August 21, 2024
A joke about my home state goes:
What do you call a Queenslander in a suit? Answer: the accused.
Queensland as criminal is a key theme of OCCURRENT AFFAIR, now on at the newly reopened Artspace Mackay until October 6. The travelling retrospective of Brisbane-based Aboriginal artist collective proppaNOW has come north for its penultimate stop before ending in Lismore. But if the state is a villain, the group’s six artists are the stars of the show and collectivism itself is a hero.
I saw the show’s first iteration at UQ Art Museum in 2021, where it was met with much fanfare from a Meanjin art world keen to tout its own. Megan Cope, Tony Albert, Vernon Ah Kee, Richard Bell, Jennifer Herd, Gordon Hookey, and Laurie Nilson are all linked to Griffith University’s ground-breaking Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art programme, which contributed to the birth of proppaNOW in 2003. After several years focusing on their independent careers, the seven artists came together in 2021 as pillars of Indigenous art. Gina Fairley wrote for ArtsHub that the show’s curation by Troy Casey and Amanda Hayman of Blaklash, described as the “next generation of Brisbane First Nations arts workers”, was a “handing of the baton.”1 In 2024, curator Lauren Turton was able to marry each artist’s distinct oeuvres despite Artspace Mackay being a fraction of UQAM’s size.
Passing through Herd’s shield-emblazoned door design, visitors see Albert’s pre-colonial map of Terra Nullius (with Scrooge) (2021), the capitalist caricature McDuck carves a dollar sign into the land. Above this hangs Hookey’s fan banner of resistance hero Dundalli (2021). The placement of these initial works sets a tone that rings throughout the show; a voice that celebrates the strength and resilience needed to address past injustice, while demanding that activism continue.
Ah Kee’s documentary proppaNOW (2021) allows the exhibiting artists to share how they joined together to promote Aboriginal art that was urban and contemporary rather than remote and traditional. As Bell explains, “to try to dispossess us culturally, I thought it was criminal and I wanted to do something about it.” Their collective works, designed with a shared goal of challenging injustice and occupying cultural institutions nationwide, reinforce the gallery as a place of protest.
A freestanding wall in the centre of the space holds up Ah Kee’s Scratch the surface (2019/2021) as a cloud of police shields, asking what or who the violence of the shield holders protects. The mind behind the muscle is revealed on the opposite wall in Bell’s portrait of Queensland’s longest serving premier, Johannes Bjelke Petersen. Bell pictures him rifle in hand and outlined against a hard white sky. Sitting on the floor beneath Bell’s painting is a collaborative component contributed by Ryan Presley. His specially reproduced and brown-bagged Blood Money—counterfeit notes featuring formidable Aboriginal leaders—are a cash offering to the Hillbilly Dictator. Presley’s reference to the “brown-bag era” of bribes questions the version of history represented in Australia’s currency. Bell’s drawing of parallels between Bjelke Petersen and Donald Trump seems prophetic now: the angle of Bell’s portrait echoes the viral photo of the former president taken moments after the attempted assassination. Titled Little fish are sweet (2021) after the corrupt former top cop Terry Lewis’ proverb on bribes, the work began its national tour just months before Lewis died, unrepentant, claiming innocence despite being the only police commissioner in Australian history to be imprisoned. The painting’s first hang at UQAM was unassuming, but its placement in Mackay dominates the surrounding walls. A step back creates a concerning connection between Bjelke Petersen’s rifle and the red-ringed targets on the chests of Tony Albert’s triptych Brothers (2013).
As a student of history, my sense is that people are slowly forgetting Queensland’s wildly unjust past—particularly the Joh years. Some younger generations don’t understand how dire the situation was. I think that because I myself didn’t really get it. For my parent’s generation, parts must have felt unforgettable: colourful characters with infamous tales of corruption, betrayals of public trust, cultural destruction, and white shoe villains with contentious records.
I have relatives who were arrested during student protests against an increasingly repressive government. Abuse of police power was rife. They saw friends and family hurt. And they consider themselves lucky. They’re still here, still in Australia. But a legacy of vibrant activism was smothered, literally and ideologically, in a way that left deep impressions on a generation, including some of proppaNOW’s artists.
On the other hand, I also have relatives who recall meeting the pampered Gold Coast girlfriends of corrupt political toadies with no small amount of amusement. Post-Fitzgerald Report reforms have allowed communities to regain faith in the Queensland Police Service, but proppaNOW warn us not to forget the particular scars left when those who uphold the law have no sense of justice.
OCCURRENT AFFAIR draws a line of criminality all the way from settler violence and frontier warfare, through the Joh years, to contemporary culture wars. Herd’s Mother’s Country (2022) maps massacres with bullets over satellite images of Mbarbarrum country in Far North Queensland, and Nilson’s barbed wire emu totem is photographed standing over Brisbane sites of oppression and resistance in his Signage series (2013). There is a wry sensationalism in the show’s TV news framing, underpinned by the red news ticker strip of quotes that rings its walls and exploding in Hookey’s provocative protest banners.
Next to the artists’ self made documentary, Nilson’s Spreading the word (2013) warns, by contrast, of media baiting ‘dingo traps’ that lead to misrepresentation and misinformation. Thirteen thousand ceramic fish caught in a downward spiral also hang suspended in Cope’s Bated Breath (2021) as a metaphor for the lateral violence of racist social media and fake news. Cope’s Arsenal (2021) similarly challenges whether the big questions of our time can be meaningfully addressed while ‘Murdocracy’ populism holds sway.
While working for a regional paper owned by NewsCorp, I’ve seen firsthand the care and skill that dedicated journalists put into their reporting. At the same time, I share proppaNOW’s concerns. I see the same racist comments, false narratives, and echo chambers on my feed. The famously litigious Bjelke Petersen also draws to mind the expensive and destructive legal battles that have flared up when journalists tell difficult truths—particularly the spectacle of war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith. The further discourse that erupted when his portrait was removed from the Australian War Memorial shows how accountable institutions must adapt when narratives get flipped.
OCCURRENT AFFAIR reminds us that it will take effort for the news industry—struggling with technological change and yet more vital than ever—to work towards an ethical, sustainable future. And perhaps, as we saw at Nine newspapers’ Olympics strike, it will take protest.
- Gina Fairley, “Exhibition Review: OCCURRENT AFFAIR: proppaNOW, UQ Art Museum (QLD),” ArtsHub, 14 April 2021. ↩︎
Zoe Devenport is a writer, historian, and journalist at the Mackay Daily Mercury. She lives and works on Yuwi country.
