic and
contemporary narratives, traditional and contemporary making practices. In turn
these have informed my place in the world as an artist and an Indigenous
woman.
Chapter 2 elaborates the concept of Ghost Weaving and reflects on the
methodology underpinning the multiple bodies of work presented for the
exhibition. It gives details of the background development and rationale for the
diverse pieces and installations. In brief, the stages include:
1. Working up Aboriginal Women’s Standpoint by working on Country
2. Performative photography to disrupt and flip the colonial gaze
3. Going Home to Country: photographing the six-generational matriarchal
line
4. Research and writing contributing to critical analysis of my own practice as
an artist and researcher
5. Photography for sovereign matriarchs
6. Learning how to bush/eco dye cloths for healing and survivance by
gathering stories through yarning while gathering bush-dyeing materials
on Country
7. Gathering cloths and making healing cloths on and with Country
8. Making Home: recreating the Mission Home installation
9. Bringing the Exhibition together, a long labour and birthing process
10. Giving back and workshopping with Community
11. Exegesis writing.
These stages are roughly chronological but not linear; for example, research,
writing and analysis occurred throughout, photography and portraiture are
13
brought together, including from previous works, while working with family and
community occurred throughout.
Chapter 3 gives a descriptive overview of the two rooms of the exhibition and
their works, accompanied by selected photographs of exhibition pieces and
layout.
Chapter 4 speaks Blak to Artistic Terra Nullius, focussing in particular on works
of Aboriginal and other Indigenous and People of Colour. It also explores my
work, placing it in relation to my matrilineal community and to the Blak women’s
art world.
A separate set of appendices provide a photographic record of the two main
rooms of the exhibition (A and B), a list of selected essays written during the
PhD and relevant to the exhibition and exegetical argument (C), List with links
to catalogues, including essays from curated exhibitions (D), and the approved
Human Ethics Plain Language Statement for the project (E).
14
Chapter 2: Ghost Weaving:
A critical overview and reflection on creating this body
of work
Blak women’s work: the art of disruption and survivance
This chapter situates the original inspiration and motivation for the research
project, to understand and platform the work of Blak women as sovereign
warrior women who are/have been active in the resistance against colonialism,
patriarchy and state settler violence. In approaching this project, I had dual
purposes: first, to create a dream world of unconditional love where Aboriginal
women are sovereign warriors, embodying the disruptive and transformative
work of Aboriginal women’s art work and resistance and second, to speak back
and Blak to dominant white and patriarchal public narratives and spaces that
hold violence and erasure. I aimed to explore these key issues through
practice-led art research in creating a new body of work. This chapter offers a
critical reflection on the processes that have been woven together in creating
this body of work, describing the methodologies, histories and practices I
enacted and grappled with to conduct the research and exhibition outcome. It
considers prior works and curatorial experience and their relevance leading up
to work of the final exhibition.
Developing the term ‘Ghost Weaving’, in dialogue with Professor Tracey Bunda,
encouraged a matrilineal, intergenerational approach, which could embody the
‘everywhen’ (Gilchrist 2016), rather than separating past, present and future. Dr
Tony Birch shared a story in which he spoke about the ‘sky being held up by
women,’ which got me to thinking about how the sky is filled with narratives by
Blak women. These story tellers and keepers are Ancestral, they are
contemporary, they are lived, they are spiritual, they are gone and they are
present. The knowledge and understanding that we are all related and all
connected implies that we are responsible to each other culturally and
ancestrally.
15
I set out to create a new series of work responsive to Aboriginal women artists
who have gone before me – through photography, digital form, personal
memoir, family narratives, performative elements, installations, and portraiture
work – along with analytical and theoretical meditative statements that align with
each piece of the Exhibition. I wanted to understand the diverse, creative,
analytical, deadly ways that Aboriginal women artists, community women and
activists – who sometimes act as all three (and more) in community life – disrupt
the notion of terra nullius, refusing the virtual no (wo)man’s land in white man’s
history. History literally and figuratively ejects Blak women out of the picture, in
art as much as politics, language and daily family and communal life.
Unfortunately, a comprehensive herstories of resistance by
Indigenous women has not been researched and documented,
unlike the frontier political activism of Indigenous men, which
has been recorded in the works of historian Henry Reynolds.
(Moreton-Robinson 2000 p. 152).
By investigating how Aboriginal women subvert and utilise art to disrupt both
the erasure of their voices and experiences, in history and through art as
history, I was then able to utilise matrilineal and contemporary art modes to
have unspoken community stories and memories seen and heard, to be re-
membered in spaces that are usually impenetrably dense with whiteness and
colonial patriarchy.
Disrupting colonialism in methodology
As explained in Chapter 1, Ontology, Epistemology and Axiology are woven
together across the Exhibition, its associated workshops and the Exegesis. The
axiological priorities of expressing Sovereignty, refusing coloniality and
speaking Blak require careful Ghost Weaving of practice-led arts research, a
range of artistic genres curated into an Exhibition, engagement with other
Indigenous artists’ work, research reading and writing.
Professor Karen Martin’s seminal work conceptualising Aboriginal ways of
being, knowing and doing’ in Please Knock Before You Enter: Aboriginal
regulation of Outsiders and the implications for researchers (2008) both excited
16
and overwhelmed me: how was I to approach Aboriginal research without
replicating colonial methods whilst engaging practice led research methods that
held space for my art practice and story and respected the legacy of Black
research gone before me?
Core issues jumped out at me, and helped me respond to the overuse of the
term ‘decolonisation,’ particularly in the arts and cultural field, Martin cited Cree
academic, Cora Weber-Pillwax who said:
Deconstructing and decolonising will serve some purpose, but I
don’t think these processes will necessarily bring us to a better
state of existence as Indigenous people. Although they may be
necessary discourse and practices for western or non-
Indigenous researchers, deconstruction and decolonising
discourses on their own will not lead us as Indigenous
researchers to where we want to be (2001b, 170 in Martin
2008, 84).
It is hard to do this work. During the candidature I was invited into many arts-
based speaking and writing opportunities. I took some, said no to quite a few,
(especially at last minute invitations) and shared others. Most of them took the
form of commissioned essays during the first two years of my candidature. I
was doubtful, cautious and suspicious of the level of interest in my perspective
on Aboriginal women’s matriarchy, responses to white feminism, modes of
resistance, de-and colonial work. I was aware that talk about de-colonisation
was becoming fashionable, and therefore palatable to particular white and
settler audiences without any solid moves to actually de-colonise institutions or
galleries, still maintaining only minor roles for actual Indigenous people in art
and cultural fields. I was also aware of my accessibility, being city based, my
perceived palatability and the comfort which white people seemed to have in
speaking to me. I spoke or wrote back my suspicions of white motivations,
named my concerns with white institutions, and to the void of erasure. I named
artistic terra nullius to celebrate Blak women warriors whom I was witnessing,
sometimes collaborating with, exhibiting with, or working in community with –
some I idolised as artists and as warriors.
17
Early doubts in my abilities as an academic, imposter syndrome, Blak trauma
shame and fears of being successful were sabotaging me. A brilliant and
enlightening Indigenous Post Grad Masters workshop with Professor Linda
Tuhiwa Smith and her husband, Professor Graham Smith, held at Melbourne
University in 2015 in my second year of candidature, snapped me out of my
fears when she asked the group what was holding us back. I expressed my fear
of not being good enough, and she relayed a story about how her pakeha or
white students on campus walk straight to their office doors, knock confidently
and stride in with their direct questions and demands. The Maori students, Prof
Smith said, were waiting outside the office, or in the hallway, waiting, patiently
and modestly to be seen. Not wanting to impose. I took this straight in and
could see myself, waiting by that door. Professor Smith challenged me to stop
holding myself back and move into the work despite the fears and doubts.
I had to apply an Indigenous way of working to the existing theories of Practice
Led Research Methodology, De-Colonial Research, and Participatory Art
Research. I posed that these methodologies were appropriated from Indigenous
modes of working without acknowledgement by the Community Cultural
Development field that historically has espoused justice driven, community
centred work but continues to be led by white people and structures of
management applied to community arts settings.
Naming this methodology as Ghost Weaving gave me the framework to present
the visual work as a body of epistemological and ontological work from a place
of realness, autobiography, memory and identity. I had to understand my art
practice and research as reciprocal processes in order to develop my own
practice led research as Blak and communal. Wilson argues that
an Indigenous methodology must be a process that adheres to
relational accountability. Respect, reciprocity and responsibility
are key features of any healthy relationship and must be
included in an Indigenous methodology; Cora (Weber-Pillwax,
2001) calls these the 3 R’s of Indigenous research and learning
(Wilson 2008, 77).
18
Our respect and relationships with our families, communities and our matriarchs
is embedded with a set of ethics – an axiological position – that white
universities, galleries and museums fail to grasp. I struggled to articulate an
Indigenous art creative thesis PhD without ignoring or disrespecting key
Indigenous issues, how to do an art as research process within an Indigenous
lens, and specifically my standpoint as Wemba-Wemba and female. This has to
be achieved whilst developing an evolving language and practice that is non-
colonial, responsive and resistant in ‘talkin’ up to the ‘[white cube]’, to
paraphrase Moreton-Robinson (2000) in the field of art. To enact art and
cultural practices that evolve in response to various modes of structural,
historical and systemic racism and oppression requires the weaving together of
various cultural practices, including artistic. It is also communal: it requires
collaboration with my matriarchal figures, family research, permission seeking
and the approval of matriarchs.
The deep accountability and reciprocity Martin (2008) names again resonated
with me:
… after having levelled some strong critique at existing
Aboriginal research models to determine their role in our
dispossession, and then also identifying problems in the beliefs,
behaviours, values and assumptions of some Aboriginal
researchers I realised I was not immune, or neutral. I therefore
wondered about the filters I would use and the types of
representations I would form in this research study (Martin
2008, 32).
Whilst my research was not as deeply implicated in other Mob’s business as
Professor Martin’s was, I still had to be accountable to my Wemba-Wemba
matriarchs and community, both gone and present. I was making my work for
my family and other Blackfullas rather than a white audience. I had to think
through a lens that responded to the injuries of racism and sexism. And I had to
figure out how to apply:
critique as an Indigenous research project must tell us what is
‘wrong,’ (even though practice led research in visual arts does
not focus on “problem solving” as such) and what is to be
19
avoided if we are seeking relatedness, agency and sovereignty
in research’ (Martin 2008, 84).
The ultimate responsibility of an Aboriginal researcher is to her research
participants, her family and community, not the university. As an Aboriginal
woman I conduct insider/outsider research (Smith 1999). I am challenged by
research within the university because I am engaging with de-colonial research
methodologies. My research project is an act of de-colonial practice in itself: an
assertion of sovereignty in which I situate the contribution of Aboriginal women
artists and activists to resistance, naming traumas and critiquing structural
oppression.
These ethical issues are given additional insight in relation to this project’s
decolonising efforts in the Yarning and ‘Remembering’ sections below,
exploring enactments of Indigenous cultural protocols which replace the
colonial.
Yarning Methodology replacing “Interview”
In the original design and ethics application for this doctoral work, I included
interviews, applying for Ethics approval to conduct a series of interviews with
Aboriginal women artists and community members (VUHREC # HRE17-229
see Appendix). I moved away from doing these interviews in a formal sense,
and moved towards a practice of listening and yarning, in a range of community,
family and gallery settings.
The original formal interviews had been planned to include a list of incredible
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women artists who have made significant
contributions to the cultural landscape in Australia and to my research. Instead
of interviews, I wrote about a number of these women and their work in the
commissioned essays (See Appendix C).
The project morphed into a more culturally-responsive form that drew instead
on art-based conversations and responses in galleries, theatre show
performance, foyers and event spaces post-exhibition opening, along with
informal community spaces. Some conversations are referred to within
20
particular essays and some are drawn on specifically for the project, while
others have been kept private to the community.
The nuances and cultural specificity of interviewing other Indigenous women is
a very particular practice. The knowing how to speak with, not to, and not at, our
sisters is an act of respect and reciprocity: it requires the knowledge of
responsibilities. We must remember to check ourselves in our active listening,
to ask our ourselves and others “Are you asking me or are you telling me?”. The
move to Yarning methodology (Walker, Fredericks et al. 2014; Geia et al. 2013)
has become more prominent among Australian Indigenous researchers in
multiple fields. For this project it called on me to value the ways in which we
listen to and value Aboriginal women and their contributions in speaking Blak
and back.
To engender trust and not harm, the ability to listen deeply and most of all a
willingness to participate fully in the conversation are core to our communal
ethics. This is demonstrated through speaking, observing, listening, caring,
making (food, tea, shared art practices, space, comfort) and through
maintenance of the space as culturally sound and safe, particularly from
interference from non-Aboriginal women. The circle of women’s yarning is held
in time, space and place through participation. Bunda (2007 p77) writes of the
embodied ‘The Sovereign Aboriginal Woman’ in response to Vivienne Cleven’s
Mavis Dooley character in Bitin’ Back where Mavis is observing the
conversation of younger Aboriginal women, and then sums up their
contributions by concluding, ‘they think that when they have your land, they
have your fork’. These sovereign assertions, whether critiqued in literature, or
taking place in community space through story and yarning, are sovereign
exchanges.
The place of Yarning was central to the family community work for the Healing
Cloth installation in the ontological space of the Exhibition. The healing cloths
were created together with five other Aboriginal women, and my son Katen,
fifteen years old at the time. These conversations there were not recorded, nor
organised to “capture” or “document” the contributions from the women I invited
21
to participate but were instead to share the practice as a healing and creative
activity and to have yarns that I facilitated from my standpoint as a Wemba-
Wemba and Gunditjmara woman. All of the participants had things in common:
all are Koorie People (First Nations Peoples from South East Australia), all have
creative practices, and work in Aboriginal Community work in various
contributions. Their work spans visual art, curating, community arts practice,
Indigenous education, including early childhood and tertiary, Aboriginal
women’s health, social media and public platforms, writing, Indigenous youth
initiatives and cultural practice.
The process included inviting participants to my home, sharing the process with
them, sharing food and tea and coffee, and driving to the local Maribyrnong
River to walk, talk/yarn and collect plant material. After visiting my mother on
Yorta Yorta Country, with my Aunty Donna, who was visiting Mum, I collected
handfuls of gum leaves there, specifically bush flowers and flowering gum, gum
leaves, and some paperbark for bush-dying healing cloths. We shared stories
and ideas for how to create activities for children as my Aunty is an early
childhood educator. There were also stories in relation to the place where we
were gathering. Across the road from my mother’s house, it was also outside
my childhood kindergarten. At this site was a pine tree, a flowering gum, which
spoke to my Aunty and me and we both agreed that it was talking to us. We
then moved to the paperbark at the site and in the fork of the paper bark was a
piece of white calico cloth (the same type I was using to create my healing
cloths) which had soaked up the colours of the tree and looked incredibly similar
to the cloths I was dying. My Aunty Donna told me that “the crow had put it
there for me.” A week later, my mother, visiting me in Melbourne, brought me a
gift from Aunty Donna: a beautiful dilly bag style basket that she had woven for
me.
The weave between Yarning, as a process of passing on matriarchal
knowledge, links to Country and arts practice was thus central to the Healing
Cloths creative work. It could not have occurred without the centrality of
knowledge and practice among family, Country, and community. This was a
22
healing experience through storying as ‘giving voice to our stories creates a
healing, a knowing that our voices weave back into age-old traditions, enabling
our bodies to thread seamlessly with the veracity of our spiritual selves’ (Phillips
& Bunda, 2018, 107).
Decolonising through Remembering: Aboriginal Matrilineal research in art
This project with its work is motivated by the decolonising work of
‘Remembering,’ one of the 25 Indigenous Projects Linda Tuhiwai Smith names
in her book, Decolonising Methodologies:
… the remembering of a people relates not so much to an
idealized remembering of a golden past but more specifically to
the remembering of a painful past and, importantly, people’s
responses to that pain. While collectively Indigenous
communities can talk through the history of painful events,
there are frequent silences and intervals in the stories about
what happened after the event. ….. Violence and family abuse
became entrenched in communities which had no hope. White
society did not see and did not care. This form of remembering
is painful because it involves remembering not just what
colonisation was about but what being dehumanised meant for
our own cultural practices. Both healing and transformation
become crucial strategies in any approach which asks a
community to remember what they may have decided to
unconsciously or consciously to forget
(Smith 1999, 146).
Most of this remembering work is not written, nor the subject of literature
reviews but, rather, oral. As Marie Battiste (2002, 2) argues from a Canadian
First Nations’ perspective:
… in the European (or Eurocentric) knowledge system, the
purpose of a literature review is to analyze critically a segment
of a published topic. Indigenous knowledge comprises the
complex set of technologies developed and sustained by
Indigenous civilizations. Often oral and symbolic, it is
transmitted through the structure of Indigenous languages and
passed on to the next generation through modeling, practice,
and animation, rather than through the written word. In the
23
context of Indigenous knowledge, therefore, a literature review
is an oxymoron because Indigenous knowledge is typically
embedded in the cumulative experiences and teachings of
Indigenous peoples rather than in a library. The second point is
that conducting a literature review on Indigenous knowledge
implies that Eurocentric research can reveal an understanding
of Indigenous knowledge. The problem with this approach is
that Indigenous knowledge does not mirror classic Eurocentric
orders of life. It is a knowledge system in its own right with its
own internal consistency and ways of knowing, and there are
limits to how far it can be comprehended from a Eurocentric
point of view.
My initial literature review confirmed my experience that western art research
literature largely ignores or excludes Indigenous artists, theorists or standpoints.
I was looking for myself and our people everywhere, all the way through. I felt
extra pressure to address this form of artistic terra nullius or erasure by
privileging Indigenous or People of Colour scholars to cite, and in particular
women, to rectify this erasure. My research problematic set out to understand
and expand and platform the ways that Aboriginal women in Australia disrupt
this silencing through their work, art and contributions.
Aboriginal women’s art work, as research and practice, is one form of
representing the epistemologies, the knowledges and knowledges embodied in
practices, that becomes our archive, our gallery, our museum, a continuing
process of remembering, recovering and passing down the generations.
And it is ‘ours’, not just mine. To support this collectivity, I developed a digital
online journal in Instagram and Facebook posts with annotations and iphone
photos that I took. I gave updates of my PhD creative process and family
research. Though this makes the work quite visible publicly and worries me
regarding the protection of Indigenous Data Sovereignty, this is about the
protection of Aboriginal People’s rights to the ownership of information about us
and our ways of knowing, doing and being. I made sure not to share images of
people without their permission and that I did not share anything that was of a
secret or women’s business inappropriate for social media. However, there is
always the risk that my posts can be misappropriated, or misused.
