The portrait of Dr Charles Perkins by urban aboriginal artist Robert Campbell junior (b. 1944 Kempsey NSW) is the starting point for the exhibition FREEDOM RIDERS: 1960s activism to today. This exhibition is a survey of South East Australian aboriginal artists and the legacies of Aboriginal rights activism in Australia.
Dr Charles Perkins’ remarkable life - an international soccer player, the first Aboriginal University graduate and then the first aboriginal to lead a government department – remains an inspiration for many Aboriginal people today.
This portrait of Dr Perkins by Robert Campbell Jnr sits at the intersection of an artistic resurgence that was sweeping across south East Australia in 1987 – partly inspired by the looming Australian Bicentenary and partly the legacy of activists continuing the work begun by the freedom riders in 1965, the Committee for the Australian referendum in 1967 and the tent embassy activists in 1972.
This portrait was included in one of the first Aboriginal art exhibitions to be curated by an Aboriginal person - “Kempsey Koori artists” curated by Campbell and the second commercial show at Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co operative after its opening.
In his untiring and sincere attempt to deal with his own Aboriginality that was torn from him through mission life and its accompanying lose of local language and tradition, he finds a new way forward that is bold yet layered with the traditions of Aboriginal people from many other parts of Australia.
Another two significant works by Campbell dealing with the colour ban, Roped off at the pictures, 1987, and Barred from baths are shown here, along with the Map of the massacres of blacks on the Macleay Valley, provide a stark picture of how race relations shaped the artist’s life.
'I am painting to show people … what truths took place in my lifetime: for example, being fenced off at the pictures; the dog tag system … I'm forty five years old now and yet I'm still searching for that Aboriginal identity that I've lost’. (Reference) RCJ
Boomalli Aboriginal artists Co op, Bangarra Dance theatre, Black Books, Indigenous screen Australia and Redfern Radio were just some of the Aboriginal cultural institutions that were formed during this period and were the first opportunities for many Aboriginal people to participate in the arts and cultural industries in Australia. These institutions put theories of self determination into practice and were a follow up the services such as the Aboriginal medical service and Aboriginal legal service that were community initiated responses to institutionalised discrimination in Sydney.
Elaine Russell (b. 1941Tingha, NSW) and Harry Wedge (b 1958 Cowra NSW) use a similar strategy of using painting to document and explore personal memories of life before the self determination movement. Both were taught at the Eora college of TAFE in Redfern and Tranby Aboriginal College in Glebe while mature age students and were given the freedom to paint whatever they wanted. Instead of turning to dot painting or X Ray style art that were the most common forms of Aboriginal art from this period they turned to their own very different life experiences in New South Wales.
Many Aboriginal artists from this period used the freedom of readily available and affordable acrylic paint rather than the laborious and time consuming oil painting techniques to provide a first person account of the direct experience of living under conditions of social exclusion and political insincerity in Australia.
Elaine Russell’s Inspection day is a telling reminder of the controls exercised over Aboriginal people living on missions and stations being subjected to invasions into personal space and judgement in relation to standards that many could not possibly be expected to match.
Highly charged works deep with angst at the lack of respect shown by white management on missions and stations is at the heart of much of Harry Wedge’s work, as he explains:
‘I paint the stories told to me by my grandmother, Ethel Wedge, at Eurambie Cowra Mission… The white management never used to knock. They just walked in, even into bedrooms while the parents were in bed, saying the mission managers have the right to do whatever they want.’
While Campbell, Russell and Wedge’s most formative experiences were spent with childhoods under the Aborigines Protection Acts and living in/on missions/reserves, the success of their artistic carers occurred through the urban centres of south east Ausytralia. Campbell was taken on by the prestigious contemporary art gallery Roslyn Oxley9, while Russell and Wedge would become regular exhibitors at Boomalli. Avril Quail (b 1958 Brisbane) and Michael Riley were founding members of Boomalli while Wedge and Russell were prominent in the increasingly diverse membership of the artist run co operative.
Prior to Boomalli the Tin Sheds, the University of Sydney, was an important centre for artistic activism in the 1970s and 1980s. Robert Campbell jnr was– artist-in-residence, and Michael Riley undertook darkroom photographic processing courses at Tin Sheds, Also produced at the Tin Sheds was Avril Quail’s Trespassers Keep Out!, 1982, which links obvious images of the Aboriginal flag with more subtle notions – the exclusion of Aboriginal people from the white ideal of the English cottage home and flower garden with picket fence. The garden and flowers in this work have a distinct feminine approach albeit with references to fringe dweller dispossession and Aboriginal outsiders in suburbia.
Michael Riley produced portraits, documentaries and video installations that were made for an Aboriginal audience first and foremost. He wanted to celebrate the glamorous and sophisticated attitudes of a new generation of Young Aboriginal people asserting themselves in the arts and in public life in Australia. His circle of Sydney based aboriginal artist friends and community members provided the subject matter for many of his photographic portraits documentaries and films. The importance of Aboriginal people participating into their representation marked a turning in point in Australian photography from a medium that was constrained by ethnographic subjectivity into a medium for self representation and recognition.
Jonathon Jones’s (b 1978 Sydney), Domestic lean-to, 2008, is at first glance a contradictory piece – part sculpture, part autobiographical expression. These large forms are not made of the perfect white or steel surfaces of industrialist finished Minimalist art, instead the surfaces are rough and hand-made, the blue tarpaulin with bands of light striped across the middle. The materials Jones selects are loaded with personal associations - the tarpaulin and is a reference to the make do housing that his grandfather had lived in, also referring to the most common form of Aboriginal housing in Australia for thousands of years - the Gunya.
Karla Dickens, Adam Hill, Jonathon Jones and Christian Thompson represent the contemporary generation of artists following on from the work of artists such as Robert Campbell Jnr and Michael Riley and have used their art to continue the momentum generated by the political art of the 1980’s into contemporary issues and at the forefront of being Aboriginal in Australia today. Karla’s installation is a reflection on her experience as a mother and how the experience brought back memories of her own grandmother being member of the stolen generations and the difficulties and sadness that this brings.
Adam Hill has spent more than a decade creating bold works reflecting on the issues of the day, his witty titling of his work such as his painting of Cathy Freemans winning the gold at the Sydney Olympics – ‘Despite her race she was a champion’ (2005 NSW parliament collection) is a process of saying the unspoken that exists below the surface in race relations in Australia. In this exhibition Adam’s work reflects on the Northern Territory intervention – the police dog on steroids rampaging through the outback is not that far from the truth given that Aboriginal Australians in remote communities seem to come under far more scrutiny from governments and police than other sections of the Australian community.
The media attention gained by the freedom rides, the referendum and the tent embassy were rallying calls for many regionally based Aboriginal people to move to the cities like Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and create communities such as those associated with Redfern (Sydney), Fitzroy (Melbourne) or Musgrave Park (Brisbane). Sadly government initiatives such as the Northern Territory intervention are still regulating Aboriginal people’s lives in ways that treat aboriginal people with double standards that do not apply to other Australians.
The exhibition concludes with Christian Thompsons work “Heat” – this work is an interesting counter point to the work of Robert Campbell Jnr’s portrait of Charlie Perkins in that the subjects of his video work are the grand daughters of Charlie Perkins - Madeline, Thea and Lille. The generational divide is evident in the different mediums used to depict grandfather and granddaughters but sadly the message is the same – end disadvantage – end double standards.
Madeline Madden was recently a part of a national media campaign organised by independent lobby group Generation One that asked Australians simular questions about equality as those asked by her grandfather Charlie Perkins – Let’s Hope the children of Madeline’s generation are still not asking these same questions in generations to come.
