‘The beach was and still is an Aboriginal space’: artist Billy Bain on reclaiming the sand and waves

Bain in his Granville studio with a few of his clay Indigenous figures dressed in bikinis, shorts and budgie smugglers. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/Guardian

As a teenager in the mid 2000s, Billy Bain would ride waves around Sydney’s northern beaches, having travelled the world watching his champion surfer father Rob Bain compete. But even though he was minutes from his home in Avalon, he was often made to feel an unwelcome outsider.

“I’d be told that I’m not from there, so I need to go in [to shore],” he says, seeing these warnings as veiled threats of violence. “Otherwise, you know, ‘something’s gonna happen to you’.”