24
Despite these risks, I found by posting publicly that it was an immediate way to
utilise digital media and communications with family and community members
and report on my progress, especially that which involved us collectively as
family and Wemba-Wemba Peoples. It would otherwise have been difficult to
keep family updated of the research process. Though there is a risk in making
the work available to online audiences, I believed it has been a successful
medium to maintaining visibility and transparency to family and community. Of
course, actually meeting with family and presenting research outcomes to them,
in particular my Aunties, giving them copies of the research materials, was the
most important face to face responsibility I undertook.
The online journal was a way to communicate and share the relationship
between the research process, what was learned, what was uncovered and
how I translated that into a series of new visual art works for the exhibition. It
was a way to express how I was creating a relationship between the stories I
was being gifted and privileged and how I would create visual art outcomes with
that new and old knowledge. How would this knowledge be best served in a
visual art mode? How would the works be shared publicly without breaking or
damaging family protocols and maintain protection of that knowledge and those
stories? How would I share the impact and damage of colonialism on the bodies
of Aboriginal women in my family, of my own damages without spilling our blood
again? How would I maintain the respect, dignity and pride that my matriarchs
survived their traumas with? There were also stories of language protection and
politics embedded within, how it was that our matriarchs’ knowledge, shared
and taught to Dr Louise Hercus, has then been publicly available to both white
people and other Aboriginal Peoples who have not always acted ethically with
access to Wemba-Wemba language.
Reparative aesthetics: made by daily acts of repair for healing
Using art for personal and community memory work means naming the pain
and the resistance to it, the healing that is needed and the processes by which
such healing can be mobilised. I started making art as a child as both a way to
be who I was as Koorie child, and to escape and disassociate from traumas.
25
Writing became the process and vehicle to let it flow out, and name the
unspeakable, with art becoming my space to construct and manifest my stories
and survival.
The research and creative work for the doctoral project continues this journey. It
involved a process of localising historical and trans generational trauma with
localised acts of healing. These works were to be an invocation of ‘aesthetic
repair,’ an expression of ‘daily acts of repair’ for colonial traumas and wounds,
as Kruger noted in her ACCA symposium presentation in 2017. Since
colonisation is a structure, not an event (Kauanui 2016), it requires daily acts of
repair and maintenance like any structure, necessary if we as dispossessed,
marginalised and traumatised Aboriginal Peoples are to be able to survive.
Aboriginal artists, activists and creative workers thus become critical to
‘survivance’ (Vizenor 2008) by making shared, collective and public events,
communities, places and spaces to disrupt what functions to uphold dominant
colonial narratives.
The image of my grandmother labouring in child birth and giving birth on the
verandah of the Echuca Hospital in the nineteen fifties haunts me and ghosted
my own birthing experiences in 1995 and again in 2004. In between those
years, it ghosted me again at the Royal Women’s Hospital when I suffered a
miscarriage and had a white male radiographer tell me coldly that my womb
was “motherless” after an internal examination. The transgenerational traumas
on Aboriginal women’s bodies, and on our business, is carried through body
memory, story, blood loss, violence and brutality repeated in language,
processes and repetition in public institutions. These histories are laid out in
government and organisational policies and maintained through public
dialogues about the value of Aboriginal women’s lives which are valued less
than that of white women’s lives. When I retold my grandmother’s experience at
the Royal Women’s Hospital in 1999, at their apology ceremony to Aboriginal
mothers, speaking in front of my mother and young daughter was an
opportunity for healing.
26
The medicalisation of our bodies, birthing rites and sites, in particular since
June 2018, and the attempted destruction of Djap Wurrung Birthing Trees and
sites by Vic Roads and the Victorian State Government are continuations of the
ongoing colonial project that includes ecocide, erasure and desecration of
sacred sites and the hypocrisy of doing so whilst attempting to create a treaty
with Victorian Aboriginal Peoples. The resistance – activism, and the protective
actions of Djap Warrung women on their site – is disruptive, revolutionary and
incredibly courageous.
The use of the term healing and its practice as trauma treatment speak to
Kruger’s ‘daily acts of repair’ needed to both remember and to reconstruct
sovereignty. As a Wemba-Wemba woman, I researched Aboriginal women
artists’ work, and women’s work to recover matrilineal relationships with
mothers’, grandmothers’ and great and great-great grandmothers’ experiences
of surviving, experiencing and resisting colonisation. Indigenous art standpoints
and theories, particularly those in which Aboriginal Peoples name their own
traumas and healing processes, are largely neglected from the white research
curriculum.
My exhibition was a way to create pieces that draw on the aesthetics of repair,
the architecture of healing, considering the very structure of what temporal
respite could look like, where restorative aesthetics and daily acts of repair
came together. The project encompassed multiple bodies of work made over
the four-year project. The project was designed and evolved to demonstrate art
as a sovereign act, in the way that Bunda (2009) names writing as a sovereign
act, and using research as ceremony (Wilson, 2008).
Working up Aboriginal Women’s Standpoint by working on Country
Throughout my arts career to date, including being represented in numerous
group shows and seven solo exhibitions between 2010-2016, I created works
that spoke to the stories, experiences, resistance and survival of my family and
matriarchs. As a curator, I have been honoured to platform the work of other
Aboriginal artists. However, the opportunity to consider and weave these
27
cultural concepts, my standpoint and research into a single PhD exhibition was
a huge and at times overwhelming challenge. I broadly researched the work of
Aboriginal women artists, community women and activists through writing a
series of essays that responded to their works and how they disrupt dominant
patriarchal and colonial dialogues and created photographic works that were
more of an intimate nature, of myself, my mother, daughter and niece. It was in
a sense, a call and response of research outwardly, see who was making what,
what they were creating and saying and turning back to my base of matriarchal
knowledge, practice and being to reflect and respond. This became my praxis
and methodology of participatory action research and practice led research
done from a de-colonising practice of my own standpoint as a Wemba-Wemba
matriarchal researcher and artist.
From this place, I embarked on practice led research that is multi stranded,
complex, pluralistic, and intersectional: I consider the intersection of class, race,
gender and identity that informs my standpoint theory. This begins with drawing
on the stories of my matriarchs, entrusted and taught to me by my matriarchs. It
includes considering art practice as research itself, which is practice led in
nature. By making and creating new works from materials I am creating new
meaning and re-contextualise both historic and contemporary narratives and
stories that inform my place in the world as both an artist, a woman and an
Indigenous person.
Situating myself as a Blackfulla is core to my standpoint, specifically a
standpoint of an Aboriginal woman, a cis woman, a straight woman – culturally
and politically as an Aboriginal Wemba-Wemba matriarchal woman with family
and ancestors. To keep strong and connect with family and community
knowledges, connection to Country was central: grounding myself in matrilineal
memories, stories and continuing connections.
28
Mok Mok: To disrupt and flip the colonial gaze with performative
photography
The creative component of my research began in 2016, by creating a new body
of photographic works, in particular the Mok Mok series that celebrates Mok
Mok the old woman/hag character written about by esteemed Elder, Aunty
Margaret Tucker in her 1977 biography, ‘If Everyone Cared’ (1977). Aunty
Marge recounted a story about Mok Mok, one I had heard many times as a little
girl from my matriarchs about this fearsome and fearless wild woman who lived
in the bush with her huge hair and ugly features – and, as Mum and Nan told
us, red eyes. We were often taunted with “Mooky at the window, look out!” if us
kids were being too cheeky, or too loud at night time. Mok Mok also threatened
to steal babies for herself if left alone, or if they weren’t safely tucked up in the
fork of gum trees. The moral of the Mok Mok story is that babies in Victoria
ended up being carried on their mothers’ backs in possum skin cloaks to keep
them close, and out of Mok Mok’s reach. Despite her ominous presence, I loved
Mok Mok and her courage, as an antithesis to fear and childhood traumas. I
wanted to bring a version of her into suburbia to speak back to the white footy
Mums, their cult of motherhood and “domestic goddess,” nonsense of
gentrification and white, heteronormative cis-gendered parenthood of the inner-
city hood I live in.
I posed as a Mok Mok in Footscray, mocking the process of “doing it all” as a
woman, and speaking back to my own anxieties about raising my Black kids in
the city away from the bush I grew up in, away from mobs of cousins and
extended family. In urban spaces, without your family of origin, you have to
work hard to maintain culture, story and connections to keep your children
knowledgeable and strong away from your homelands. Mok Mok was also a
way to resist racist and narrow white definitions of beauty and white feminism. It
gave me a way for me to perform a liberated character that is fearless, healed
and unapologetic. As kids in our family, my grandmother, mother and aunty
would regularly put us kids on the spot, and demand we perform for them to
make them laugh; the pursuit of and celebration of excellent black funniness
29
was held in high esteem. Having “a good laugh” was prized as an important
Aboriginal activity long before laughter classes were introduced into the western
self-help movement.
I utilised photography for this act, to create a hyper realistic Blak wild woman,
flourishing and thriving in her body and herself. Although Mok Mok’s status as a
mother is not present or relevant in Tucker’s (1977) or my matriarchs’ telling, my
enactment is a play on Mok Mok, trying to appear as if she is a “perfect mother.”
In narratives, Mok Mok was willing and plotting to steal other women’s babies to
devour once she had roasted them over a fire. Mothers come in many forms
and mother work is conducted by multiple community and family members in
Aboriginal community. Mok Mok is a woman, though not defined by western
gendered tropes, and is from both the spiritual and physical realms.
I describe these Mok Mok photographic works as performative photography and
acknowledge the work of Aboriginal women photographic artists, Tracey
Moffatt, Destiny Deacon, and Brenda L Croft whose works embody character,
narrative and story. The self-portraits painted by Frida Kahlo also influenced this
process.
In my research, the camera became a tool for expressing Blak matriarchy and
community ways of 'being, knowing and doing', following Martin (2008), a
response to Aboriginal women's art making and activism through photographic
based works drawn from my matriarchal family stories.
The method of “performing” Mok Mok was an act of survivance, both a liberating
and empowering process. Enacting the Mok Mok photographic series was a
method for me to use the trickster, shape shifter or mask to have the courage
and strength to complete the early research coursework and early stages of the
research, which I felt overwhelmed by.
Native reality is best understood through the trickster, who has
always been known to First Nations people through oral
traditions, and who is best described as a creator that is
constantly transforming and shape-shifting. In using trickster
strategies, Native artists are able to deconstruct and
30
reconstruct ideas about Native people and their culture.
According to many Native artists, this new discourse, called the
“trickster shift,” has been around since the beginning, seeded in
oral traditions, and it requires the Native perspective to decode
these trickster undertakings properly. (Warn 2007, iv)
Enacting Mok Mok was also a healing methodology for me to go forward into
the research process; she was a way to speak back into the abyss of
exhausting trans-generational trauma. Bringing Matrilineal stories from Country
to recreate Mok Mok spirit in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray was a tool of
courage to establish my starting point and articulate my Standpoint. Printing
and framing the photographs from this performance became the first stage and
outcome of the practice-led research.
These Mok Mok works, developed for the creative thesis, were included in a
commissioned solo show at Kingston Art Gallery, Melbourne, in 2016. Works
from the series have now been selected for five group shows1.
Going Home to Country: creating the photographic project of six
generations of my Matriarchy, including my daughter and myself
Commissioned for Next Matriarch at the October 2017 Tarnanthi National
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Festival, on Kaurna Country (Adelaide),
this was presented as Lovescapes; Wemba-Wemba Country. Next Matriarch
was a group show featuring seven Aboriginal women from different nations
across the country: Hannah Bronte, Amrita Hepi, Kaylene Whiskey, Ali Gumillya
Baker, Miriam Charlie and Nicole Monks. It was an honour to have contributed a
o 1 State of the Nation, Counihan Gallery, curated by Kimberley Moulton, Yorta Yorta,
Melbourne (2016)
o Strong Women, First Draft Gallery, curated by Emily McDaniel, Kalari Clan, Wiradjuri
Nation, Sydney (2017)
o In Character, Verge Gallery, curated by Peter Johnson and Tesha Malott, Sydney
(2019) and
o In Character, Verge Gallery, curated by Peter Johnson and Tesha Malott, Sydney
(2019) and
o Affirmation at Koorie Heritage Trust (2020) for the postponed international photographic
festival, curated by Gail Harradine, Wotjobaluk/Jadawadjali PHOTO2020.
31
matriarchal narrative that demonstrated the connections between my daughter
to my great-great grandmother with each woman of each generation
representing our unbroken sovereign line.
This large photographic group drew on the idea of the ‘personal as political’,
showing that Aboriginal women’s activism, work and community achievements
are not forgotten, by presenting the matrilineal line in historical images of my
daughter, self, mother, grandmother, great grandmother and great-great
grandmother. In the Exhibition, the large acetate photos were shown against a
large photo of Wemba-Wemba Country.
I have included the use of my family’s photographic collections with the utmost
respect, love and gratitude. Historically, the availability of cameras and film was
rare due to the cost and the exclusion of Aboriginal Peoples from accessing
photography. The flipping of the colonial and predominantly male lens and gaze
to Aboriginal family members documenting family and protecting and sharing
these images across generations is highly significant and precious. The use of
photography, photos and family collections of photos and albums, framed
pictures and reverence for photography is very important to Aboriginal families.
Aboriginal People, especially women, are expert curators at maintaining family
genealogy and story through photography in both their homes – and recently on
Facebook and Instagram. We use photography to talk about and maintain
relationships with Ancestors and forebears. Photography of gatherings at
funerals becomes poignant as many lament that the only time extended families
and community gather on masse is for funerals and wakes or, as our family
says, ‘cuppa tea after up the hall.’
Many Aboriginal family members set up Family Pages to share images and
research and annotate photographs, the story of the image and the family within
the images. Respect for the photo’s provenance is important; paying respects to
family members and Elders for images shared with their permission. The
images I was able to use are from our Day Family collections. Uncle Hubert
Day, my great-great Uncle, (great-grandmother Papa Mariah Day’s son) had a
photograph collection. My mother granted me permission to include images of
32
herself, her mother, her grandmother and great grandmother. I sought my
daughter’s permission to include her image in Lovescapes: Wemba-Wemba
Country and Margie the Matriarch and that of my nine year old niece, and her
father and mother, my brother and sister-in-law.
Research contributing to critical analysis of my own practice as an artist
and researcher
Research has included reading, writing, visiting Indigenous exhibitions, writing
essays and co-curation of the ACCA Sovereignty Exhibition, December 2016 to
March 2017, in Melbourne (see Appendix C for link). Ten of the eighteen essays
produced during 2016 to 2019 are relevant to the work of the exhibition and
exegesis and are listed in Appendix D. Research also involved a 2019 research
visit with my Mother, Margie Tang, and daughter, Rosie Kalina, to the Australian
Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) on
Ngunnawal Country/Canberra, where we examined their archives.
Outcomes from the research with both family and AITSIS archives contributed,
both directly and indirectly, to the art pieces for the Exhibition and to the
analyses that led to the exegesis. Stories and selections from the literature were
directly made present in the epistemological space, with copies recreating my
office/studio space. Building my analysis through creative writing, curating and
essays underpinned significant artistic work for the exhibitions, commissions
and the final project Exhibition. The ethical/axiological commitment to creating
and recreating knowledges of Aboriginal Women as an expression of
sovereignty remains central to my work.
Photography for sovereign matriarchs
For an installation Lovescapes: Wemba-Wemba Country, 2017, a central
element was an i-phone photograph that I took of the flowing, gum tree lined,
Tummugerri Creek on Wemba-Wemba Country in 2016 during a visit with my
Mum, Aunty and children. The Tummugerri Creek feeds off the Kolity/Edwards
River and is a significant site for our Day Wemba-Wemba family, being where
my great-great grandmother, Papa Mariah Day lived in her own little hut before
33
our Country was invaded and before the Moonahcullah Mission was
established. This site is also where my Aunty Barbara Walker, my
grandmother’s beloved sister, and Uncle Kevin Walker returned to Country to
live in the early 2000s after leaving Moonahcullah Mission for work in the 1960s.
This place continues to be an intergenerational family gathering site.
There is a story that Aunty Barbara Walker shared with my mother and Aunties;
that her mother, my great grandmother Nanny Nancy had shared: when the
women gathered to weave at the Tummugerri Creek, they never sat directly on
Country, but on weaving mats they had woven. Re-creating a matriarchal
gathering in photography allowed for a re-imagined gathering across
generations and time; it created and recreated place and memory.
For the family, this i-photo also resonated with a photograph taken by my Aunty
Karen Mobourne of the river close by, seen on a visit with my family to see our
great Aunty Barbara Walker who, before her passing in 2013, became one of
the oldest living Wemba-Wemba woman in the state. We marvelled at her old
photograph and gazed into what we saw and read as cultural and women’s
business. I had my i-photo printed as a colour 5-metre-wide and 1.5m tall eco
wallpaper. I wanted this image of Country to be wide and expansive; to
demonstrate this place as a lovescape: more than just a landscape. As I chose
wallpaper, it was able to lie smoothly against the wall, almost like a looking
window into Wemba-Wemba Country from its city installation on shared Boon
Wurrung and Wurundjeri Country.
Another important photographic process included creating a series of portraits
of my mother, my matriarch, in collaboration with her at her home on Yorta
Yorta Country. The portrait was commissioned by curators for Lucky, a group
exhibition at the Bundoora Homestead, Melbourne in 2018 that spoke to the
experiences of Chinese people and history in Australia and their entwined
relationship with gold and gold mining. My mother’s grandfather George Tang
came to Australia from China and his grandson Billy Tang married my
grandmother, Rosie Egan, a Wemba-Wemba and Gunditjmara woman. Mum
spoke at the Lucky exhibition about her pursuit of luck, but often feeling cursed
34
as a black woman in this country. A key portrait of my mother, with my daughter
and niece, is included in the exhibition.
I also created a series called and the matriarchs sang (2016), commissioned for
an exhibition titled Re-Centre Sisters at City Gallery, (2016), a group show of
Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander women artists from around Australia. The
purpose of the work was to tell elements of stories told to me by my mother and
grandmother, stories of my matriarchs from my mother, grandmother, great
grandmother and great-great grandmother. Their work, their struggles and their
resistance has inspired this series and I wanted to document this in a way that
hinted at what is also not known, what is not told and what is kept secret.
Women in my family have suffered various forms of violence of the colony and
state, patriarchal violence from their own men, migrant men, white men and the
colony itself. I wanted to speak to these stories without exploiting them and to
honour their lives and to share with our family future generations. In ‘and the
matriarchs sang’, I rubbed 13 small white panels by hand with house paint
mixed with ground bark from branches collected on Wurundjeri and Boon
Wurrung Country on campus at Victoria University during the early stage of my
research when I was situated as an artist in residence on campus. This included
walking the grasslands to find discarded materials that found their way to the
edge of campus, dumped on the remnant grasslands at Iramoo that once
covered a quarter of the state of Victoria, home to the endangered legless lizard
and home to Murnong, Yam Daisy, once a staple of Aboriginal women’s diet
and their collecting and harvesting practices.
