Tides of Renewal

AN ESSAY BY NICOLE FORESHEW

There are plenty of fish in the river for us all and land to grow all we want…

The Aboriginals owned Australia, and today he [Aboriginal people] demands more than the white man’s charity. He [Aboriginal people] wants the right to live…1

Guraban: where the saltwater meets the freshwater, features newly commissioned contemporary artworks by Dennis Golding, Jenine Boeree and Nicole Monks, Djon Mundine, Marilyn Russell and Jason Wing, affirming the endurance of Aboriginal artists of the south-east region of Australia. Guraban can be seen to commemorate the rich cultural and historical inheritance of the Bidjigal people who are the custodians of the Georges River area in southern and south-western Sydney.

Each artist is unafraid to continue to challenge post-colonial stereotypes of Aboriginal art and identity. To speak up against injustice, giving cues to issues of dispossession, assimilation, land and water rights and activism that reflect on and yet transcend past eras, to speak to issues that reverberate to future generations, from unwavering portrayals of resistance contrasted with museum depictions of fertile land and waters - a land of plenty. Guraban merges the historical with the contemporary, speaking not only to the nostalgic pre-suburban chronicle of southern and south-western Sydney but of timeless connection and expression across generations.

Drawn from the Latin Terra Australis, the name of the nation we live in was a hypothetical continent mediated by water through mapping and directions, both about other lands and inside the continent itself. It is universally acknowledged that Aboriginal cultural practices and survival have shaped the continent for thousands of generations. Aboriginal people are connected to their lands, waters, and resources because every person comes from, and belongs to, their Country. Maintenance of this relationship is critical for Aboriginal people and communities’ social and emotional well-being.

Aboriginal culture is still alive and exists amongst residential subdivisions within the great sandstone escarpments - united by water, creeks, rivers, and the sea - sites of creation, gathering, and protest, sources of nourishment, connection, and memory.

For over 250 years, Aboriginal cultural heritage has been disrupted, taken, removed, and destroyed using government policies applied to ‘protect’ and ‘assimilate’ Aboriginal people. Therefore, without full recognition of Aboriginal customary laws, practices, and ownership of land and water, since 1788 has had a radical impact on Aboriginal people, culture, and everyday life.

However, despite the carnage and concealment of first contact in south eastern regions of New South Wales and the effects of restrictive government assimilation policies. Aboriginal artists and communities retain a vital role in maintaining culture, land and water rights, education, and above all, sovereignty. These ongoing actions sustain the much-needed shifts in mainstream society’s perception regarding the everyday life of Aboriginal people residing in the cities and suburbs of south-eastern Australia.

As a result, any attempt to resolve hundreds of years of historical experiences is problematic. Aboriginal people have not been treated with the same rights, having little recognition of any customary authority, laws, and ownership of land, or at the very least, preventing Aboriginal children from being taken from their families and defending a distinct urban Aboriginal cultural identity. If Guraban aims to re-contextualise the history of Georges River and greater south Sydney, what form of resolution is now taken?

Commemoration is a unique feature of Marilyn Russell’s lustrous continuation of shell work adorning small-scale objects, from the monumental Sydney Harbour Bridge to treasured personal jewellery boxes and slippers. Russell’s practice echoes her mother, Esme Timbery’s dynamic process spanning more than eighty years of collecting and sorting shells from the 1930s2. A celebration of harvesting and collecting seashells on the coastline from the community of La Perouse, just south of Sydney, once sold as tourist objects, now enrich significant museum and gallery collections nationally. The familial testimony is a luminous glimpse into the endurance of Aboriginal women at the forefront of challenging stereotypes of identity whilst simultaneously maintaining culture and community.

