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Chair: Genevieve Grieves, Indigenous Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Melbourne
Honouring our Aboriginal Warriors Speaker: Dr Fiona Foley
This paper discusses a proposal for a memorial to the 1851 massacre that took place on K’gari killing Badtjala men, women and children. Foley argues that public art is a way of putting in plain sight a history that has been shrouded in silence and complicity.
Dr Fiona Foley was the recipient of the following prestigious research grants in 2020; Capstone Editing Early Career Academic Research Grant for Women, The Inaugural Monica Clare Research Fellowship and the Cherish Fund – Australia Council for the Arts. Dr Foley is currently a lecturer at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. Her publication with UQP was released this year titled, Biting the Clouds: A Badtjala perspective on the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, 1897. With commendation by Dist. Professor Larissa Behrendt, ‘In Biting the Clouds, Fiona Foley reclaims the colonisation narrative for the Badtjala people and clearly asserts their sovereignty. Essential reading, it cements Foley’s place as one of our leading intellectual and creative forces.’ Foley exhibits regularly in Australia and internationally. Her recent solo exhibitions were held at Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane 2017, Ballarat International Foto Biennale 2019 and the National Art School, Sydney, 2020.
Mutually assured construction Speakers: Carol Que and Joel Sherwood Spring
If mutually assured destruction is a cold war military strategy that insists upon the annihilation of all life, how do we conceive of a mutually assured reconstruction that assures life, and is not based on a white liberal politics of recognition and reconciliation? What might it take to smash the colonial pedestal, and work through the monumental task in cultivating relational and material, mutually assured reconstruction? Carol Que is a Chinese migrant settler living on Kulin Lands since age 10. Her work is informed by community values, practices and relationships cultivated by and within Anticolonial Asian Alliance, from Melbourne to Sydney. Her writing, teaching, theorising, translating and organising is invested in the grassroots, co-creating anticolonial infrastructures here and across the seas. She has love for hotpot, karaoke, Virgo placements, the coming abolition of Melbourne University.
Joel Sherwood Spring is a Wiradjuri man raised between Redfern and Alice Springs. A Sydney-based architecture graduate, he is an interdisciplinary artist working between solo works and Future Method studio. Working across research, activism, architecture, and broadcasting, he currently focuses on the contested narratives of Sydney’s and Australia’s urban culture and Indigenous history in the face of ongoing colonisation. Joel has experience creating, producing, recording radio/podcasts and other sonic work.
Mass Exposure: Memory Laundering, Racial Literacy and the Art of Truth Telling Speakers: Lilly Brown, Dianne Jones and Dr Odette Kelada
In this paper, Brown, Jones and Kelada argue that attempts to obscure the connections between colonial celebrated names and places from their origins in acts of slavery, eugenics and genocide, can be understood as a form of what we describe as ‘memory laundering’. They explore how this strategic use of ‘forgetting’ may be countered through increasing racial literacy, drawing on the work of Indigenous artists exposing the crimes and refusing this constructed ignorance through creative interventions and decolonising practices.
Lilly Brown is an interdisciplinary educator and researcher based in the Indigenous Studies Program in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. With a background in critical Indigenous studies, education and youth sociology, her work seeks to attend to the narratives and power relations that shape social structures. Lilly’s research and teaching focuses on the possibilities education presents as both a site of positive transformation and social reproduction; the ongoing colonial state violence resisted by First Peoples; and the way anti-Indigenous racism, as foundational to Australian nationhood, continues to function. Lilly’s academic practice is informed by her relationships and work with different communities in Victoria and across Australia, including with Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal young people, their families, communities and schools. Lilly belongs to the Gumbaynggirr people of the mid-north coast of New South Wales.
Dianne Jones is a Nyoongar artist whose photo-media work deals with Indigenous identity and cultural history. Dianne completed a Masters of Visual Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts and is currently undertaking a PhD. Her work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions in Australia and overseas, and is included in the collections of National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Monash University Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Australia.
Dr Odette Kelada is a senior lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Kelada researches on race, sexuality and gender in Australian writing and the arts. She is interested in the constructions of nation, body and identity in creative representations and the teaching of Racial Literacy. Kelada has white and Egyptian heritage and her writing has appeared in numerous publications including the Australian Cultural History Journal, Outskirts: Feminisms on the Edge, the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Journal, Postcolonial Studies and the Journal of the Association for Australian Literature.