Within and the matriarchs sang, I imbued the little canvases with memory of
Country and the remnant grasslands by rubbing that dirt and bark matter into
them. Mixing it with white house paint was to embody the colonising impact of
“developing” the grasslands and eradicating the majority of their size and
health. Within the paint, I fixed copies of photographic images of my matriarchs
with hand written text in charcoal, a nod to their dedication that their children
and grandchildren be able to access education and not be denied it as they
35
were, and the charcoal was a nod to the times my grandmother would take coal
from the campfire and insist that I draw something.
All of these projects visually articulate the healing process history, land, place,
the body and the politics of Aboriginal women’s lived experiences of subjugation
and violence, coming to survivance, nurturance and healing. Weaving family
stories and photos together brings into strong focus the sovereign matrilineal
relationships on and with Country.
Curating Sovereignty
In 2016 I was commissioned to co-curate an exhibition, entitled Sovereignty at
the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). This was twenty-two years
after Blakness: Blak City Culture, the first Indigenous exhibition at ACCA and a
time period that encompassed ‘ACCA’s previous director, white woman Juliana
Engberg who had described Aboriginal art as ‘a passing moment’(in Carroll
2016-2017) So, the opportunity to speak back to this absence and platform
South Eastern Aboriginal art in this space was a responsibility that I was
honoured to work on. The task was exciting but also overwhelming as it was at
the beginning of my PhD project. However, I was supported by Director of
Moondani Balluk Indigenous Academic Unit, Yorta Yorta woman, Karen
Jackson, and my PhD supervisors, to do this work whilst completing the early
research milestones required for my doctorate.
The research into commissioning Aboriginal artists for this exhibition, with a
focus on Koorie artists and my negotiation with ACCA Director, Max Delany, to
include a women-focussed, matriarchal space, grew my knowledge of
Aboriginal women’s practice as a practising artist, researcher and curator. (See
Appendix D for links to Catalogues and curatorial statements).
As noted in that catalogue,
the idea of sovereignty has been articulated in many ways –
political, juridical, ethical, spiritual, and in relation to the
actuality and assertion of human rights, autonomy and agency.
… As celebrated author and catalogue essayist Tony Birch
36
notes in this publication: ‘Conversely, within Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander communities, Sovereignty is a reflection
of a reality that people, custom and Country are inextricably
linked, regardless of the impositions of colonisation’ (2017, 9).
The challenge for a visual artist is to create, in three dimensions, ways to
express this Sovereignty, carrying the weight of colonial history while
reasserting that land was never ceded. As I argued in the catalogue (2017, 13-
17).
In considering the social, cultural and historical implications of
being sovereign people, we also experience our place and
place-making being constantly under surveillance. In the gallery
space and in cultural institutions, we situate ourselves to return
the gaze with direct eye contact and a request that you listen to
us deeply – whilst we attempt at the same time to subvert the
process; to de-colonise and to Indigenise the very places that
have represented us through the colonial gaze.
In my work, I particularly emphasise resistance and love. In the Sovereignty
catalogue, I pointed out that:
To be sovereign is in fact to act with love and resistance
simultaneously. Uncle Banjo Clarke, the late Gunditjmara
statesman, said we must ‘fight hate with love.’2 If there is a
thread that connects all the artists across the wide diversity of
practices represented in Sovereignty it is this deep love for
family, for truth telling and for beauty.
This love for family, truth telling and beauty asserts sovereignty in the multiple
elements of both the ontological space of the Mission Home and the Healing
Cloths, and the epistemological space which foregrounded Matrilineal
photographs posed on Country, the Mok-Mok trickster portraits subverting old
stories, and the recognition of other Blak women artists and their work.
Visiting International Indigenous and colonised exhibitions
In 2017, I was accepted to present at WIPCE (World Indigenous Peoples
Conference on Education) and to present my reflections on Aboriginal women’s
art and activism and my PhD first stage practice led research. As part of this
37
conference, which was happening on Six Territories Nations in Toronto, I visited
Tongva Lands/Los Angeles and Lenapehoking/New York City.
I visited as many art galleries as possible, looking for Indigenous contemporary
art and a number of these exhibitions were highly influential. In Los Angeles;
original photographs of Frida Kahlo by Hungarian photographer Nicholas Muray
at the Latin American Museum of Art, and an exhibition by young Latinx women
titled Envision-Picturing the Self (2017) about identity, self, community and
women. It was one of the best community collaborative exhibitions I’d seen. The
curators facilitated the process of young Latina women selecting the work of
senior and established Latina artists and responding to those works in their own
ways through self-portraiture photography.
In New York City, at the Native American Museum I saw an installation titled
The Harbinger of Catastrophe, 2017 by Marianne Nicholson (2017): a carved
box projecting light and shadow around the room enveloping the space in
immersive story. For me, it problem-solved how to produce an immersive
experience in a gallery without hanging out the family’s ‘dirty washing’.
On this visit, the Whitney Museum’s posthumous retrospective of two decades
of Brazilian artist, Helio Oiticicaca, had a huge impact of me. Hélio Titicaca: To
Organize Delirium (Lynn Zelevansky 2016) included the artist’s architectural
installations, writing, film, and large-scale environments of an increasingly
immersive nature, works that transformed the viewer from a spectator into an
active participant. I spent five hours in this exhibition, finding it difficult to leave
after being so moved and excited by experiencing each gallery and installation.
Helio, born in 1937 in Rio and dying young, at forty-two, created little dwellings
of the favelas, as memory spaces of his home country. His work was driven by
presenting his truth of his country; he was dedicated to “plunge into the shit”
(Whitney Museum of Art 2017). His work embodies his activism and distrust of
institutions, speaking of a need for decolonisation and resistance to colonial
institutions that narrowly defined the canon of art as European or Western and
anything ‘other,’ ie Indigenous, Black or brown as ‘folk’ or ‘traditional,’ instead of
as contemporary art in its own right.
38
Seeing his work as a visitor required responding as a participant and
collaborator, not just a passive viewer. By encouraging participation, could
restaging in institutional spaces be enough to save them from being
appropriated by whiteness and colonisation? Can the same be applied to our
works as Blak artists in patriarchal and colonially white art institutions? Can we
subvert these spaces while they curate us and manage our works? His work
both helped me to articulate such questions and shaped how my Exhibition
space was curated. It also assisted me in globalising the experience of
marginalisation, resistance and vulnerability in truth telling for Indigenous
Peoples in arts settings.
Recovering family archival records
During the Family visit to AIATSIS, we researched and found family
photographs, stories and a highly significant collection of audio recordings of
my great-grandmother Nancy Egan, and her brother, Uncle Stanley ‘Stoon,’ Day
which formed the basis of a Wemba-Wemba dictionary co-authored by Dr
Louise Hercus between 1961-1965. I emphasise co-authorship, as Hercus is
named as sole author, and I believe that my great grandmother and great-great
Uncle deserve to be recognised formally for their contributions to this significant
body of work as one of the few remaining Victorian Aboriginal languages that
survived genocide in this state.
The Wemba-Wemba dictionary was compiled from extensive interviews
conducted with Nanny Nancy and Uncle Stoon over this four-year period at
Echuca, with occasional trips to Moonahcullah to visit the old Mission site. The
dictionary is the most comprehensive list of words, terms, linguistic
interpretations, introduction and stories. It built on previous historical research
done about Wemba-Wemba Language, and also featured loaned photographic
images from the collection of my grandmother’s Uncle, Uncle Hubert Day, a
prolific photographer of the Day Family of the Wemba-Wemba people.
We acquired a copy of 1961 super eight film footage of my Nanny Nancy
walking, talking and teaching language to Dr Louise Hercus, a white linguist at
39
our Moonahcallah Mission site, on Wemba-Wemba Country. By then, the little
houses community had created had been demolished by settlers, along with the
school house, church hall and gardens created by Wemba-Wemba Peoples.
Together they were walking through various ghost weavings, layers of
occupation, culture, history and activity of Wemba-Wemba Peoples on Country:
scar trees, cultural sites, gathering places, story places, weaving places,
hunting, cooking and eating sites that were erased through genocidal acts by
the first wave of colonisation.
The Hercus footage which is silent, and the research around it proved
especially significant. Growing up I had heard about footage being in existence
but the tapes were lost through deterioration, as one of my Aunties had told me.
Finding the footage within the AIATSIS archive was thrilling and emotional. Dr
Hercus was the first linguist to make contact with our family, and maintained this
relationship, visiting my Aunty Maureen Tang’s house in Echuca around 1998 to
give copies of the language dictionary to my cousin Kelly Ann Edwards,
grandchild of Uncle Stoon, and to me, as Nanny Nancy’s great granddaughter.
At the time, we were both students of the Nyerna Studies Bachelor of Education
Program at the time in Echuca, an Australian first program between a university
and Aboriginal Community, to develop an on-Country university campus to
address the community’s self-determined educational needs and aspirations of
community, without having to leave Country and our home town of Echuca for
Melbourne for tertiary study. I included some basic Wemba-Wemba language
and language activities in my Nyerna Studies program with the intention of re-
learning it with family and local schools where I hoped to teach after graduating
from Nyerna Studies. Kelly Ann and I were lost to school teaching after being
unable even to secure interviews, despite our high grades, excellent teaching
portfolios and local knowledge, connections and support from our community.
Specially, within the film footage from one of these trips, we see Nanny Nancy
and Dr Hercus setting up a little camp site, with Mrs Hercus’ little car, camping
paraphernalia and a white canvas tent. In this scene, my great grandmother
flicks and folds a white cloth, perhaps a table cloth, and I am immediately
40
fixated and in love with this movement, and this emotive act. Nanny Nancy
smiles and chats as she does this, and it validates the obsession I have had for
the past few years of working with white cloths and rags and, for the prior six
months, the eco dyeing of white cloths. I was transfixed by this movement and
felt that I was exactly where I was supposed to be and doing exactly what I was
meant to be doing. I felt that I was time travelling with my Nanny Nancy through
this action, through working with the white cloths. The mission house was
created to replicate the sense I got from the white canvas.
Ethically, I decided to leave out of the Exhibition the sound of Nanny Nancy’s
voice speaking language, as we have not had time and space to make sure that
each family group descending from Nanny Nancy has copies of the recordings,
and they should be able to access and listen to her voice for the first time, as I
first did with my family as a child from the original tapes; now disintegrating;
new digital copies of the recordings I made for my Aunties and shared on USBs.
However, an excerpt of the film flickers over the Mission Home in the first room,
emphasising the Matriarch continuing to care for Country and those present.
Curating a space of resistance through cultural architecture: Blak
Women’s Houses
This section ponders what makes Blak women’s houses such specific and
particular places, and draws on visual inspiration from Helio Oiticica’s
retrospective exhibition, To Organise Delirium (Almino 2016) and the chapter,
Black Vernacular: Architecture as Cultural Practice (hooks 1995) as global
Black references. The mission houses of Wemba-Wemba women and in
particular, the stories, and memories of my matriarchs’ little bush homes at
Moonahcullah Mission, were the beginning point for creating an immersive
installation of memory, respite, healing and timelessness. The ontological
standpoint as a Wemba-Wemba matriarchal woman, a river woman, a Koorie
woman, was something I drew on to articulate a three-dimensional temporal
space for the duration of my exhibition period at Footscray Community Arts
Centre.
41
After three years of writing, reading and speaking, responding to the field I work
in, I realised I needed to find a new physical medium to work in and find a new
practice that would give me respite from all of the words I had surrounded
myself with. I was sick of hearing my own voice. It was ironic, because trauma
had silenced me, perpetrators had silenced me, enablers had silenced me: all I
yearned was to be heard and validated. After years of speaking and writing out
and back, I realised it was time to be quiet and that I had to make again,
something more physical than photography and something I could realise into a
form of reality for others to immerse themselves in.
It was this feeling of unconditional love that I wanted to express physically. My
matriarchs developed a way of curating their homes and gardens to give a
sense of safety, welcome and nurturing to their families and communities. To
curate means to care. The first curators I knew were my mother, grandmother
and Aunties. With very little materially, they were able to create homes of love
and beauty that made us proud to live in. However, the narrative surrounding us
in the white world, was and continues to tell stories, that we destroy homes and
don’t deserve the homes we apparently are “given” by the government. Angry,
hateful white children at my primary school would scream in my face that “your
people get everything! You get houses and cars! And you burn everything
down!”.
Moonahcullah was deemed a
Reserve dating from 1896 to 1962, and the Station dating from
1919 to 1952. Two land parcels were set aside at
Moonahcullah as Aboriginal reserves, one parcel of 245 acres
was gazetted in 1916 and partly revoked in 1964, the other was
gazetted in 1898 and was for a cemetery. Moonahcullah
operated as a government run Aboriginal reserve administered
by the Aborigines Inland Mission (AIM). The Mission school
was established in 1911’ (AIATSIS 2016, 4).
By 1941, Mission Managers were appointed by the state government to take
over running of the mission. In protest at the oppressive, racist treatment of our
people, my great grandparents, Nancy Egan (née Day), a Wemba-Wemba
42
woman, and Robert Wallace Egan, a Gunditjmara man of Framlingham Mission,
left Moonahcullah with their ten children and made their way to Echuca, Yorta
Yorta Country, occupation of Wemba-Wemba Homelands for the first time in
history.
Our great-grandparents stopped in Barham for a while before moving into town
and becoming one of the first Aboriginal families in the town to be allowed to
buy a house. This house was in a flood-prone area, at the junction of the
Campaspe and Dhungala (Murray in Yorta Yorta) Rivers, in a small section
within a one-kilometre section between the town cemetery, police station and
court house. These are all adjacent to the Dungala and to the Echuca Wharf, at
one point the Southern Hemisphere’s largest inland port before railways would
move the wheat and wool, preceded by the paddle steamers along the Dungala
in the colonisation of River peoples.
A wave of community re-occupation of Wemba-Wemba country took place from
the 1970s onward when family returned to take up residence on the site again,
to hold place. I was taken there as a child growing up with my brother and
cousins for family camping trips; hunting, fishing, swimming and learning in the
same places our Wemba-Wemba Peoples had for hundreds of generations
before us. The places where we camped corresponded to the positioning of the
original Mission Houses, including where each family group had negotiated their
positions.
The original Mission Houses were built by Uncles and Aunties long gone. Still
when I was a child I was watched over by Elders who would tell us stories about
the old days: Mok Moks, Little People or Beccas – the Old People referred to as
‘true Wemba People’ (Hercus 1992). The houses were constructed not only
from local gum trees, and found materials, but Wemba-Wemba Uncles taught
themselves how to make mud bricks from the banks of the Edwards/Collingen
River for their homes and Mission buildings. Homes had one room, wooden
framed, with compacted dirt floors that were kept meticulously clean, by
sprinkling with water and brushing with gum leaf brooms. The walls would be
43
insulated with old newspapers. Their light was lantern or candle light. There was
no electricity or heating, other than stoves added later.
I grew up in Aboriginal housing, that is housing funded by the Australian
government, managed by white offices where we paid our rent for the house
with minimal heating and no air conditioning, with mission brown bricks and thin
hard carpet, for the house we never ever felt truly safe in, knowing that we could
be kicked out at any time. There were times – due to financial stress and
poverty – that my mother would get behind in our rent and had to appear in the
Bendigo Magistrates Court to plead for more time to catch up on our rent. When
I was sixteen, I went with Mum and watched her plead for our rental. I will never
forget the fear of seeing the Sheriff drive up to our house and having to speak
to the Sheriff while our mother hid inside, lying to him to protect Mum from
facing jail time.
Housing instability trailed us in our lives and resulted in an event where our
home was emptied out in our absence and the majority of our belongings taken
to a charity op-shop. It was devastating to lose so many of my childhood toys,
books and the few things I had been able to hang onto, after moving multiple
times with my mother and little brother around the state, following new
boyfriends, new homes and new schools. By coincidence, when I was nineteen
years old, I was with a friend and visited this op-shop, finding what was left of
our belongings. It was a strange event. All of my life I had op-shopped with my
family for clothing and household items. It was surreal to see our own life
displayed there: I felt as if our very life, our struggles, were on display for
everyone to see. It was like being turned inside out, shocking and confronting.
Our privacy and dignity were violated. It required drawing on a fierceness within
me to explain to the white women who worked in the op-shop what I believed
had happened and to demand our things back.
The Aboriginal co-operative itself had sent the charity in to empty us out and
change the locks. My friend backed me up and helped explain while I became
slightly hysterical, because I was in shock. Because I had been through so
much childhood trauma, I reacted in the way that Aboriginal People with trauma
44
do: I yelled, I swore, I confronted and expressed my grief at seeing our lives
spread out in public for literal consumption and shaming. This was before
mobile phones were common and I couldn’t call Mum to tell her. I was then
living in Melbourne with her until we were financially able to get our things
moved to our new rented flat.
Charity, trauma and capitalism of a church charity organisation all collided. In
this strange intersection I remembered my painting and asked where it was but
was informed that I had made my very first art sale. A painting, a very detailed,
large portrait of my mother and little brother – who were my whole world – for
my VCE art subject had been sold to a white woman who lived on a farm. For a
moment, the shock of having our lives displayed in public was suspended and I
revelled in someone liking and actually paying for one of my paintings. Then,
after that momentary joy and pride were gone, I was left with the horrible duty of
transporting our lives in seven green garbage bags, back on the train to our
new city, a three-hour trip. Then I had to tell Mum that not only was her painting
gone – I had given it to her as a surprise at the end of the school year – but so
were many of her things, despite my best efforts to gather and reclaim as much
as I could. I went on to write about this story for a reading, my first ever, at La
Mama Theatre in Carlton, in 2010.
Such experiences of ‘home’ were the well-spring for the Mission House created
for the ontological space in the Exhibition. It was created as a time travel pod. I
did not want to replicate a museum-type version of a Mission House but rather
the emotional essence of this cultural architecture within a three-dimensional
structure and art work to be immersed in. I had originally intended to re-create a
mission home dirt floor by bringing dirt from our family homelands, Wemba-
Wemba Country from our Moonahcullah Mission site. However, after
contemplating this for weeks, I decided it would not be ethical as it would
involve too much grief for Country, myself and family. And, as Country where
FCAC is situated is both shared and contested by Boon Wurrung and
Wurundjeri Peoples, I knew that this would add too many complex processes to
ask permission to bring dirt from other People’s Country, something that is done
45
relentlessly by white people in colonising Country in building, construction and
so called developments. The work of re-creating a dirt floor in a gallery context
will be one that I keep for now and discuss further with my mother and aunties
for future work. The concept of honouring my matriarchs and the homes they
worked so hard for is for now a conceptual process in which I/we create,
maintaining and clean a dirt floor, by compacting it, sprinkling it with water and
sweeping it with gum leaf branch brooms, the way our matriarchs did.
African American professor of architecture La Verne Wells-Bowie highlights in
her writings the significance of architecture created by people who were not
schooled in the profession or even in the art of building. She offers the insight
that ‘vernacular architecture is a language of cultural expression’ that
‘exemplifies how the physical environment reflects the uniqueness of a culture’.
