Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art
Key Idea 1: Continuity of Culture

Peter Waples-Crowe is a Ngarigo visual and performance-based artist based in Melbourne. Waples-Crowe is well known for colourful multimedia drawings and collages that frequently feature dingos. Although the dingo is not Waples-Crowe’s totem, he is drawn to this animal because they symbolise the situation of Indigenous people in Australia as native but marginalised, often treated as pests. As both gay and Aboriginal, Waples-Crowe explores the complexity of his identity through his art. Colonisation introduced religious morals that repressed gay, trans and queer presences within Indigenous cultures. Through his artworks Waples-Crowe reasserts queerness as something that is, and always has been, part of Aboriginal life and community.

Peter Waples-Crowe’s Ngarigo queen — cloak of queer visibility is a large possum skin cloak with a long train displayed atop a bright pink display stand. The exterior is rich grey and brown possum fur and the interior features South-East Australian Indigenous shield designs organised into bands of bright rainbow colour. On the opening night of the exhibition the artist paraded through the crowd wearing his cloak and a dingo mask before it was placed onto its display stand.

The making and wearing of possum skin cloaks is an ancient cultural practice shared by several Indigenous nations across South-East Australia. Ngarigo Country is in the alpine region across the colonial border of Victoria and New South Wales, and because it is high country when a Ngarigo baby is born it is given a single possum pelt to keep it warm. As the child grows further pelts are added, often coinciding with maturational milestones, such as entry into adulthood. The interior of an individual’s cloak will feature designs and images telling of their connection to Country, position in community, important life events, family, and even good places to hunt on Country. A cloak is biographical and inseparable from the wearer. When they die, they are buried with their cloak.

Waples-Crowe’s practice of this cultural tradition continues his culture. It tells the viewer about his Indigenous identity, and also his identity as a gay man through the use of the rainbow spectrum, which references the rainbow design of the queer pride flag.

Jonathan Jones is a Sydney-based artist and a member of the Kamilaroi and Wiradjuri nations of South-East Australia. Jones is known for creating large-scale installations that engage the multiple Indigenous and non-Indigenous histories layered at specific sites, and how those histories are overlapping and entangled. His grandmother, a Wiradjuri woman, encouraged him to pursue his artistic career after she suggested he explore his heritage. Jones uses a wide variety of everyday materials in his artworks, each chosen to suit the ideas he is exploring in each project. His practice is founded upon critical research and engagement with Indigenous practices from a contemporary perspective.

Jonathan Jones artwork Untitled (gidyirriga) is an immersive, multimedia installation. Jones displayed a large collection of readymade ceramic figurines of the native Australian parrot commonly known as the budgerigar. Each sat on a shelf in front of a wall-length frieze of elongated diamond shapes which the artist hand-stamped onto the wall in lilac coloured paint using a stamp made from kitchen sponge. At each end of the wall were speakers playing a soundtrack of primary school children from the rural New South Wales town of Parkes sounding-out and reciting the Wiradjuri language word gidyirriga.

Jones was inspired to make this artwork when he learned that gidyirriga is Wiradjuri word for ‘bird’ from which the word budgerigar derives (when you say them both out aloud you can hear the similarity). Jones was interested in the idea of Indigenous intellectual property and how the word budgerigar can be thought to have been corrupted from the Wiradjuri by colonial Australia without consultation. This idea is particularly pertinent when you realise that the gidyirriga/budgerigar is the third most popular household pet worldwide. Jones emphasised the global popularity of the birds by including the figurines which were produced by multiple different makers across the globe.

Working with Wiradjuri Elder Stan Grant Jones established a Wiradjuri language program across several primary schools in Parkes. The voices that can be heard in the soundtrack to Untitled (gidyirriga) belong to Indigenous and non-Indigenous students who by learning Wiradjuri are continuing the unbroken language specific to the Country upon where they live.