In Dennis Golding’s Remnants, 2022, a curious juxtaposition is created in response to the Hurstville Museum & Gallery collection of stone tools. A typographic map is laid out with shattered black resin and concrete objects. A widening stream shape opens from the debris, suggestive of earlier works where Golding reproduces the original 19th-century fence panels using epoxy resin.3 Recalling childhood memories, the decorative fence lines of the inner city suburb of Redfern, also known as ‘the block’, sit as residual impressions of the past alongside customary stone tools, fishhooks, and blades to be read within both art and museum contexts. Questioning the purpose of material culture presentation and how the visual culture of the south-east of Australia has been shaped to stimulate the ongoing interpretation of cultural identity, the environment, and its citizens. Golding’s response can also reveal a framework for repositioning cultural representations - a means or path that now symbolises a lived experience, trace, or memory.

In the same way, the combination of contemporary art as a response to fragments of archival material is shared in both Djon Mundine’s All the Black man wants is representation in Parliament, 2022 and Jason Wing’s Endeavour to improve our conditions, 2022. Both works encrypt text, forming phrases, from King Burraga, known as Joe Anderson. Combining both language, portraiture, and landscape imagery. Referencing the onset of organised political agitation by Aboriginal people publicly voicing dissatisfaction about their treatment by white Australia through street rallies, meetings, and conferences.

King Burraga’s direct-to-camera plea was distributed in the 1933 Cinesound News broadcast, reaching audiences nationwide. He announces:

Before the white man set foot in Australia, my ancestors had kings in their own right, and I, Aboriginal King Burraga, am a direct descendant of the royal line…4

Reciprocity and acknowledgement are a motion that still resonates today. Wing’s insertion of the word “still” highlights that such statements are not diminished with time. Even when read today, petitions that sought to recognise Aboriginal people are contemporaneous in pitch and as relevant as the day Burraga voiced them. Mundine and Wing continue to declare that Aboriginal people’s rights regarding occupation and land ownership override all others cautiously refusing any notion of inferiority.

History, display, and repossessing narrative through Jenine Boeree and Nicole Monks (mother & daughter) collaborative installation of Thalanara yalimanha (making kangaroo skin blankets) and NSW Aboriginal blanket, 2022 is warning from a not-too-distant past. The hard-hitting suspension of cloth and animal skin is an invective voice against the injustice of colonisation and assimilation practices implemented by successive governments.

From the mid-1800s, British colonies across the south-east region of New South Wales distributed blankets to local Aboriginal people. Government issued blankets replaced possum skin cloaks and kangaroo skins, offering little protection from the weather and disease. Many Aboriginal people became ill and died, having a devasting impact and continuing to have lasting effects on the reclamation of art and cultural practices. For Boeree and Monks, the repatriation of kangaroo skin-making across generations is a participatory cultural action - having a powerful healing effect.

The exhibition’s presentation of contemporary artwork included in Guraban can be seen to aid audiences in the vital bonding of diverse connections to culture and responses to local histories. Compiling sculptures, drawings, images, and installations allows tracing crucial historical milestones and artistic expression. Guraban artists may be found to navigate the social and cultural landscape, reflecting the solid relationship between Aboriginal people land and water, the management of resources, health, and well-being.

Art, like water, is a place for movement, a tide of departure and arrival, having the ability to renew.

Nicole Foreshew Wiradjuri

Artist, writer and curator

1 Burraga Foundation, ‘The Burraga Story’, Burraga Foundation, Sydney, 2022, https://www.burraga.org/, accessed December 2022

2 Museum of Contemporary Art, ‘Esme Timbery: Shellworked slippers, 2008’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2008, https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/ works/2008.46/, accessed December 2022

3 Dennis Golding, Artist statement for Remnants, 2022, accessed December 2022

4 Burraga Foundation, ibid., accessed December 2022

King Burraga Joe Anderson at Salt Pan Creek, September 1933

Cinesound film footage

National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra

Background: Joan Hatton, Salt Pan Creek Tributary of the Georges River, c.1975

Facsimile colour photograph

Georges River Council Libraries Local Studies collection