In Art On My Mind, (1995) African-American feminist bell hooks talks about little
black houses in America: the way that black women make little, modest, poor
homes into places of love, beauty and respite. She points to the way that
families put verandas on little houses, surprising white people that little poor
homes would even have a veranda. She describes her grandmother’s house,
which
was not unlike the small shacks that were the homes of many
Southern black folks. Her place was just a bigger, more elegant
shack. Wood frame dwellings that were fragile or sturdy shaped
my sense of meaningful vernacular architecture. Many of these
structures, though fragile and therefore altered by time and the
elements, remain and offer a wealth of information about the
relationship of poor and working-class rural black folks to space
(1995, 149).
In her chapter, Black Vernacular: Architecture as Cultural Practice, hooks
(1995) invokes hope of another kind for Black people in Turtle Island, by
reflecting on a high school art class activity where she was asked to imagine
and draw her dream home. She then designed ‘… a dwelling place of dreams’
(145). In the ontological ‘Unconditional Love space’, I attempted to create a
place of dreams, and of memory/memories in the cloth mission house.
46
To draw further on this sense of dreaming, sleeping and rest, sorely needed by
Aboriginal Peoples, and Blak women in particular, I included a bed lined with
gum leaves in reference to my grandmother’s poem, ‘Childhood Memories’
(Goodall 1988), which is essentially a nihilist meditation on suffering, hunger
and colonial poverty. In the poem, my grandmother invokes the comfort from
her mother’s ‘gentle and loving black hand’.
In completing this chapter, in 2020, my Aunty recently shared with me that great
grandmother Nanny Nancy would use those gentle and loving Black hands to
create shadow puppets that would dance across candle and lantern light in their
little mission house as her grandchildren watched transfixed. Nanny Nancy also
had the knowledge of how to revive dead birds, and regularly practiced this on
Wemba-Wemba Country. In addition to this, Nanny Nancy was a Wemba-
Wemba language keeper. To illustrate this (without playing the audio files from
the 1960s of her speaking language), I decided, with my mother’s and Aunties’
permission, to play this silent footage on a loop to complete the immersive
sense of being in and on Wemba-Wemba Country in that memory space.
Learning how to bush/eco dye cloths for healing and survivance by
gathering stories through yarning while gathering bush-dyeing materials
on Country
Learning new practices and challenging myself as an artist and researcher,
brought respite from academic research and writing practices. By developing
new media for artistic work, and in workshops with other Indigenous women,
gathering bush and cloth materials, I experimented with dyeing using bush
materials from Yorta-Yorta, Boon Wurrung and Wemba-Wemba countries, and
worked with colleagues, matriarchs and community members, yarning along the
way. I learnt through doing; by walking and talking or ‘yarning’ during the
gathering and cloth dyeing and through sharing food and cups of tea and
coffee, at my kitchen table.
Some of the plants and eucalyptus were collected in the bush in my hometowns
of Echuca and Kyabram on Yorta Yorta Country, and on Boon Wurrung Country
47
and Wurundjeri Country along the Maribyrnong River. Each place I gathered, I
said thank you to the plants and trees I gathered from and to the Ancestors of
that Country. I was careful to only take small amounts from each tree or plant
and to spread the collecting out so as not to deplete each place. During this
process I learnt to be more observant of different plant species, of Indigenous
plants local to Kulin Country and those that may be Indigenous to so called
Australia, but not to Kulin Country.
Along the Maribyrnong, close to where I was born in Footscray, my Mother
Margie showed me how to collect the sap from the box gum and told me a story
I’d not heard before: that her mother, my Nan Rosie, had shown Mum the same
thing in her childhood. It is these times we need to reconnect with each other
and Country in reciprocity and to find quiet, gentle moments of healing. Mum
always says “it’s the little things that matter”. This observation is humbling
considering the gratitude it holds, the refusal to take joy, peace and pleasure for
granted in lives that are dominated by trauma, grief and loss. This is quiet
resistance and respite from the battles Mum has already had in her youth,
physical and emotional, political and personal.
The process of creating bush-dyed cloths includes going for a walk on the river,
collecting plant material, preparing the dyeing pot, talking through the process
and explaining my PhD project and process, the aim for the exhibition
installation, cooking a meal for the collaborators, taking our time to talk through
the process, planning out the materials on the cloths after we wet them with
water and vinegar, carefully planning the placement of the plant material on the
cloths laid out on the kitchen table, the placement of gum leaves and rusty
metal objects into the water and onto the fabric, the placement of stringy bark,
lilly-pillies, various plants and bush flowers - all carefully considered and placed.
Once the materials are placed, cloths are wrapped with gum tree sticks, small
branches, string, bound into bundles and placed carefully into the boiling water
and bush brew in the pot and left for 1-3 hours.
While they boil, we prepare more cloths, talk, drink tea and coffee, eat food and
yarn about culture, family, identity, politics, grief, resistance, life as Black
48
women, the role of our families, Elders and relatives. These were broad and
open conversations, non-judgemental, respectful and confidential.
Once the boiling is done, after we carefully observe the colours seep up the
fabric bundles, we decide when to remove them. The longer they sit, they
stronger the marks and patterns become. The decision is up to each participant.
I give advice, on my experiences of making the cloths myself, but make it clear
that the decisions about the cloth belong to the cloth maker. I believe different
spirits, of the plants, insects, animals and Ancestors of the place the plant
material comes from all emerges into the cloths. A reading process takes place
with each cloth, as each one is completely distinct and unique. Even if I tried to
replicate a cloth, it will do what it wants to do.
We take them out of the water carefully, with long tongs, and lay them outside
on the concrete to cool down and drain the excess water. Once cool enough to
touch, they can be unwrapped, and hung on the clothes line to dry. After drying,
I iron them with a hot iron, which “sets” the fabric and the images that have
emerged.
This is a laborious and involved process. There are very particular steps to each
part of the process which I find soothing, the repetition, the attention to detail. It
is all meditative and holds all of the attributes of mindfulness practice. Being
present is critical to this work, but so is being calm and the work itself brings on
a sense of timelessness and presence. The smells from the boiling pot emanate
into the air; the eucalyptus oil is cleansing and creates a sense of being in the
bush after rain, or fire. It is evocative of the bush and being on Country and it is
comforting and gently tiring work. I sleep well after days of eco-dying.
I can facilitate all of the elements for creation, but I can’t control what happens
in the pot, or in the water, or in the cloths themselves. I can encourage, I can
place, I can nurture, I can observe, I can reflect, but I cannot guarantee the
outcome. These are lessons in themselves about the healing process; it is
supported by collective knowledge and processes; but ultimately healing is
intimately personal even though the context and historical traumas that causes
49
wounds are political. In waiting, there are also lessons of patience, and of
anticipation; there is no way to know exactly how the cloths will turn out; which
plants will rise most vividly to the surface of the fabric, which marks will appear,
how and where.
Some marks appear as animal, spirit or both; different family members and
friends saw different things and shared their ways of seeing with me. It’s like
looking for the faces in gum trees along the Dungala, Campaspe & Colity
(Edwards) Rivers the way my grandmother taught me. To see the Old People
and Spirits that live there. These were methods of both cultural and artistic
practice; of deep listening to the women and family who walked and gathered
with me, deep listening to Country, Ancestors and deep listening to my own
reflections and new learnings.
These plant materials – gum leaves, bush flowers, plants and Old Man Weed;
Wemba-Wemba family bush medicine were gifted to me by my Aunties and
delivered to me by Mum during my own healing. I then used these materials to
dye white Indian calico, white recycled rags, white second hand bed sheets,
white pillow cases, white women’s clothing, white baby’s singlets, and onesies.
This transformation of whiteness into tones, colours and patterns drawn from
Country itself is a disruption to historically enforced white garments at Missions,
whiteness forced onto the bodies of women and little children. On seeing the
babies’ clothing drying after being unbound from their steaming bundles, my
fifteen-year old son Katen, who has never lived on the Mish at Moonahcullah,
but knows it through visiting and memories said, “they’re so Mission Mum and
so sad.” His ability to identify the grief associated with these transformed pieces
is a reminder that the imposition of Christianity, and so-called purity was an
injustice, a colonial injury we are still healing from. The stains of sexual abuse,
violence and subjugation of our women’s and children’s bodies still wounds.
Having experienced the joy of collaborative workshopping around the Healing
Cloth Bush-Dyeing, I wanted to spread this practice more widely. After the
exhibition, I facilitated an eco/bush dyeing public workshop in response to the
exhibition. I was honoured to have two Moondani Balluk colleagues, Aboriginal
50
community women, artists in their own right, participate. I had intended to
facilitate another workshop, one for Aboriginal Community only, but the
conditions caused by the 2019-2020 summer’s horrific bushfires limited the
opportunity to do this work.
I have been talking about healing for years now and I finally feel closer to it than
I have in my life. This process of making, yarning, ‘being, knowing and doing,’
has been transformational. Not only a healing cultural and arts practice, these
processes gave me respite. I needed to be quiet and listen to others, to the
bush, to plants, trees, birds, fish, Country itself and boiling water steaming a
healing mist and brew into the air.
The family and community work and the new arts practice of bush dyeing cloths
underpins the soft ontological space of the first room in the Exhibition. The
processes of building a large collection of cloths, a wedding dress and coverage
for the Mission house, drew both on matrilineal Wemba-Wemba Country
materials and shared practices in my suburban home on Boon Wurrung
country.
Bringing the Exhibition together, a long labour and birthing process
The Exhibition was organised to present to people as an immersive experience
of what creative Aboriginal women’s research, art as research, and practice led
research could be, could look like, and could feel like – within and immersed in
the research itself. The description of the two galleries of the Exhibition is
provided in the next chapter, with some selected photographs. (See Appendix A
List of Works: Unconditional Love Space and Appendix B List of Works:
Photographic works and studio installation.) I am grateful to the many hands
who helped install the exhibition.
Ghost Weaving the past, the present and the future
In this chapter, the background stories for the creative works have been
detailed as part of the memory work needed to decolonise the artistic work and
its spatial presentation. The healing work that emerges from the capacity to
51
express sovereignty does not erase trauma. The body of works created a
structure that could hold a self-determined and sovereign space to be immersed
in, a space that would allow imagination, memory, embodied experiences, and
temporary respite from dominant white colonial narratives.
Ghost Weaving brings together legacy practices in a multi-method art-and-
writing, Aboriginal women’s research methodology which weave connections
across diverse methods, as well as across time. The project is thus able to
disrupt old readings of Aboriginality and make intimate connections between the
urban and the rural as extended practices of Country.
All stages of the Exhibition and Exegesis writing are held together in a Ghost
Weaving, which became a meta-concept for the doctoral project. The Ghost
Weaving links together the multiple media and strands of art projects that led to
and were curated for the Exhibition and it weaves this work into the specific
matrilineal transgenerational stories and practices I have inherited and which I
communicate through the combined Exhibition and Exegesis to the wider world.
It is also important to emphasise the places and spaces the research and
project took place on and with. I say ‘with’ to honour the living nature personality
and philosophy of living Country as a being named as a participant in this
project, and woven into every element, including myself.
Having read the stories, research, reflections and descriptions of methods used
in making and remaking art works, you are now invited to read about the
exhibition’s two spaces enfolding this work in Chapter 3.
52
Chapter 3: The Exhibition:
Unconditional Love and Matrilineal knowledge work
The Exhibition both embodies and is an outcome of the research process 2015-
2019. Art itself is research and creative projects are research. In a range of
media, it addresses key questions of how Aboriginal women’s art could be
curated to voice and disrupt the prevalent ‘artistic terra nullius’. By embodying
and generating home as a sense of ‘unconditional love,’ (Bunda 2016), it
represents resistance to colonisation and patriarchy as dominant ideologies. It
celebrates and platforms Aboriginal women’s resistance and humanity, and
‘survivance’ (Vizenor 2008). As the multiple forms of feedback affirmed, art can
be curated to contribute simultaneously to comfort Aboriginal visitors while
challenging white visitors.
My choice of the Footscray Community Art Centre was an important and de-
colonising decision for me as a place where I would present my PhD final
creative works. I needed the work to be in a community-controlled space that
was as close to a First Nations determined space that I could find in the city. It
had taken over ten years’ consistent work, and contributions from various
Aboriginal artists and arts workers to FCAC in order for this space to be as
culturally safe as possible. White spaces don’t just magically de-colonise or
become safe for the Mob to work or be in. It takes years of relationship-building
and demonstrated action before a space and its staff can be engaged with. Will
it ever be possible for us blackfullas to ever actually fully trust a white
institution? By “Ghost Weaving” multiple art and cultural practices to conduct
the research and community cultural work of the project, I was able to combine
historical, cultural survivance practices that respond to the past, present and
future.
In this chapter, I introduce the two distinct but related Exhibition spaces I
curated, described here for those who were unable to experience them. One
was an ontological space: of knowing, being and doing; the other emphasised
an epistemological space: the archive, platforming and privileging of Aboriginal
53
women’s knowledge, practices and standpoints as sovereign warrior women
and artists. Both spaces worked as siblings; one holding a space of theorised
photography, family documentation and theorising of matriarchal experiences of
survival, resistance and thriving in the face of colonisation. The two reflected
different approaches and outcomes but are read as one work, despite them
having visually different environments of their own; in the same way that the
exegetical work accompanies the exhibition as a whole work to be read as one.
As you enter the space, the movable wall to the right had the exhibition signage
in black vinyl decal: Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius: The ways that First
Nations women in art & community speak blak to the colony & patriarchy.
To the right of the exhibition signage was the FCAC visitors’ comment book on
a plinth, along with the exhibition catalogue that I had printed as a small A 4
colour booklet. The comments book is something that FCAC does for all
exhibitions, and I appreciated the documentation of visitors, the number of
visitors, and their overwhelmingly positive comments for which I am so grateful.
It indicated that around 300 people saw the exhibition during its two-week run.
The regular numbers to the gallery were down due to the heat wave and horrific
bushfires in Victoria and NSW at the time. Bushfire, smoke and ash from
burning Gunai Kurnai Country was filling Kulin skies in Footscray and the city
and it had an impact on how people engaged in community, wellbeing and
work, and of course visiting art centres and galleries.
I did want to gather as much feedback as possible in extending the research
process, so in addition to the visitor comments book, I also invited a few people
to give me written responses. The other form of response to the exhibition was
the bush dyeing workshop which I facilitated for the public in the second week
of the exhibition, responding to the Unconditional Love Space. The public
workshop was attended by eight people in total, including FCAC staff, members
of the public, including two Aboriginal community women, Pauline Whyman,
Yorta Yorta woman, and acclaimed actor, filmmaker, writer, director and
community arts worker, and Tarsha Davis, a Kuku Yalangi woman, who is an
emerging artist and weaver. Tarsha and Pauline also took images of the
54
workshop. The workshop numbers were reduced by the climate trauma taking
place, which also stopped me from running a second workshop exclusively for
Aboriginal community women.
The ‘Unconditional Love ‘Space: Healing cloths, the recreation of ‘Home’
and mission house under the matriarchal gaze
Figure 1. Paola Balla Unconditional Love Space, (2019) Mission House
bush dyed Indian calico, recycled timber, gum leaves, voile, interfacing, op-shop
bedding, 3m x 3.5 metres by 4.5m Clothes Line, op-shop clothing, baby clothing,
women’s clothing, 10m x 5m x 3m rope. Shown in Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius,
the ways that First Nations Women in Art and Community Speak Blak to the Colony
and Patriarchy (2019), FCAC. Image courtesy Anthony Balla (2019).
The ‘Unconditional Love Space’ title came from a pre-candidature meeting at
Moondani Balluk with Professor Bunda where we discussed my approach to the
project and research within the academy. Professor Bunda taught me that, in
order to survive as Blackfulla researchers in white universities, and to thrive
within our research projects; we “must find places of unconditional love.” I wrote
this on a piece of paper and pinned it to my studio/office wall. I included this
55
note to self in my studio installation in the Roslyn Smorgan Gallery and its
meaning deepened over the period of the project. I’ve realised that in naming
the ‘Unconditional Love Space’ I offered, what I’ve always craved: to be loved
unconditionally and to learn how to love others unconditionally amidst colonial
caused traumas and inter family and community fractures of violence, sexual
abuse and shame. I realised that I as much as I was creating an offering of
healing to my people that I was also creating it for my own healing.
The space was created as an immersive installation and when I found out that
the Performance Space at FCAC was available, I was so excited. It opened up
the development of the concept of ‘unconditional love’ and allowed me to go
bigger and more deeply into the work to fully tell the story in the most immersive
way I could. I knew that I would be able to create a theatre set-like work; one
that was narrative-driven and immersive in size and scale. The theatre
blackness and cavernous size of the Performance Space lent itself to elevating
the visual art concepts into an immersive, larger than life installation that played
with scale and allowed for emotional resting places, both visual and
metaphorical. I have a theoretical approach to curating spaces in which, apart
from the gathering, selecting and placement of objects and artworks, that there
must be a space for the “eye to rest.” A space where there is an apparent
“nothing,” yet, that space of clarity is a gentle punctuation place where you can
contemplate either the totality of the installation or have a breath from particular
moments.
Before you enter the space, you encounter a sign on a plinth adjacent to the
entry door. This was the only text people would encounter in relation to the
space. Hopefully after reading this, people would enter the space via the front
door, and would slowly approach the space, as the lighting was very low, I kept
the space deliberately dark so that people would slow down their movements
and be cautious and deliberate in how they moved in the space. It read:
56
Before you enter, please know that you are invited to visit this ‘place of
unconditional love.’
This is a space created out of the artist’s own healing processes from trauma &
offers respite from ongoing colonial violence, traumas & injuries.
It was created with daily acts of repair & unconditional love & care.
Each healing cloth within has been hand dyed with locally gathered Indigenous
plants, bush medicine gifted from the artists Aunties from their matriarchal Wemba-
Wemba Country, bush flowers & various eucalyptus leaves. The cloths visualize
grief, loss & trauma & hold the potential for healing by offering a space to rest.
The installation is a memory space of Moonahcullah Mission on Wemba-Wemba
Country, family & Country & the artist's respect for her matriarchs, in particular her
late great-grandmother Nancy Egan (nee Day),Wemba-Wemba matriarch &
speaker. Family & community members are advised that her image appears in the
featured film footage with Dr Louise Hercus, linguist & co-author of the Wemba-
Wemba Language dictionary.
First Nations/Aboriginal/Blak women require respect, respite & care. This space
was created out of unconditional love for them.
The ‘Unconditional Love’ space had four main elements that could be seen as
you entered the gallery: Healing Cloths, the recreation of ‘Home’ mission house,
clothes, including piles folded on the floor and the wedding dress hanging on
the wall, and the silent super 8 film. Ghost Weaving, with its emphasis on the
ghostly and haunting of memory, past traumas and ongoing grief, brought these
hauntings to a new space which held memories together with nostalgia and
love.
