A Queen made of wool – “the boss for them mob” – raises her right hand in a salute, as a goanna climbs the outside of Australia’s Parliament House. Above the fray of animals meeting to talk, a kangaroo and emu flank a commonwealth coat of arms that has been transformed into a vibrant shield of multi-coloured connections.
“This Parliament House is for everyone – white, Aboriginal and any other colour. It belongs to the community,” says the artist Marlene Rubuntja, one of 11 artists from Yarrenyty Arltere art centre in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) who made the “soft sculptures” component in this work, titled Blak Parliament House. These sculptures were created with blankets dyed with pigments sourced from local plants, tea and corroded metal, as well as wool, cotton and feathers. Of Australia’s parliamentarians, she says: “They’re only sitting in the office and talking. Not listening.”
Atop Blak Parliament House, which has been unveiled at the 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia, the Australian flag has been replaced with another showing a mountain landscape likened to the ancestral creator caterpillar or yeperenye. Seven artists from Tangentyere art centre, also at Mparntwe, have added protest signs placed to the left and right of the sculptures, some of which read: “Safe water for everyone”, “Land rights” and “Our kids belong at home not in jail”.
Blak Parliament House celebrates the role of culture in the history of Indigenous activism, and is unveiled 50 years after the Aboriginal Tent Embassy was established on the lawns of Old Parliament House in Kamberri or Canberra. It is also five years since the release of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which called for a constitutionally enshrined First Nations voice to parliament and a Makarrata commission “to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history”.
Sixty-year-old Rubuntja comes from a family that likes to talk with meaning. She says her father, the late watercolour painter and Arrernte law man Wenten Rubuntja, “talked because they really wanted things to be better for their people. Not just words, but feelings, too.”
Sat beside Rubuntja is the triennial’s curator, Hetti Perkins, whose father was the late Arrernte-Kalkadoon Indigenous rights activist Charles Perkins. “Like your father, my father, we were always protesting,” she tells Rubuntja.
Rubuntja puts a wondrous spin on the animals arrayed before us: “This mob here talking, tonight they’re gonna talk because they seen us all sitting in the chair,” she says. “They helping us, that’s what I think.”
“Is it like, we’re watching them, but we don’t realise they’re watching us back, too?” Perkins asks.
“Yeah, mmm hmm,” Rubuntja confirms.
Speaking at the opening of the triennial, titled Ceremony, Perkins told the audience that Canberra is “at the heartland of what is sort of whitefella sacred ground, and our peoples, our family, our country men and women, whose country this is, have been too often overlooked”. Each of the works, by 16 artists and the two aforementioned collectives, has a “performative element or purpose”, and “the idea of ‘active’ is central: works that are active; works that are activist; works that activate”.
Across a vast, curved wall, the Kamilaroi artist Penny Evans has placed 280 glazed terracotta and black clay sculptures modelled on pieces of banksia trees. Her work, gudhuwali BURN, anthropomorphises banksia with its “beguiling” human-like forms.
Evans found the 2015 bushfire in the Yuraygir national park in Yaegl country in northern New South Wales profoundly affecting. Reflecting on the impact of the climate crisis, she laments Australia’s disregard for Indigenous knowledge in the face of natural disasters, such as selective vegetation clearing and low-temperature burning ahead of bushfires.
Evans lives and works in Lismore, on Widjabul Wia-bal country, which is yet again facing floods after the devastating events of last month. She says the town is “like a zombie apocalypse” – although the army, “once they finally arrived”, did a good job cleaning away the rubbish.
“I’m lucky compared to a lot of people I know, they’re still there cleaning up,” she says. “The feds are giving $10m to the CSIRO to do another study around flood mitigation and engineering solutions: levies, dams. We do not need any of that. We need to look after country and let country do what it’s going to do: re-establish the creeks. There are creeks cemented over with car parks.”
Meanwhile the photo artist Hayley Millar Baker, based in Naarm (Melbourne), has made her first short film. Titled Nyctinasty, a word meaning the opening and closing of plants in response to darkness or temperature changes, the eight-minute black-and-white film explores “that act of survival to close up at night-time to protect yourself”.
Nyctinasty resembles a horror film, and plays with “shape-shifting stories within my mob”, the Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung people (Millar Baker also has Indian and Brazilian ancestry). Set in the home or the “safe space” of an Aboriginal woman, Baker is shown in a meditative state, crushing charcoal, when two mysterious sets of hands suddenly appear on her shoulders.
Some people will relate to the horror element, but Millar Baker believes women are more likely to relate to the spiritual part of the scenario. “I feel for women, our intuition is a lot quicker,” she says. “Maybe that is through genetics and motherhood.”
Millar Baker only recently gained the “courage to speak my own stories”, such as the fact she has inherited a “magic” line in her family. “I can’t heal but I can astral project,” she says. Her first experience of spirits occurred when she was three, and was witnessed by several cousins during a sleepover: a shadow outside flashed into the bedroom, and Millar Baker was pushed from a bunk bed onto the floor.
Such unexplained experiences are “easier when it’s nicer things, like ancestors; it’s more annoying when it’s sinister things”. And Nyctinasty is not all sinister: it not only celebrates autonomy, but survival.
The 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial: Ceremony is at the National Gallery of Australia until 31 July. Steve Dow travelled as a guest of the National Gallery of Australia.