On entering the space, your eyes are drawn to three main creative works, a
small Mission House, situated diagonally across the room, facing East (Figure 1
above). To its right hangs a bush-dyed 1970s white satin wedding dress which
is pinned to a large bush-dyed cloth hanging by rope behind the Mission House.
A ten metre rope is suspended across the space from left to right creating a
huge, over-sized clothes line, draped with bush-dyed white calico and bush-
57
dyed women and children’s white clothing, under the line is a large square of
bush-dyed white calico that is covered with nine neatly folded piles of freshly
ironed bush-dyed women’s and children’s white clothing and bush-dyed ragged
pieces of white linens and laces. Beyond the clothes line, five metres above on
the back wall of the space is a projector wall on which is projected a continuous
digital loop of an extract of a 1961 Super8 film footage of my Great
Grandmother, Nancy, with white linguist, Dr Louise Hercus.
Figure 2. Paola Balla Unconditional Love Space, (2019) Clothes Line, (detail) bush
dyed Indian calico, baby clothing, rope. 10m x 5m x 3m. Still, Super 8 Film. Hercus
(1961). Shown in Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius, the ways that First Nations
Women in Art and Community Speak Blak to the Colony and Patriarchy, (2019),
FCAC. Image courtesy Anthony Balla (2019).
The largest of the three main works is the Mission House. At three metres tall,
three metres wide and five metres in length, I designed it to be big enough to
allow at least three people to be in there at once comfortably. It was also
designed specifically for the Performance Space Gallery. I planned the Mission
House in size and dimensions using a ladder, measuring tape and floor tape to
58
walk through how to make it three dimensional. It is a small house frame,
constructed from second-hand timber I hand selected carefully. The wooden
framed Mission House has walls, an entry and windows that are all completely
made of bush-dyed calico, facing (a fabric used in lining clothing), fine curtain
sheers, a foam mattress, gum leaves hidden under the foam mattress, a bush-
dyed bed sheet), a small foam pillow in a bush-dyed pillow case, while the area
under the bed was laid with a bush-dyed cloth to emulate a dirt floor.
Apart from the wooden frame, staples and nails holding the house together (all
hidden under fabric), the house and installation was soft, aromatic and all
touchable. For the materials of this space, I only use recycled and second hand
materials from op shops where possible to avoid contributing to the destruction
of Country through land fill and creating more material waste.
The House was designed for people to go inside, spend time, sit, lie on the bed,
watch the Super8 film footage through the sheer curtain fabric on the left-hand
side, and look out the facing sheer panel to the ghostly hanging wedding dress
from the right-hand side. On lying down, or looking up, you can see gaze at
“stars” spots of light projected from above through the bush-dyed cloth ceiling,
along with the pale, blue moonlight/twilight coloured gels that created a sense
of night, dream state, twilight within the Mission House. This created a feeling
like you are sleeping in a tent and gazing at the stars beyond. On looking out
the left side, you see what appears like soft, orangey pink light spilling onto the
clothes line and floor beneath it, creating a sunrise/sunset (birth and death)
feeling of time, created from soft gels projected above. I hired a theatre lighting
technician to bring the space to life with colour and light. Whilst I had other
exhibitions, I had never worked on this scale on my own work and was
passionate about presenting this work as an immersive experience. I opted to
keep the theatre seating bank closed and, in keeping with darkness and twilight,
to keep the soft orange safety lights on, the height of the bank (around 5 metres
tall). I loved the soft radiant light they gave; to me they played with bush lights
at night – just like the ones I saw with my son in 2015 at Moonacullah one
evening, just after dusk.
59
This performance space as gallery contained around two hundred and forty
white cloths that I had dyed using a bush dyeing or eco dyeing practice. The
process of transforming white pieces of fabric into beautiful pieces, tells stories
in stains, marks and what I believe are spiritual markings. I call the cloths
‘Healing Cloths,’ as they hold the life of the trees, plant and earth itself they
grow in (Figures 2 and 3). These cloths were draped over the rope clothes line
strung from one wall at a high point on the left side graduating up to a higher
point on the right side and fixed to an existing wall joint using a scissor lift.
There are no pegs: the cloths are draped, so their position on the line is
tenuous, not fixed. They drape softly, and hang like ‘strange fruit,’ and include
women’s nighties and slips, tiny babies’ singlets and onesies, and delicate,
lacey women’s dresses, all stained with bush medicine and bush flowers, gum
leaves and rust. The stains make them appear as if they may have just been
dug out of shallow graves, or pulled from soft river sand, where they may have
been brewing in sun light, river water, clay, mud and blood. The ‘Healing Cloths’
installation is an attempt to manifest a three-dimensional space that makes
visible trauma trails and stains and visualises what respite and healing could
look and feel like.
Three of the largest cloths lying over the clothes line touch the floor, and
elegantly pool on the floor like fancy house curtains, pooling like water into the
black floor and spreading like red gum tree roots into the earth, holding
themselves into Country and creating place for all relations, human and non-
human. The marks from the trees that the gum leaves and flowers in the bush-
dye brew appear in the cloths, emulating the smooth skin of red gums and
lemon scented gums, whose wrinkles and folds show us just how related we are
to them as non-human relatives. Their skin holds their memories, soft and
gentle like an Elder’s hand. Some of these cloths are up to ten metres in length,
and a metre wide, and one is folded on the floor into a neat square, as a holding
place for around sixty pieces of clothing, folded into nine piles of white bush-
dyed babies singlets, onesies, women’s nighties and tops, table cloths and
multiple other cloths.
60
Figure 3. Paola Balla (2019) Clothes Line, Unconditional Love Space
bush dyed calico with eucalyptus, rust, bush flowers, Old Man Weed, bush-dyed
baby clothing, nightgowns, tops, lace, Shown in Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius, the
ways that First Nations Women in Art and Community Speak Blak to the Colony
and Patriarchy, (2019), FCAC. Image Paola Balla (2019).
The wedding dress, Kalina Moonahcullah, 2019, bush-dyed, marked and
stained like a Black Miss Havisham, in perpetual waiting for her love, hangs
suspended about two metres above the ground (Figure 4). Her arms are held
stiff by pins that hold her onto a two by two metre square piece of bush-dyed
calico with lines of black rusted iron marks like scars that create page lines for
the wedding dresses stories to be read on. The cloth is held stiff as I hid within it
a one metre piece of bamboo like a women’s digging and fighting stick. I tucked
the bamboo into the top of the cloth, tightly into the knots I tied in the top right
and left corners of the cloth. The bottom of the cloth was left to hang. This
tension creates a stiffness that makes the cloth and the dress move as one
when a breeze touches them, or if someone walks closely past. She is lit lightly
from above, so as to ‘float’ against the dark wood panelled walls. Each corner
knot has old rope tied to it, to hang the dress and cloth like a flag against the
wall. This work signifies the imposition of western women’s clothing on Black
women’s bodies and cultural practices.
61
Figure 4. Paola Balla, Kalina Moonahcullah, (2019) (detail) 1970s Kyabram op-
shop wedding gown, bush dyed with eucalyptus, rust, tea tree, bush flowers, mould,
with bush dyed calico cloth. Shown in Unconditional Love Space, Disrupting Artistic
Terra Nullius, the ways that First Nations Women in Art and Community Speak Blak
to the Colony and Patriarchy, (2019), FCAC. Image Paola Balla (2019).
It is a visualisation of the patriarchy and gendered marriage roles, distinct from
Aboriginal relationship practices, and acts to disrupt the notion of white as purity
in the Christian wedding gown.
Flickering soft, coloured light spills from the continuous digital loop of the 1961
Super8 film footage of Grandmother Nancy projected high onto the wall
62
behind the Mission House (Figure 5). It is the only visual literal representation of
people, and the 1961 footage adds to the sense of nostalgia and time travelling
within the space. In it, we see Nanny Nancy and Dr Hercus setting up a little
camp site, with Mrs Hercus’ little car, camping paraphernalia and a white
canvas tent. In this scene, my great grandmother flicks and folds a white cloth,
perhaps a table cloth, while smiling and chatting, resonating with the healing
cloths in this space I have (re)created in connection with her.
The Healing Cloths installation, ‘Place of unconditional love,’ was created
specifically for the Performance Space at FCAC over the six months prior to the
Exhibition through 'daily acts of repair' in sharing and collaborating with other
Aboriginal women and family members in a new process of eco dyeing fabrics,
clothing and rags to become 'healing cloths’. Healing is often an elusive and
difficult process; it lacks a visual guide. Creating this space is a way to grapple
with and try to resolve this process in an embodied, immersive experience.
63
Figure 5. Paola Balla (2019), Still from Super8 film footage, Hercus (1961), view
from inside the bush dyed cloth Mission House
Unconditional Love Space. Shown in Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius, the ways that
First Nations Women in Art and Community Speak Blak to the Colony and
Patriarchy, (2019), FCAC. Image Paola Balla (2019).
64
The Epistemological space: Refusing exclusion: representing Blak
Women’s knowledges
The epistemological space was installed in the Roslyn Smorgan Gallery,
situated at the northern end of the FCAC’s main building, a former warehouse
that was refurbished to expand the centre and to create a large gallery. As you
enter the main doors, to the centre of the building, Roslyn Smorgan Gallery is
on the left.
As the Roslyn Smorgan Gallery is completely open, with no wall to the foyer
area, I used the gallery’s large movable walls to create a more enclosed,
intimate gallery space. I curated it to operate as a “traditional” gallery space by
placing two movable walls at the end, offering a more an immersive experience
of the works. I allowed a gap of around three metres between the movable walls
to create an entry to the exhibition and a sight-line through the centre of the
gallery to the eastern wall with a central floor-to-ceiling window that allows
natural light and a view. I did not curate this space to direct visitors to move in
any particular direction around the works, but allowed each work, or set of
works, to draw visitors to move around the gallery to look at and read works as
they were drawn.
The moveable walls also served to give additional hanging space for the Mok
Mok photographic works and for two in particular, on the left-hand side of the
gallery looking east toward the city. I chose to have the white opaque window
shade drawn to complete the enclosed gallery space – the ‘white cube’ – to
paraphrase Moreton-Robinson’s Talkin’ Up to the White Woman seminal text
(2000), subverting the dominant whiteness of gallery spaces. I also chose to
hang the photographs at a lower height than the regulation 1500m, down to
1300mm to make the works more accessible, and to allow children to view the
works more easily. FCAC is fully accessible and I wanted to honour that by not
creating an able-centric exhibition.
The Epistemological space was one of active engagement with photography,
installation, and text. This space draws on Blak humour, familial knowledge,
65
family photographic collections and the culture of story-telling. It also
acknowledges the power and influence of Aboriginal literature, Aboriginal
women’s herstories and Aboriginal art. In contrast to the Unconditional Love
Space, which was curated to have no text, literature or written components and
no labels on the works (except for the external entry signage) the epistemic
space included labels, text, literature references and labels on the works.
On entering the epistemic space, you see four distinct bodies of work within the
gallery. The first is the Mok Mok photographic series in the left-hand corner and
along the eastern wall when reading the gallery from left to right. All of the
works are related and speak to one another. The second body of work is made
up of works in particular dialogue with each other. ‘…and the matriarchs sang’
is a 13-panel work of photographic images and charcoal text, collaged over a
blend of housepaint and bark which was installed alongside the northern end
corner. It links to the large portrait, Margie the Matriarch (2018) and the dress
installation, born into sovereignty, live in sovereignty. The final piece in this
collection, speaking to the Matriarchal line and the historical record, is my
grandmother’s poem, Childhood Memories. The third body of work is the
studio/office wall recreation which served to represent both my conceptual
and exhibition developmental space including a studio wall collage and a
bibliography table of colour photocopied references and book and publication
covers. The fourth body of work, Lovescapes; Wemba-Wemba Country, was
the largest work in the space, encompassing photography in two different forms:
copies of family and archival photographic images on translucent acetate paper,
loaned from my mother’s albums and from family collections, and an i-phone
photograph I took on Wemba-Wemba Country printed on a large scale onto eco
wall paper.
1. Mok Mok
The Mok Mok series could be read in any order but was hung to read it in the
most linear way with the Mok Mok Cooking Show I, and Mok Mok Cooking
Show II where she is posing as a domestic goddess cook in her suburban
kitchen preparing to eat the chocolate cake by sliding a bone handled butter
66
knife across her tongue, licking the chocolate icing whilst glaring into the
camera lens, to the Mok Mok Eats Chocolate Cake work where she is smashing
cake into her mouth, letting the crumbs and icing fall where it will. These were
followed by Washing Day Sis, Graduation Day, I Woke Up Like Dis, and Mok
Mok The Matriarch.
Figure 6. Paola Balla (2016), Mok Mok Cooking Show I
from the Mok Mok series. Digital pigment print on 188 gsm photo rag 710 x 960 mm.
Shown in Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius, the ways that First Nations Women in Art and
Community Speak Blak to the Colony and Patriarchy, (2019), FCAC. Image Paola Balla
(2019).
67
2. Family … And the matriarchs sang
Figure 7. Paola Balla (2015), and the matriarchs sang
Ecoboard, house paint, dirt, ground bark, charcoal, paper, pages from 1930s art
history book, 2001mm x 800m x 40mm. Shown in Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius,
the ways that First Nations Women in Art and Community Speak Blak to the Colony
and Patriarchy, (2019), FCAC. Image Paola Balla (2019).
This work continues the photographic work of the Mok Mok series. It features
photocopies of my matriarchs collaged onto hand painted boards, rubbed with
bark and dirt from Country at St Albans where I was doing an artist residency at
the start of my research. There are 13 panels and they can be read or seen as
pages from a book. Each panel features either hand written text in charcoal, or
a photocopy, working like illustrations. There is also a page ripped from a 1930s
art history book that I wrote new text for and typed over the original page.
Speaking to this history is the large gold framed portrait of Margie the Matriarch,
featuring my mother, Margie, daughter Rosie and niece Maggie ((Figure 8). This
68
portrait was way to honour my mother, her role in our family as a matriarch.
Honouring my mother in photography way is also a way of honouring our past
photography and in documenting our family life on Yorta Yorta Country in the
small town of Kyabram.
Figure 8. Paola Balla (2018), Margie the Matriarch
digital pigment print on 188gsm photo rag 1240 x 910 mm. Shown in Disrupting
Artistic Terra Nullius, the ways that First Nations Women in Art and Community
Speak Blak to the Colony and Patriarchy, (2019), FCAC. Image Paola Balla (2019).
Adjacent to this is the installation born into sovereignty, live in sovereignty.
This is a 1950s green, floral motif house dress adorned with around fifty native
bird feathers, which I hand sewed into the hem, collar, arm bands and waist
band) at the width end of the wall. This work is seen in multiple places and ways
within the exhibition, as I had worn this dress in a performance that I did on the
banks of the Maribyrnong River for a 2014 solo show at FCAC, this time in the
69
Gabrielle Gallery. (One photograph from that show, by my husband, Anthony
Balla, also appears in the Lovescapes installation.) This piece had been
awarded the Three Dimensional Award at the 2015 Victorian Indigenous Art
Awards. The dress appears here in its own right, as an installation, a flowered
and feathered cloak that offered me both vulnerability and protection as a
women’s cultural garment.
Figure 9, Paola Balla, 2014, Born in Sovereignty, Live in Sovereignty
Image: Courtesy Art Gallery of Ballarat, used with permission.
70
Completing this body of work is the handwritten poem, Childhood Memories, by
my grandmother, Rosie Tang, enlarged and printed on foam block mount which
was installed on one side of one of the moveable walls, also holding the dress
installation. I feature my Nan Rosie’s poem to show my respect, love, and
reverence for her life, which ended when she was in her early 60s in 1993.
Nan’s poem speaks of the traumas of colonisation. It speaks of the starvation
and the hunger pains’ that she, like so many of our Elders, endured.
Figure 10 Childhood Memories, Rosie Tang, nee Egan, (1988)
original hand written poem digital pigment print on foam mountboard, 800mm x 507mm.
Shown in Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius, the ways that First Nations Women in Art and
Community Speak Blak to the Colony and Patriarchy, (2019), FCAC. Image Paola Balla
(2019).
71
3. The studio/office
Figure 11. Paola Balla, Studio Wall Collage (2019)
studio ephemera, test prints, PhD Coursework ethics poster, feathers, lace, paper
flowers, photographs, notes, Victorian Aboriginal Languages Map. Shown in
Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius, the ways that First Nations Women in Art and
Community Speak Blak to the Colony and Patriarchy, (2019), FCAC. Image Paola
Balla (2019).
The studio space was explicitly situated in the field set before me by Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander artists and collectives, and, particularly Blak women,
through their writing, catalogues, and artistic work. Some of this is from my
visual arts “literature” review, some of which now appears elsewhere in this
Exegesis.
I recreated this space by installing a collage of my office posters, research
materials, personal and family photographs, a Victorian Aboriginal language
map-adorned with a selection of paper flowers I created throughout the
research period. I drew them in pencil and then cut them to replicate life size
flowers (around ten centimetres in diameter) and painted them with water
72
colour. I used them to create family Country punctuation points and of
matriarchal places on the studio wall collage (Figure 10), including native bird
feathers, hand bush dyed lace, my ethics poster (made as a creative work in
itself) and reference to my research processes.
In the window space I placed two large kitchen tables end to end (on loan from
FCAC) and draped a bush dyed table cloth over the centre of the tables, not to
cover the entire length, but to act as an anchor point, a grounding space, for the
bibliography table. This cloth, one of the first I dyed, was one of only two dyed
pieces outside of the Unconditional Love Space: it hinted at the relationship
between both bodies of work. On it I placed photocopied coloured covers of text
and literary references.
In the corner of the studio/office space I placed more paper flowers and a few
personal items, a 1980s photo album that I had used as my eldest child’s first
baby album. Sadly, this album was water damaged in the early 2000s in the
many house moves and temporary spaces I had stored things, so the precious
first and only copies of my baby girl’s photos were left as watery abstract half
landscapes within the photos themselves, I also placed a drawing journal from
when I was twenty-one, a new mother to my little baby girl. I propped open the
book to a sketch of her, relaying the difference between drawn impressions and
photos as an amalgamation of memory.
On the small bookshelf, loaned from another space within FCAC, I placed my
developmental journal for the works and exhibitions, where I took notes from
meetings with my co-supervisor, or to remember thoughts of concepts or ideas.
I also placed some textbooks relevant to my research, Helio Oiticica’s catalogue
from Delirium, and a copy of an English 1800s journal of drawings about the
colony, including depictions of Aboriginal Peoples from different nations.
The ethics poster from my PhD presentation was comprised of a Mok Mok
photograph, I Woke Up Like Dis, printed on photographic rag paper. During the
PhD coursework we were informed we would be required to create an ethics
poster for a mini conference, and explain our research methodologies, key
73
theories and motivations for the project. I was inspired to make a hand drawn
poster for a creative thesis, knowing that graphic-design posters were not for
me. The ethics poster was a collage of text, images and citations pasted on top
of the 750mm x 900mm photographic print ; I felt it really captured the emotive,
cultural and theoretical approach I was taking to my project and one that
visualised my standpoint and early readings of Aboriginal feminist theory by
Prof Aileen Moreton-Robinson. It included lines of poetry by Black poet, Warsan
Shire (2012), who featured in Beyoncé’s phenomenal Lemonade album which
had just been released, fortifying me whilst grappling with early stages of the
PhD work.
The poster included images of our Wemba-Wemba Old People and relatives
from Moonahcullah Mission, to cite our place as central to my standpoint,
responsibility and respect to our Homelands and People. I made a collage of
copies of myself, mother, grandmother, great grandmother and great-great
grandmother. Cascading down the left-hand side of my face and the poster,
next to each matriarch, I placed lines of text from Warsan Shire (2012), about
the magic that grandmothers hand spin: gold from nothing, goodness and
nourishment from impoverishment.
4. Lovescapes, Wemba-Wemba Country, 2017
To the right of the table and studio space, on the South wall of the gallery I
hung the largest work in the gallery, Lovescapes, Wemba-Wemba Country
(2017).
74
Figure 12. Paola Balla, Lovescapes: Wemba-Wemba Country (2017)
eco wallpaper, 5m x 1.5m acetate film, 5m x 3m. iphone image of Wemba-Wemba
Country with archival & family images of matriarchs, L-R Papa Mariah Day, Nanny
Nancy Egan nee Day, Rosie Tang nee Egan, Margie Tang, Paola Balla, Rosie
Pepeny Kalina. Shown in Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius, the ways that First Nations
Women in Art and Community Speak Blak to the Colony and Patriarchy, (2019),
FCAC. Image Paola Balla (2019).
The Lovescapes work can be read from any angle and invites the visitor not
only to look at the translucent photographic images of my matriarchs, but also to
look through them into the Wemba-Wemba Country behind them, thereby
demonstrating the relation between my matriarchs, myself and my daughter and
with Country. That relationality (Moreton-Robinson, 2013) is a lived experience
represented here in the genealogical use of photography responding to
Country.
Lovescapes, Wemba-Wemba Country, 2017, begins with a 5m wide and 3m
high work which includes a 5m wide and 1.5m high eco wallpaper that I had
printed from an i-phone photograph I took of Wemba-Wemba Country,
75
specifically at Tumudgeri Creek. Set up in relation to this large print of Country
are archival and family photographs printed onto 3m high x 800mm wide
translucent acetate photographic sheets. The images from left to right are of my
matriarchs, my great-great grandmother, Papa Mariah Day, great grandmother,
Nanny Nancy Egan, née Day, my grandmother Rosie Tang, my mother, Margie
Tang, myself and my daughter, Rosie Pepeny Kalina. I had originally intended
for this work to be on translucent fabric which was hard to source. I researched
and found acetate photographic film to be a good alternative.
I wanted to have the images installed so that the matriarchs would be in a
matrilineal line, with the eye level of each woman at the same height, so that
you could read our eyes in each other’s. It proved really complicated to install
this idea as I intended, placing the acetate films on a 45-degree angle, to create
a triangular space between the films and the wallpaper, a space to walk or be
between my matriarchs and our Country. This allowed the acetate film images
to be viewed from multiple angles and gave the work an additional immersive
element.
As the image stopped 30mm short of the top of the translucent film, it meant
that I needed to line the top of the images exactly with the next, and it also had
to match exactly the top of the wall paper image of Country, against which it
was angled. The i-phone image of gum trees on the creek was flipped to mirror
themselves, creating bush and tree like spires and mirror images that were
fascinating to look into.
Reflecting/exhibiting
The Unconditional Love Space grew out of the longer-term photographic
practice, resulting in the epistemological space of photography, documentation
and active research with family, the archive and the theorised field of Aboriginal
women’s work. The epistemic space was a replication of my conceptual and
thinking space – my working space from a critical place of interpretation and
documentation, while the Unconditional Love Space was about my internal
processes of going deep within my embodied memories of place, Country, lived
76
experiences of surviving and thriving in the face of colonisation. For the
Unconditional Love Space, I reflected on the healing processes of my own
trauma within intergenerational traumas and repressions.
I thus worked as curator to provide an exhibition space that would challenge the
settler and provide comfort to Aboriginal People – and perhaps to other peoples
who have experience trauma and displacement. As a temporary exhibition,
however, it underscored that healing can only be temporary while
transgenerational historical traumas and injuries continue.
The emotional and psychological curatorial intention has been to create a
temporal place of respite, contemplation and listening as an unconditional love
space that we all crave: the unconditional love of Black women, the
unconditional love of Aboriginal culture. It is also a space for deep listening; in
Wemba-Wemba language, an active deep listening is nyernila – which
translates to mean sit, listen, and learn. This space replicates the sense of
home of our Wemba-Wemba homelands and Moonahcullah Mission, where my
Old People come from and where I spent significant time camping with family as
a child.
The Epistemological space was a more explicit representation of Aboriginal
women’s knowledges, passed down and re-made, their legacies of practice, of
art, of making – and Speaking Blak to the ‘white cube’ of the dominant ‘artistic
Terra Nullius’. The presence of both spaces asserts Matriarchal Sovereignty,
both ‘born into’ and reclaimed through multiple actions, including researchful
artistic creation.
77
Chapter 4: Speaking Back and Speaking Blak
The invisibility, erasure and disrespect for the work of Aboriginal women’s work,
art and activism is a focus of significant struggle that is necessary in the white
arts world, in academia, and in broader society. These politics cannot be
avoided. Moreton-Robinson, following in the footsteps of many Blak women
writers and artists, points out the demand for Indigenous activists and
researchers:
that indigenous work has to ‘talk back to’ or ‘talk up to’ power.
There are no neutral spaces for the kind of work required to
ensure that traditional indigenous knowledge flourishes; that is
remains connected intimately to indigenous people as a way of
thinking, knowing and being; that it is sustained and actually
grows over future generations (Moreton-Robinson 2007).
The relationship between activism, research and art must be clearly stated. The
historical legacies of previous sovereign warriors in art, community and
literature must be acknowledged and placed within one’s work as a reference
and foundational touchstone for ensuring that the work of others gone before us
is not forgotten, neglected or dismissed as irrelevant, not current, or ‘sexy.’
This project responds to community, the academy and the art world by breaking
silences and honouring the stories previously made invisible. As an Aboriginal
matriarchal sovereign woman, I speak back and Blak (Deacon 1988) to the
violence, trauma and silencing brought by colonisation and ongoing structural
trauma that I encounter in daily life, the academy and public spaces. My work
and the work that informs it are described as matriarchal and imbued with
Aboriginal women’s authority, that of the Sovereign Warrior Woman named by
Bunda (2016). A descendant of basket weavers, and emu feather wearing
women who are guided by birds as totemic, spiritual and physical guides, my
matriarchs are also poets, writers, painters, photographers and activists. Papa
Mariah Day, my great-great grandmother undertook a 1500-kilometre round trip
alone to represent our family, and our Wemba-Wemba People to attend the first
Day of Mourning in Sydney, January 26th 1936, in protest at the loss of lives of
78
Aboriginal Peoples in the invasion and colonisation of Australia. The early
landscape paintings of my grandmother Rosie were instrumental in teaching me
how to ‘see’ Country.
Remembering and re-making are acts of disruption of artistic terra nullius.
Whilst disruption can be an action of the moment, requiring acts that alert
others, a calling out, a naming and sometime shaming of erasure and deliberate
exclusion, it is almost always done with our Old Peoples in mind, their
sacrifices, and to honour our Ancestors and the suffering of our families and
communities. My research project was in part a disinterring of memories, of
personal, family and community stories, many of which spoke of trauma. The
project thus became in part a journey of articulation of my own healing from
trans generational trauma derived from white and settler colonial injuries.
Breaking silences is a powerful practice in healing transgenerational and
colonial wounds. Shame is so embedded into our lives that the word shame has
enormous cultural and intellectual power in the Aboriginal vernacular. To be
shame, to cause shame, to act shame, to feel shame, to be a shame job! To
shame someone up, to be too shame to do something. It’s funny, it’s Black, and
has no equivalent in white Australian English-which is inadequate for
understanding this concept.
Art is not only working to refuse shame and heal from the past but about
creating prospective futures. Working on art built my ‘Standpoint’ as part of a
Wemba-Wemba matriarchy and contributes to the ongoing reclamation of
Wemba-Wemba language and culture. We work together to maintain
boundaries: the very word Wemba-Wemba means ‘No,’ and ‘Wemba-Wemba’
means, ‘no, certainly not.’ We say “No, certainly not” to ongoing colonisation,
violence and patriarchy by asserting our sovereignty, by talking back to our
enforced erasure in public stories and by telling other stories instead, in multiple
media.
79
Reasserting curation and criticism
Curating is an act of care. For First Nations’ works, deep attention needs to be
paid to curating for Country and stories of Country, and all that comes with it,
including trauma stories. Art that addressed previously silenced stories is a gift
to community and can be a way of writing back into academia and the arts
world, making new spaces and opportunities for reciprocity and healing. In
curating other Aboriginal Peoples’ work, and my own, I care for and facilitate a
process to place and protect that work in a context that is ethical, responsible
and respectful. An exhibition and academic writing provide a different
experience for community members, and a different one again for the academy,
the art world and for readers of this exegesis as a public work.
However, curating in colony Australia is not oriented to such work. Despite
museums and galleries having major and significant collections of Aboriginal
art, artefacts and stories, the curators of these collections and managers of
galleries are almost all white, or non-Aboriginal people, an appalling situation
(Eshraghi 2015). Despite calls for Indigenous communities and collaborative
projects, these projects and exhibitions usually have one off or limited time
spans which often leave community members proud of their achievement but
suspicious of further engagement without permanent appointments, structural
changes and shifts away from white and anthropological representations of
Indigenous narrative, histories, lives and lived experiences.
This is not only a local problem. The Persian and Samoan academic and
curator, Leuli Eshraghi has undertaken a global survey of Indigenous Curatorial
positions and argues that, when these positions are held by non-Indigenous
people, Indigenous people’s autonomy and authorship will always be managed
and controlled by non-Indigenous agendas. For example, the Senior Curator of
Indigenous art at the NGV is a white woman. Further, Melbourne Museum’s
only Senior Indigenous curator, Yorta Yorta woman, Kimberly Moulton states
that ‘the number of Indigenous people in leadership roles within the industry is
completely inadequate and this leads to what is often absent – our voice’. The
lack of Indigenous curators at the Koorie Heritage Trust and NGV is in fact
80
symptomatic of a ‘societal dispossession’, not just an artistic one (Eshraghi
2016).
“Aboriginal art” has been kept, and to some extent still does get kept separate
from the Western Canon and contemporary art. It is still spoken about in binary
terms, as either “traditional,” or “urban”, i.e. as “authentic” or not Aboriginal
enough. Bell argues the advent of Aboriginal art is a ‘white thing’ (Bell 2002),
accompanied by exploitation of “traditional” artists. We don’t see ourselves in
major collections, or contemporary art or “Australian” art collections because we
are categorised in the Aboriginal or Indigenous gallery. There are a few
exceptions, including Tracey Moffatt, whose work is held in the “Australian”
collections. Do these galleries function as contemporary equivalents of last
century’s Aboriginal dioramas where we are frozen in time, the same way that
mid-20th century ashtrays and 2020s stilted Aboriginal kitsch objects, still
produced and found in tourist shops, maintain representations of us?
Activists find it necessary to make visible our resistance to being described and
controlled by white Australia and its storytelling, as Alexis Wright points out:
we were not in charge of the national story about Aboriginal
people when other people needed to create the narratives for
the diorama in which we should exist, of how we should be
visible in the eyes of Australia’ (Wright 2016, 8-9).
Visual and performative arts have important roles to play here for constructing
and reclaiming our story. Subversion is necessary to assert a visual sovereignty
within art. Play is important, imagination is central to ‘the meticulous struggle to
be…This is the weight that infiltrates everything we try to do, the burden in all
creativity, the handicap in vision’ (Wright 2016, 9).
Most contemporary art texts focus on the work of Aboriginal men, though
renowned Aboriginal women painters – often relegated to being either
traditional ‘bush or desert’ painters such as Sally Gabori and Emily Kame
Kngwarreye – are compared to ‘less authentic’ Aboriginal so-called urban
artists, such as Tracey Moffat and Brenda L Croft, whose works are understood
as being in response to Aboriginality as opposed to ‘being Aboriginal.’ And
81
urban Indigenous identity is questioned, critiqued and dissected as
opportunistic, inauthentic, or not really black. Aboriginality becomes tied to a
male, nameless body in the colonial project in Australia; colonial narratives,
notes Moreton-Robinson (2016) tell the story of a male or genderless pan
Aboriginality that establishes an erasure of Aboriginal women’s presence,
contributions and humanity.
The white art canon continues to struggle to describe or critique Black art in
uncolonized ways, such that some Aboriginal artists and First Nations artists
reject and even uninvite white reviews and criticisms. For example, Queer 2
Spirit Ojibwe/South Asian performer, playwright and poet, Yolanda Bonnell,
requested ‘that only Indigenous, Black, people of colour (IBPOC) review the
show’ in her online piece Why I’m Asking White Critics Not to Review My Show,
(Bonnell 2020). This demonstrates that making Blak art for Black communities
is not the same as making art for white or non-Aboriginal audiences.
The marginalisation of Aboriginal curators and the challenges they face in
working in what essentially remain white galleries and museum institutions
means there has been little opportunity for ensuring appropriate cultural
protocols, especially in recognising community. The Aboriginal woman curator
and critic is often ignored, particularly whilst she does not hold senior roles.
While the Who’s Afraid of Colour Aboriginal women’s exhibition at the NGV was
‘long overdue.’ (Delaney 2017) it was still curated from a white perspective and
lacked community collaboration and engagement with local Aboriginal women.
However, critical dialogue of Aboriginal women’s arts writing is found in
Indigenous women’s blogs, social media platforms and emerging opportunities
through independent media such as The Lifted Brow and select art publications.
Aboriginal women writers, Eugenia Flynn, (Flynn 2016), and Kimberley Moulton
(in Balla & Delany 2016) contributed critical texts in response to the Sovereignty
exhibition in reviews and essays for Art+Australia magazine. Writing on treaty,
black feminism and violence against Aboriginal women, particularly in academia
and social media platforms, Dr Chelsea Bond, Amy McGuire, Nayuka Gorrie
82
and Celeste Liddle (Liddle 2016) have made critical contributions to community
and public debate.
By moving on from curating in the Mission Manager’s house (i.e. white
institutions, galleries and museums), First Nations artists and curators attempt
to de-centre whiteness, and work toward de-colonising or in de-colonising ways.
Such collective work helps build a community and communities who support
one another, through projects and exhibition building, to create a cumulative
public set of knowledges and pedagogies, so they can see and walk through
their stories, hear the unheard in the field of art whilst disrupting its whiteness.
Speaking Back to the university
Breaking silences speaks back and Blak not only to the art world, but to
universities themselves. There are necessary questions about our participation
and ongoing contributions in tertiary institutions, which are colonial sites of
power, built on our lands, using our resources, intellectual property, human
remains and belongings. University requirements for research degrees tend to
look to assimilate Black ways of working by Black thinkers, scholars, artists and
creators, including creative PhD projects and research.
Our disruptions are ongoing and required within the academy; we are required
to apply for ethics approval to talk with our own Mob, our own families, our own
communities, within University protocols which don’t actually respect or know
our protocols. It is galling to be required to follow institutional ethics procedures,
as our category of ethics is deemed “high risk.” I believe the risk is to us as
Indigenous Peoples, in dealing with white peoples, settlers and those newly
identifying as Indigenous, who perpetuate reconciliation agendas, assimilation
and capitalism. Yet, in order to progress through the system as post graduates,
we have to comply with existing policies and procedures.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999, 99) argues that the ‘mix of science, cultural
arrogance and political power continues to present a serious threat to
Indigenous peoples’. She lists a number of ways in which research continues to
colonise, including patenting DNA/cell lines and commodifying Indigenous
83
spirituality and cultural knowledge, including art (1999, 100-103). University
research and ethics processes themselves must be decolonised and
Indigenised to respect distinct and diverse Indigenous ethical systems of
knowledges specific to communities and the country of that community
(including its history of resistance and cultural practices. Universities need to
pay attention to Indigenous ethics and collaborative and communal ways of
working, which rely on history and re-creation, accountability and collaborative
processes that embody our sovereignty.
Being a PhD candidate positions you differently. Us Blackfullas are not seen in
the academy or valued. It is a white man and woman’s world, where we are
always in a position of contestation. It is hard work to maintain a sovereign and
self-determined position that is true to family and community goals of
community controlled and self-determined community work and engagement,
rather than to the goals of the academy and its white middle-class agenda of
“success”. Sometimes known in Aboriginal vernacular as Blackademics, we are
politicised whether or not we like it: the personal and the political merge.
The need for continuing matriarchal art and activist traditions
Moreton-Robinson lays out the contemporary history of Aboriginal women
activists and their pivotal roles in the resistance of and assertion of Aboriginal
rights. The articulation of Aboriginal women’s rights within this is in stark
contrast to the aims of white feminism which, she insists, is largely
individualistic, aligned with ensuring white women’s equality with white men,
while Aboriginal women’s activism was and remains concerned with the
collective wellbeing of their people. She points out that
as knowing subjects, middle class white feminists and
Indigenous women speak from different cultural standpoints,
histories and material conditions. These differences separate
our politics and our analyses. Indigenous women do not want to
be white women; we want to be Indigenous women who
exercise and maintain our cultural integrity in our struggle for
self-determination as Indigenous people.’ (Moreton-Robinson
2000, 151).
84
Art is a risky process for Blak women who manifest and materialise intimate
thoughts, ideas, memories and Blak concepts that make others, including white
women, uncomfortable. Responses to my work, and that of other tidda artists,
has shown that many white women are unaware of the depths of our pain and
trauma, and of their own complicity in its continuation. Our work confronts and
speaks back and Blak to them, redressing the widespread gaslighting of
Aboriginal women who name these injuries by writing and making art in
response to them. It is foregrounded by speaking Blak and creating a new
space, a different world in which to break silences and continue healing which
needs to be regularly revised and renegotiated as traumas continue to surface
and erupt.
By participating in culture, we maintain culture and resist colonisation. The
embodied memories of little mission house life, for example, live within my
memories from matriarchal stories. And, ‘[i]n the telling of our stories, in the
speaking of the words, decolonisation commences’ (Phillips & Bunda 2018,
107). I am speaking to and with my family and community in this project and
speaking back to the academy and the art world about the significance of Blak
women’s lives, stories and contributions. In making my own work, I had to
reflect on what was mine to tell, what part of these stories were ethical to repeat
and place in public. This work is about the ethics of story, knowledge and what
is and isn’t included in art making and how as a curator, I care for this work.
What I tell is to honour past generations, share knowledge with current
generations, and pass on knowledge to future generations.
The creative work found in Aboriginal women’s biography and autobiographical
work (Ginibi Langford, 1988; Tucker 1977) situates my own work by placing
herstory as significant to the understanding of Aboriginal women’s resistance,
expressions of identity, country and community. Moreton Robinson (2000, 1)
notes that ‘the landscape is disrupted by the emergence of the life writings of
Indigenous women whose subjectivities and experiences of colonial processes
are evident in their texts.’
85
Aboriginal women’s work subverts various forms of art and resistance and we
constantly have to create and re-create strategies to respond and express
survivance whilst colonial violence and the rights of Aboriginal Peoples continue
to be violated. We do this whilst avoiding perpetuating any replicant white-
appeasing versions of cultural purity or appropriations of decolonising efforts
and attempts to return to or maintain a romantic binary representation of
“Aboriginality,” and pan Aboriginality. These stances can be exploited by newly
identifying and fraudulently identifying white people pretending to be Aboriginal
– a practice which is rife in the arts and academic sector – for power and
positions stolen from actual Aboriginal People who have Ancestry, community
connectedness, blood lines and community accountability. Questioning this lack
of responsibility is often met with accusations of lateral violence; which
becomes a violence in itself.
While informed by the personal and the political, by intergenerational and trans
generational traumas and resistance, creative work is contributing to something
much bigger: whilst informed by this, it is not framed by it. The framework it
works within is Aboriginal women’s matriarchy, sovereignty, self-determination,
contributing to an Aboriginal women’s feminist standpoint theory (Moreton-
Robinson 2013). Aboriginal women’s standpoint claims a bigger and new space
of Blak women’s work as disruptors to artistic terra nullius, but it is not limited to
the fields of visual and performing art.
The works of Aboriginal women writers such as Tucker, (1977) Langford-Ginibi
(1988) , and academics such as Linda Tuhawi-Smith’s De-Colonising
Methodologies (2000), Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s Talkin Up to The White
woman (2000), have begun to be read more widely. And there is an growing
collection of major artistic bodies of work by Tracey Moffatt, Brenda L Croft,
Destiny Deacon, Karla Dickens, Lisa Bellear’s photographic archive and poetry
collection, the music of artists such as Tiddas, and Tiddas member, Lou
Bennett, her recent work with Romaine Moreton and her One Million Beats
performance, the work of the Boomalli Artist Co-operative founded by ten
Aboriginal artist activists (predominantly women) in Sydney, 1988, the work of
86
the proppANOW collective from Brisbane, 2003 (predominantly men) to name
only a few. There is the Birrarung Gallery at Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural
Centre/First Peoples Gallery at Melbourne Museum, the work of more recent
collectives, the Unbound Collective of Ali G Baker, Simone Ulalka Tur, Faye
Rosas Blanch and Natalie Harkin, the WAR (Warriors of the Aboriginal
Resistance) and thismob by Kate Van Buren, curatorial projects by Kimberley
Moulton, and fempress by Hannah Bronte in Brisbane.
My work is in dialogue with each and all of these artists, writers and collectives:
it is situated in a decolonial, intersectional Aboriginal feminist, matriarchal,
critically self-aware movement of sovereign political art that is responsive and
responsible to Ancestry, Country, family and communities. My project positions
the work of Aboriginal women artists as visual authors of their lives and the lives
of their families and communities as ‘collective memories of inter-generational
relationships between predominantly Indigenous women, extended families and
communities’ (Moreton-Robinson 2003, 23). Through dialogically-based critical
analysis, my work is generating insight about how Aboriginal women are at the
intersection of colonial injuries that include their gender, race, class and social
positioning. By subverting various forms of art & resistance in diverse contexts
of community and ‘cross spaces’ like academia, public life and social media,
Aboriginal women create and recreate strategies to respond to and express
survivance.
Artists such as Moffatt (1989), Deacon (1995) and Dickens (2016) each speak
to me because of their clear disruptions to how Aboriginal women’s art,
community work and activism has been previously represented. In particular,
Deacon’s series on Blak urban identity dating from the 1990s allows me to
speak to the complexity of what it means to be an urban living Aboriginal
women artist. Lisa Bellear’s photographic work and poetry, in particular
‘Dreaming in Urban Areas (1996), is a critical example of how biography is not
always a written document but can be presented in other ways. Bellear’s
photographic archive of around 20 000 images archive of Victorian Aboriginal
community life is testament to Indigenous women’s insider documentation of
87
community collaborative practice. These approaches are de-colonial or non-
colonial (Garneau 2016) in praxis, art, community and activism.
My project revealed that we as Black women, need physical and emotional
places, spaces and resources to support this work where we can safely
cultivate healing processes and practices to give us respite from constantly
having to deal with trauma caused by institutional and social violence, murder,
deaths in custody, poor health, low life expectancy, sexual assaults, rape, child
sexual abuse, and toxic racisms in systemic, institutional ways and the micro
aggressions we are constantly exposed to online, in person, historically and in
our daily experiences. The bush dyeing body of work was a place to allow the
traumas and trauma stains, but also those of spirit and strength and survival to
float to the surface of each piece of the hundreds of pieces I dyed on my own
and with others. In creating these works I could only name what was able to be
brought to the surface. The stains that drifted to the surface of the healing
cloths, for example, held these wounds and traced the trauma trails named by
Judy Atkinson (2002) in Trauma Trails: Recreating Song Lines: The
transgenerational effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia, one of the first
times I encountered the naming of trauma and its legacies.
Whilst this project honours and remembers my matriarchs, it was not my aim to
romanticise my matriarchs. My grandmother once told me that we must never
romanticise ourselves, but I fear that, in trying to remember them publicly, that
white people might misunderstand this honouring and miss critical points about
the complexities of trans generational traumas. In naming my matriarchs as
warrior women and central to my standpoint, I also know that this is complicated
and bittersweet work. I am cautious of romanticising them because their stories
of survival are complex and have had undesired consequences. Their lives
were altered by extremely difficult decisions forged by traumas out of their
control, in which their sovereignty and agency was not respected, but violated.
I also made this work to honour and remember my vulnerability and gentleness,
and that of other Blackfullas, because these qualities made me a target for
white male sexual violence, racist bullying, and coercion by people willing to use
88
my childhood body and adult body for their own purposes, both within my
community and by whites trespassing in it.
Embodied memories, my body remembers, haunt me daily, and confronting
them, particularly in the writing of this exegesis, has been triggering and
exhausting work. It has brought multiple repressed and bound memories to the
surface, affecting my sleep, my moods, my energy, appetite, relationships,
ability to concentrate and contributes to infections and illness that have delayed
the completion and submission of this work. Creating these bodies of work has
pushed me to the brink emotionally and physically to confront trauma triggers
and wounds, making an effort to subvert their power in my life. The
photographic series were a way to present myself courageously, in various
guises, and through all my grandmothers, my matriarchs, my mother, my
daughter, my niece, and my son.
Figure 13 Paola Balla (2014) Untitled,
digital pigment print on 188 gsm photo rag, 960mm x 710mm
The sharing of this process has been reciprocal and emancipatory, like the
collaborative photographic work ‘untitled’, 2014, (Figure 13) I created at the
89
request of and with Prof Tracey Bunda, featured in Research Through with and
As Storying (Phillips and Bunda, 2018 p108), who described this process as an
act of emancipation.
Expressing unconditional love and the need for spaces of unconditional love for
Blak women is embodied within this project as a response to needing healing
and respite from the exhausting work of resisting, naming and responding to
ongoing traumas, because these complex trans generational traumas damage
relationships in families and communities by binding them with silencing,
shame, by projecting traumas on others, and making love and acceptance
conditional on complicit behaviours. Breaking silences is complicated work and,
in this project, could only be done in small increments in my art practice. This is
where the practice led research created the greatest meaning for me
personally.
Anger has a role in healing. There is energy to be found in sustained and
justifiable anger because as Blak women, we are not allowed to be wild, to be
angry. The tropes about us as ‘wild gins’ work against us in telling our truth
publicly: when we do, it causes discomfort and withdrawal. But healing is not
forgetting. Healing is not always forgiveness and whilst this work centres on
healing, it does not centre forgiveness. In ‘Refusal to forgive: Indigenous
women’s love and rage,’ Leey’qsun scholar Rachel Flowers points out that for
Indigenous wome, ‘[o]ften our love and positions we hold in the community
make us targets of colonial violence; ultimately, our resentment and anger are
in response to the modes of gendered colonial violence that exploit our love.’
She deepens this point in describing
those moments when we come together in protest or in
remembrance for our sisters (and brothers and non binary
relations) our anger is not abandoned, our resentment is not
relinquished; it is because of our profound love for one another
and our lands that we are full of rage. Anger and love are not
always mutually exclusive emotions’ (Flowers 2015, 40-41).
Aboriginal women’s work, including this body of work, is not only defined and
limited to responding to trauma; it celebrates our ongoing resistance and
90
evolving cultures previous to being disrupted and violated by invasion and
colonisation. The work continues the cultural work of truth and storytelling, of art
making, performance, reframing and re-creating language, culture, art as
disrupted, not “lost” not “disappeared” not faded into nothingness within the
colonial project. It addresses the everything and the everywhen of Aboriginality,
rich in story, theory, context and subtext, vernacular, and spectacular and
brilliant Blak and Blackfulla beauty and intelligence, ingenuity, cleverness,
inventiveness, imagination and joy.
The positive responses and embracing of the Mok Mok series in its several
incarnations demonstrate that self-representation of Aboriginal women matters;
that it is necessary to subvert stereotypes and narrow tropes of Black women as
backbones of our communities, or as striving to be “successful” and palatable
by white standards, or the uncontrollable, angry, aggressive, wild Black women.
I created my own Blak Woman Superhero character in Mok Mok, making a
positive use of fear in Aboriginal community, as opposed to the negative use of
fear in western or white society, through the use of imagination, creativity, and
respect for the spiritual world and the unknown. While legendary Yorta Yorta
artist Lin Onus’ Captain Koori addressed a lack of Aboriginal heroes, even
though Condomman heroized safe sex, even though Superboong disrupted
Australian television screens on the ABC in the 1970s, and started Black
comedy in this country, they were all hetero and cis gendered males. As
Aboriginal women, our lives, bodies, gender, and sexualities are politicised as
are labour and contributions. This drove me to position myself as Mok Mok,
because Mok Mok also embodies Blackfulla humour. Dr Angelina Hurley
underscores the importance of humour in What’s so funny about Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander humour?
‘the diversity of our humour is prevalent and exists embedded
within the diversity of our culture…Shared values among
Indigenous peoples worldwide note humour existing as a
resistance to oppression, an expression of identity, a means of
survival and a tool for healing….the health and wellbeing of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples prevails through
91
humour’ (Hurley 2015,‘What’s so funny about Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander humour?’)
We are still missing the Blak female identifying or non-gender conforming Black
Superwoman. We need her strong and non-exploited labour for our own
Peoples.
Ghostweaving Sovereignty
Matriarchal sovereignty has been embodied in this project through the making
of new art that draws on my matrilineal line and community and collective
collaborative ways to create works, woven across the ‘everywhen’. This is
perhaps best expressed in my work Born in Sovereignty, Live in Sovereignty
2014 (See Figure 9, chapter 3). It is also a concept I apply to theorising this
body of work, to find places of sovereignty and to re-instate my sovereignty as a
birthright and a life right. Sovereignty resonates because it is entwined with my
matriarchy, its continuation and the struggle it always asserts:
‘Sovereignty itself is an inalienable, innate and intimate right; its
expression can be found buried within artistic works, gently
emerging from inherited practices, or boldly spelled out in new
artistic forms adorned with confident lines, camouflage, electric
lights and bling (Balla 2016:11). The sovereignty of Indigenous
peoples is being asserted in a cultural revolution…This is
happening now, across South East Australia, in the calls for
treaty and the increasingly prominent role of art and activism by
Victorian Aboriginal peoples…In this charge we see incredible
courage and leadership by Victorian Aboriginal women…[who]
continue to be marginalised and subjected to various forms of
violence, both historical and contemporary. Despite being at the
forefront of political, social and cultural resistance, our
knowledge and practices are often omitted and rendered
invisible in colonial academic, art and cultural institutions and
public life. It is critical that this…be addressed by situating
Aboriginal women’s contributions to practices of survival in art,
academia and public spaces.
(Balla 2018, 275)
92
In ‘Critically Sovereign, Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies,’
Lenape scholar Joanne Barker speaks of gendered categories and
relationships to
matrilineality and patrilineality -not necessarily indicative of
matriarchy or patriarchy-defined social identities, relationships,
and responsibilities in contexts of governance, territories, and
cultures. Lineality would seem to indicate then, an insistence on
a biological relationship, but not one that can be used to
stabilize gender and sexuality in the reckoning of social identity,
desire and pleasure’ (Barker, 2017 p13-14).
My son Katen’s contribution to the Mission Hut, in creating the largest and most
graphic piece of healing cloth, took on a significance for how I learn how to hold
my son and patrilineal lines as an Aboriginal woman, a mother, an Aunty and
hopefully one day as a grandmother. However, I also know that mothering and
mother work as named by Patricia Hill Collins (2002) is done by multiple people
in Aboriginal communities and is not bound by biological mothering and birthing.
Everyone has or had a mother and, in this sense, this work honours mothers
and their work of supporting, caring, nurturing, mentoring, and providing a safe
place of unconditional love.
The Unconditional Love Space, of bush dyed fabrics, and memories of my great
grandmother and her little Mission House drew emotional responses that I both
witnessed and had re-told to me by visitors. The responses I witnessed to this
space from Blackfullas were very different to those of whites and settlers.
Blackfullas responded to me with emotions of nostalgia, longing, familiarity,
homesickness, sadness, grief and memory. Some whites responded with crying
and feeling overwhelmed, struggling to describe their responses; they
commonly talked about “not knowing” these stories. Blackfullas however
focussed on how familiar it felt and how similar their home Missions or their own
matriarchs’ images were. Part of my intention for these works was to comfort
Mob and to make white people uncomfortable, or at least question their comfort.
After the completion of the show I invited a small number of people to write
responses to the exhibition. Two selections articulate for me that the project
93
addressed my problematics and answered key questions for the research.
Eugenia Flynn, a Tiwi, Larrakia and Chinese and Muslim woman writer and
curator writes:
The most striking thing about this exhibition is that it makes
visible the work of Aboriginal women - both the products of that
work and the cultural processes that underpin the pieces.
Paola's practice as both artist and community practitioner is not
just hers, but it is shared between her and the women in her
family and her community. Her ways of doing – Aboriginal ways
of doing – are just as important as the works produced, and this
comes across throughout the entire exhibition as genuine and
intrinsic to the work. In particular, the mission hut is a shared
space where the viewer feels as though they are witness to
Aboriginal women's ways of being and doing. Approaching,
then standing inside the hut, we are transported through time
and space through sights, sounds and smells that evoke deep
memories for those of us who share the experience of being
Black women. It is not about clamouring for space or pushing
our way through to be seen: Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius is
a compelling example of how Aboriginal women can confidently
assert themselves with strength through art.
Bryan Andy, Yorta Yorta, writer, critic & performer, responded:
The Wemba woman in this print has been like a guardian to me
since my teenage years, and she still is. In my mind and in my
world she's the epitome of a Blak Matriarch.
This print has been in my life for three years, and was a gift
from Paola after she first presented her Mok Mok (Mok rhymes
with 'book') series in 2016 in honour of a Dreaming story that
has been told around the campfires of home on Yorta Yorta
country, and in Wemba Wemba country too, which is no doubt
where Paola first heard of Mok Mok and her malevolent ways and
came to understand her ferocious appetite for young Blak kids.
[Having said that, I'm sure Mrs Mok Mok's appetite'd extend to
white kids too, so lookout you mob!]
Mok Mok served a purpose in our mobs' past, and Paola has
reinstated her relevance today and for our future through an
imposed lens of heteronormative domesticity within the
patriarchy of so-called Australia.
94
Future Work
The future work I want to do after this project has a number of focuses. There is
a project with my sons and nephews and non-binary siblings, acknowledging
that Matriarchal honouring does not exclude males or non-binary relatives, and
that as a straight, cis gendered woman I have privileges that trans Black women
and men and non-binary Mob are denied. another is working towards collective
family healing from matriarchal ways of being and naming this work within
academia and Blak community.
Another focus is writing into this space more and continuing to advocate for
Aboriginal women’s voices and spaces in art and community to tell untold
stories and healing opportunities. During the PhD project, I lost my Aunty, my
cousin, and my Tidda. During this project, my mother’s cousin Aunty Tanya Day
died in police custody, her coronial inquiry was held and no one single person,
police officer, has been found accountable. Her children, my cousins, Apryl,
Belinda, Warren and Kimberley have fought for their mother publicly and
courageously. There are multiple stories which require anger to fuel telling and
healing, political activism and personal connection.
I also want to continue the bush dyeing projects and workshops with other
community members. I have been part of a successful Moondani Balluk
collective AIATSIS grant to conduct healing workshops with Aboriginal women
inmates at Dame Phyllis Frost Detention Centre in Melbourne, and This Mob
young Aboriginal art collective has invited me to do workshops with SIGNAL in
Melbourne for Koorie young people both in 2021.
My post-doctoral dream is to create a book about Blak women’s art. I would like
to return to my earlier plan to interview more Aboriginal women artists to further
platform and document so much of what is undocumented of Blak women’s
work. Beyond temporary exhibitions and performances, there is a permanence
created and a larger truth when photographs and documentation are made
public as a lasting record.
95
By this creative work and exegesis, I fill a gap in the scholarship of Aboriginal
art and community and familial research processes. In speaking Blak and back
to the ‘white cube’ and academia, I express resistance to making Black art that
makes white people comfortable and the commercialisation of Aboriginal art for
consumption. By taking up Deacon’s Blak, I continue to disrupt the status quo of
those who shy away from the C in Black, repositioning the power of Blakness
and Blak women’s power as sovereign Aboriginal warrior women.
96
REFERENCES
Acosta, N. & Sosa, F., 2019. Black Power Naps. 2019, Performance Space New York,
New York City, New York, January 9-February 3, 2019
Affirmation, 2020. Affirmation, Koorie Heritage Trust, Melbourne, 29 April-15
November 2020.
Almino, E. W. 2016. ‘Tripping Through Hélio Oiticica’s Mythical World,’ Hélio Oiticica:
To Organize Delirium, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, October 1 2016, January 2
2017, https://hyperallergic.com/345190/tripping-through-helio-oiticicas-mythical-world/
Anzaldua, G. 1981. Speaking in Tongues: Letter to 3rd World Women Writers. In:
Moraga, C. & Anzaldua, G. (eds.) This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical
Women of Color. 1st ed. Persephone Press, Watertown, Massachusetts.
Arlander, A. 2011. ‘18 Characteristics of visual and performing arts, in The Routledge
companion to research in the arts,’ edited by Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson in
collaboration with Stiftelsen Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, 1st edition 2011, Routledge,
London, pp 315-332.
Atkinson, J. 2002. Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines: The Transgenerational
Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia, North Melbourne, Spinifex Press.
Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, MS 5056,
Item 1, p 4. Moonahcullah ration books.
Baker, A. Balla, P., Moulton, K. & Monk, S., 2017. Next Matriarch: exhibition panel
discussion, ACE Open Gallery, Adelaide, South Australia, 15 October, 2017.
Baker, A. C. 2018. ‘Camping in the shadow of the racist text,’ Artlink Indigenous,
Kanarn Wangkiny Wanggandi Karlto, Issue 38:2, June 2018, Artlink, Contemporary Art
of Australia and the Asia-Pacific, Adelaide. pp 14-21.
Baker, A. G., Blanch, F., Harkin, N. & Ulalka Tur, S. 2015. ‘Act 1 Bound and Unbound
Sovereign Acts,’, Artlink, Contemporary Art of Australia and the Asia-Pacific, Issue
35:3, Adelaide, pp 60-65.
97
Baker, A. G. 2018. Next Matriarch, exhibition artist talk, Koorie Heritage Trust,
Melbourne, Victoria, 7th July, 2018.
Balla, P. 2016. Sovereignty: Inalienable and intimate. In: Balla,
Paola and Delany, Max, eds. Sovereignty: 17 December 2016-26 March
2017. Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, pp. 13-17
Balla, P. 2017. ‘Blak Female Futurisms and Waves of Yte Feminism’. Unfinished
Business, perspectives on art and feminism. Melbourne, Australian Centre for
Contemporary Art. p46-47
Balla, P., Clarke, M, Edmunds, F, & Thorner, S. 2018. ‘Maree’s Backyard: Intercultural
Collaborations for Indigenous Sovereignty in Melbourne,’ Oceania, Vol 88, Issue 3
(2018) pp 269-291.
Balla, P. 2018. ‘Work to Be Done, Across Australia, Artists are Disrupting the Country’s
Colonial Mindset,’ Frieze Contemporary Art and Culture, issue 199, November-
December 2018 pp-142-145.
Balla, P. 2018. ‘An Act of Showing, ARI’s and Whiteness, An Act of Showing:
rethinking artist-run initiatives through place,’ Unlikely Publishing, Melbourne. pp 69-74
Balla, P. 2018. Thank you to the warrior black women who raised me [Online]. SBS
Online. Available: https://www.sbs.com.au/topics/life/family/article/2018/02/09/thank-
you-warrior-black-women-who-raised-me [Accessed].
Balla, P. 2018. Walking in deadly black women’s footprints, Artlink Indigenous, Kanarn
Wangkiny/Wanggandi Karlto (Speaking from inside) Issue 38:2, June 2018, Artlink,
Contemporary Art of Australia and the Asia-Pacific, Adelaide, pp22-29
Balla, P. 2018. ‘Blak Female Acts of Disruption (continued).’ In Ricatti, F, Balla,
P, Dutto, M, Kinder, J, Pallotta-Chiarolli, M, Pugliese, J & Verdina,
F., 2019, Forum: Towards a decolonial history of Italian migration to Australia,
in Altreitalie 59, pp 16-26.
98
Balla, P. 2019. ‘Why Should I Suck my Belly in?’ Keynote address for the 2019 Stella
Prize, Arts Centre Melbourne, Victoria 7th April 2019, viewed April 9th 2019
https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2019/04/09/why-should-i-suck-my-belly
Balla, P. 2019. Mother Tongue. Metro, ATOM-Australian Teachers of Media Inc. Film,
Television, New Media, No 202, pp 74-80.
https://issuu.com/atompublications/docs/3_balla_she_who_must_be_loved
Balla, P. 2020. ‘Tyirrem; the end of the world as we knew it.’ Sydney Review of Books,
https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/tyirrem-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-knew-it/
[Accessed 27 July 2020].
Balla, P. B., T. 2016. Unpublished thesis paper development. ‘Disrupting artistic terra
nullius, the ways in which Aboriginal women artists and activists speak back to colonial
Australia through art, PhD creative thesis proposal development’. Victoria University.
Balla, P. & Delany, M., (Eds.) 2017. Sovereignty, exhibition catalogue, December 5th
2016-March 26 2017, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Vic
Balla, P. (2017) Writing Blak to the Future: Situating the Ways Aboriginal
Matriarchs Protect and Resist with Art and Story. In: Writing + Concepts
2017. Ed by Jan Van Schaik, Documents Serials, 2 Art + Australia, Melbourne,
pp. 22-26.
Bellear, L. 1999. Feminism, Curlyism and Creativity. In: Trust, K. H. (ed.) Close to You:
The Lisa Bellear Picture Show exhibition catalogue, Koorie Heritage Trust. Melbourne,
Vic.
Brewer Ball, K, 2020. What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? First Nations
Dialogues, TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 64, Number 2, Summer 2020
(T246), pp. 162-170 Published by The MIT Press.
Bonnell, Y. 2020. ‘Why I’m Asking White Critics Not to Review My Show’ [Online].
online: VICE. Available: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/dygxgw/why-im-asking-
white-critics-not-to-review-my-show [Accessed 26/06/2020].
99
Croft, B. C. 2015. ‘Say My Name in Artist as Curator,’ Bristol, Intellect Books. Pp 117-
132
Bond, C. Mukandi, B. & Coghill, S., 2018. ‘You cunts can do as you like: the obscenity
and absurdity of free speech to Blackfullas,’ Continuum, 32:4, pp 415-428.
Bunda, T. (2007). ‘The Sovereign Aboriginal Woman in Sovereign Subjects.’ In:
Moreton-Robinson. (ed.) Sovereign Subjects, Indigenous sovereignty matters, Crows
Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, pp 75-85
Bunda, T. (2018). ‘Seeing the Sovereign Aboriginal Warrior Woman,’. The Lifted Brow.
Melbourne: The Lifted Brow. pp 4-5
Carroll, K. V. Z. 2016 'Sovereignty: Indigenising and decolonising curatorial practice,’
Art Monthly Australiasia, No 295, pp 36-39.
Clarke, B. 2012. Interview with Uncle Banjo Clarke, Gunditjmara Elder, exhibition text
& short film display, Koorie Voices, Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre, Melbourne
Museum, Museum Victoria, Melbourne
Commission For Children And Young People, 2016. ‘Aboriginal children represent 20
per cent of all children in state care, numbering around 1700.’ ‘Victorian Child
Protection system failing on ‘Stolen Generations’ principle.’ media release, 11 October
2016, Melbourne, Victoria: Commission for Children and Young People, Victorian
State Government.
Conor, L. 2016. Skin Deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women, University of
Western Australian Publishing Crawley, WA p27-28
Cromb, N. A. & Pearson, L. 2019. ‘Dr Chelsea Bond Delivers A Masterclass In
Indigenous Excellence.’ Available: https://indigenousx.com.au/dr-chelsea-bond-
delivers-a-masterclass-in-indigenous-excellence/ [Accessed 28 July 2020].
Crumpton, T. ‘How Black Women Have Impacted Feminism Over Time’, Teen Vogue,
21 September 2017, accessed at: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/how-black-
women-have-impacted-feminism-over-time. ‘How Black Women Have Impacted
100
Feminism Over Time’, Teen Vogue, 21 September 2017, accessed at:,
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/how-black-women-have-impacted-feminism-over-
time. Teen Vogue. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/how-black-women-have-
impacted-feminism-over-time.
Deacon, D. 1995. Me and Virginia’s doll. Photograph, colour laser print from Polaroid,
31.8 x 25.1 cm image, 42.1 x 29.7 cm sheet. 1st ed. Art Gallery of New South Wales,
Sydney
Edmonds, F. 2010. 'We have survived; South-east Australian Aboriginal art.
Exhibitions since 1988.’
http://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_5_no_1/papers/we_have_survived, pp 12-
16.
EshraghIi, L. 2016, ‘On First Nations agency in our European-based cultural
institutions,’ March, 2016, https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/4437/on-first-
nations-agency-in-our-european-based-cult/, viewed October 29th, 2020.
Flowers, R. 2015, Refusal to forgive: Indigenous women’s love and rage,
Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society Vol.4, No. 2, 2015, pp32-49
Fredericks, B., Longbottom, M., Mcphail-Bell, K. & Worner, F. In collaboration with the
Board of Waminda. 2016. ‘Dead or Deadly Report. Waminda Aboriginal Women’s
Health Service,’ CQ University, Australia: Rockhampton.
Garneau, D. 2016. ‘From Colonial Trophy Case to Non-Colonial Keeping House,’
Facing the Future; Local, Global and Pacific Possibilities, Museums Australasia
(Australian and Museums New Zealand joint conference) Auckland, New Zealand, 16
May 2016, viewed April 10th 2018.
Gilchrist, S. 2016. ‘Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia,’
United States: Harvard Art Museums (Cambridge, Mass.).
Ginibi, R. 1999. Haunted by the past., St Leonards, N.S.W., Allen & Unwin.
101
Gough, J. 2011. The Consequence of Chance, calico, pine, cardboard, lights
2012.2014 x 2011.2015 x 2012.2014m, permanent installation, Colonial Frontier
Gallery, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, Parrawe, Tasmania
https://juliegough.net/
Gray and Malins 2007. Visualizing Research: A Guide to the Research Process in Art
and Design, UK, Taylor & Francis Group, pp 26-32
Hall, B. 2015. ‘Aboriginal women 34 times more likely to suffer family violence, but fear
reporting it,’. The Age, July 2012.
Hercus, L. A. 1992, Wemba-Wemba dictionary. Canberra.
Hill Collins, P. 2000. Black Feminist Thought Knowledge, New York, NY, Routledge.
Hooks, B. 1995. Art On My Mind, Visual Politics, New York, New Press. Pp
Hooks, B. 2014. Talking Back Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, New York, Imprint
Routledge.
Hurley, A. 2015. ‘What’s so funny about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
humour?’, The Conversation, March 12, 2015. Accessed August 26, 2020,
https://theconversation.com/whats-so-funny-about-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-
humour-38484
Jones, D. 2008. A little more bite and a little less bark. artist proof, edition of 5 ed.:
Niagara Galleries.
Kauanui, J. K. 2016. ‘A Structure, Not an Event: Settler Colonialism and Enduring
Indigeneity,’ Lateral, 5, 1, 2016, in http://csalateral.org/issue/5-1/Forum-alt-humanities-
settler-colonialism-enduring-indigeneity-kauanui/.
Kruger, K. Kader Attia Symposium: La Colonie (SUD) Australian Centre for
Contemporary Art, Melbourne, November, 2017
Langford, R. (1994). Real deadly, Sydney, NSW, Angus & Robertson.
102
Lorde, A. 1981. ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,’ In:
Cherie Moraga & Gloria Anzaldua (eds.) This Bridge Called My Back, Writings by
Radical Women of Colour. Watertown, Massachusetts: Persephone Press Inc. pp 98-
99
Martin, K. 2008. Please Knock Before You Enter; Aboriginal regulation of Outsiders
and the implications for researchers, Teneriffe, Qld., Post Pressed.
McMillan, Cottom, T. 2019. ‘Why my medical crisis wasn’t taken seriously’, Thick and
other essays. Time International (South Pacific Edition), vol. 193, no. 4
Moreton-Robinson, A. 2019. The Unbound Collective, Kaurna Yarta, Adelaide.
Yankunytjatjara, Western Desert region (Ali Gumillya Baker, Faye Rosas Blanch,
Natalie Harkin & Simone Ulalka Tur) [Online]. https://www.the-
national.com.au/artists/the-unbound-collective/sovereign-acts-iv-object/. Available:
https://www.the-national.com.au/artists/the-unbound-collective/sovereign-acts-iv-
object/ [Accessed].
Moreton-Robinson, A. 2000. Talkin' up to the white woman: indigenous women and
white feminism, St Lucia, Qld., University of Queensland Press.
Moreton-Robinson, A. 2007. Sovereign subjects: indigenous sovereignty matters,
Crows Nest, N.S.W., Allen & Unwin.
Moreton-Robinson, A. 2013. ‘Towards An Australian Indigenous Women's Standpoint
Theory A Methodological Tool.’ Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 28. issue 78: 15-19.
Moreton-Robinson, A. 2015. ‘The white possessive: property, power, and indigenous
sovereignty,’ Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Morrison, T. 1984. ‘Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation’, in Mari Evans (ed.),
Black women writers: 1950-1980, New York, Anchor Press/Doubleday. pp 344-345
Moulton, K. 2016. ‘Sovereign Art and the Colonial Canon: Are We Lost Until We Are
Found?’, exhibition catalogue, Sovereignty, December 5th 2016-March 26th 2017,
Australian Centre Contemporary Art Melbourne p 25-30
103
Mukandi, B. & Bond, C. 2019. ‘Good in the Hood’ or ‘Burn It Down’? Reconciling Black
Presence in the Academy.’ Journal of Intercultural Studies, 40:2, pp 254-268
Munro, L., Kate. 2020. Why ‘Blak’ not Black? Artist Destiny Deacon and the origins of
this word. Available: https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2020/05/07/why-blak-not-
black-artist-destiny-deacon-and-origins-word-1 [Accessed 26 July 2020].
Neale, T., McKinnon, C & Vincent, E. (Eds) 2014. History, Power, Text. Cultural
Studies and Indigenous Studies Sydney, UTS Press, University Library, University of
Technology, Sydney.
Nicholoson, M. 2017. The Harbinger of Catastrophe, glass, wood, halogen-bulb
mechanism, , National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Museum, New
York City, https://americanindian.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/item?id=960
Onus, M. 2017. Matriarchs’ Speak, symposium, Australian Centre for Contemporary
Art, Sovereignty exhibition public program, Melbourne, 4 March 2017
Patten, H. 2015. What Kind of Ancestor Do you Want to Be? Sound cart by Elder and
community member Uncle Herb Patten. 3KND Radio 1503 AM Melbourne Indigenous
Radio.
Phillips, L and Bunda, T. 2018. ‘Research Through, With and As Storying,’ Oxon,
London, United Kingdom, London, Routledge. p107
Perkins, H. & Williamson, C, (ed.). 1994. Blakness, Blak City Culture, Australian
Centre Contemporary Art Melbourne, pp 20-31
Place, D. T. 2019. Decolonise This Place [Online]. http://www.decolonizethisplace.org:
http://www.decolonizethisplace.org. Available: http://www.decolonizethisplace.org
[Accessed 28 December 2019 2019].
Rule, L. (2018). Sovereign Debt. ‘Blak Brow; The Lifted Brow.’ No 40, Melbourne, The
Lifted Brow, p 14-15
Schjeldahl, P. 2017. Discovering the brilliance of Helio Oiticica. The New Yorker, The
Art World, July 31, 2017 Issue.
104
Smith, L. T. [2000] 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous
Peoples, Dunedin, NZ, Otago University Press.
Sonn, C. 2018. Mobilising decolonial approaches for community-engaged research for
racial justice. The Australian Community Psychologist, Volume 29.
Sonn C.C., Kassat, P. & Quayle A.F. 2017. Creative Responses to Social Suffering:
Using Community Arts and Cultural Development to Foster Hope. In: Seedat M., Sufia.
S. & Christie D. (Eds) Enlarging the scope of peace psychology: African and world -
regional contributions. Peace Psychology Book Series. Springer, Cham. pp 91-96
Sullivan, G. 2010. Art Practice a Research; Inquiry in Visual Arts, Thousand Oaks
[Calif.] Sage Publications
Tang, R. 1988. ‘Childhood Memories.’ (online) available at
‘https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/tyirrem-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-knew-it/
[Accessed 27 July 2020].
Tuck, E. & Yang, W 2012. ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor,’ Decolonization:
Indigeneity, Education and Society, Vol.1, p 3.
Tucker, M. (1977). If Everyone Cared, Sydney, Ure Smith, pp 49-52
Van Toorn, P. 1996. Early Aboriginal Writing: And the Discipline of Literary Studies
[online]. Meanjin, Vol. 55, No. 4, 1996: 754-765. Availability:
<https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=891804990917338;res=IELLC
C> ISSN: 0025-6293. [cited 29 Apr 19]. Meanjin, Vol 55, 754-765.
Vizenor, G. R. (2008). Survivance: narratives of Native presence., Lincoln, University
of Nebraska Press. P 1
Wahquist, C. E., N & Allam, L (2018). ‘We examined every indigenous death in
custody since 2008, this is why’. The Guardian, Tuesday 28th August
Warn, J. D.-L. 2007. A Trickster Paradigm In First Nations Visual Art: A Contemporary
Application, Master of Arts, University of Lethbridge.
105
Whyman, P. 2017. Fem&Ist Film Festival, spoken word performance, Australian
Centre for the Moving Image, 22 November 2017.
Whitney Museum of Art, N. 2017. https://whitney.org/Exhibitions/HelioOiticica [Online].
https://whitney.org/Exhibitions/HelioOiticica:
https://whitney.org/Exhibitions/HelioOiticica. [Accessed September 2019].
Back Seat, (2007). Short film. Directed by Whyman, P. Sydney: Scarlett Pictures Pty
Ltd.
Williams, M. T. 2019. ‘How White Feminists Oppress Black Women: When Feminism
Functions as White Supremacy.’
[Online]. https://chacruna.net/how-white-feminists-oppress-black-women-when-
feminism-functions-as-white-
supremacy/?fbclid=IwAR0EOPho_Rkbqr_LETcoxy3mV9ozdLUaFoftv6_3L7Y8EM7fijit
4FZI8Bs. Available: https://chacruna.net/how-white-feminists-oppress-black-women-
when-feminism-functions-as-white
supremacy/?fbclid=IwAR0EOPho_Rkbqr_LETcoxy3mV9ozdLUaFoftv6_3L7Y8EM7fijit
4FZI8Bs [Accessed].
Wilson, S. 2008. Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research
Methods. Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing. p77
Wolfe, P. 2006. «Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native», Journal of
Genocide Research, 8, 4, 2006, pp. 387-409., 8, 4, 2006, pp. 387-409.
Wooten, H. 1990. Report of the inquiry into the death of Harrison Day / by J. H.
Wootten, Australian Govt. Pub. Service, Canberra
Zelevansky, L. 2016. Helio Oiticica’s Ethical Invention of Place. In: Elisabeth Sussman,
J. R., Donna De Salvo, With Anna Katherine Brodbeck; With Contributions By Martha
Scott Burton, Frederico Coelho, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, Seì• Rgio B. Martins, Adele
Nelson, Irene V. Small, Guilherme Wisnik. (ed.) Helio Oiticica To Organise Delirium.
Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art: DelMonico Books - Prestel, 2016.
